Rogan Josh

History

Rogan josh is a lamb curry originating in Kashmir, whose name is thought to combine the Persian “rogan” (oil, or red color depending on interpretation) and “josh” (heat, passion), a legacy of the Mughal and Persian cuisine introduced to the region between the 15th and 17th centuries.

Traditionally served at the wazwan, the great Kashmiri banquet of dozens of dishes, rogan josh owes its deep red color to a blend of spices, mild Kashmiri chili, sometimes supplemented with a natural dye like ratanjot root, rather than an extreme amount of hot chili. Substituting a hot chili powder for Kashmiri chili gives the heat without the color, and misses the dish entirely.

Ingredients — serves 4

• 1.75 lb (800g) lamb shoulder, cut into pieces
• 2 onions
• Plain yogurt
• Mild Kashmiri chili powder (or paprika), ginger, garlic
• Cinnamon, cardamom, cloves
• Ghee or oil

Rogan Josh, step by step

1. Brown the lamb pieces in ghee over high heat, then set aside.
2. Sauté the sliced onions until deeply golden.
3. Add the ginger, garlic, and whole spices, letting them toast briefly.
4. Stir in the Kashmiri chili powder and whisked yogurt, stirring to prevent it from splitting.
5. Return the lamb to the sauce, cover with water, and simmer gently for about 1 hour 30 minutes.
6. Let the sauce reduce uncovered until it coats the meat, then serve with basmati rice.

Cooking method

Technique: long, slow simmering of a lamb curry in a yogurt and toasted whole-spice sauce, which develops a deep red color without excess heat.

Traditional equipment: a tinned copper pot (degchi) used in Kashmiri cooking.

Signs it’s ready: the sauce should coat the meat without being lumpy; the lamb should be fall-apart tender after a long, slow simmer.

Nutrition, per serving

Calculated from the raw ingredient quantities above, divided by four servings.

Notable amounts: roughly 8 mg of zinc per serving (around 80% of the EU reference intake) and 3.2 mg of iron (about 23%), both largely from the lamb. Carbohydrate is very low before you add rice — a plain basmati portion adds roughly 200 kcal and 44 g of carbs on top of the figures above.

The fat figure deserves a caveat. Lamb shoulder is a fatty cut and 49 g per serving reflects the recipe as written, ghee included. In practice much of that fat renders out and pools on the surface during the 90-minute simmer; skimming it before the final reduction — standard practice in many Kashmiri kitchens — removes something in the order of 15 to 20 g per serving. A leaner cut such as leg brings the raw figure down by a similar margin.

Economic context

Rogan josh is not everyday cooking: lamb shoulder, ghee and a long list of whole spices put it well above the staples that make up a typical Indian food budget. It belongs to the wazwan banquet and to weddings rather than to weeknight cooking — a dish built around ingredients that are, by local standards, a deliberate indulgence rather than a baseline.

Source: World Bank / FAO, Food Prices for Nutrition database (Cost and Affordability of a Healthy Diet) v4.0, 2024 data, CC BY 4.0, DOI 10.57966/41AN-KY81. Retrieved 29 July 2026. This figure describes the cost of a healthy diet in India generally — it is not a costing of this specific recipe.

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