Because of bachelor life and storage issues, I must use onion, ginger, and garlic in powder form.
However, I am failing to find the correct amount I should add to 1 kg of poultry chicken.
What is the maximum amount of onion, ginger, and garlic powder I can add to 1 kg of chicken before it becomes bitter?
First of all, replacing fresh onion & ginger with powdered is not going to produce the same results at all. Powdered garlic, on the other hand, you can easily get away with - it's used by BIR establishments all the time.
Powdered garlic smells acceptably similar to fresh when it first goes in a sauce, and also cooks down in a similar way. It's not identical, but it's close, and a substitute you would often not notice.
Watch it doesn't clump. It might be advisable to premix as a slurry.
Powdered ginger, on the other hand, is nothing like fresh. It has a stronger 'heat' but none of the other flavour profiles. It's really only used in baking, not in anything resembling a curry of any nationality.
Powdered onion is somewhere between the two. It's 'a bit like' onion, but not enough to fool anyone. The flavour also cooks down quite quickly.
In a curry, your final sauce is essentially onion & oil. There should be very little 'free' water left after it's cooked. Onion powder doesn't have the body to support your sauce, so it will be thin & watery.
You may need to add some early & some late in your cook, to try balance the flavour profiles. I'd experiment.
As to quantities, I found a few websites that seemed to agree on amounts.
Onion powder - 1 tablespoon to one medium onion.
Garlic powder - 1/8 teaspoon to one clove
Ginger powder - between 1/8 & 1/4 teaspoon to one tablespoon fresh pulverised ginger.
If you're batch cooking, then 1kg of meat is going to amount to something between 6 - 8 portions. That for me would be about 3 large onions, pretty much an entire bulb of garlic & a couple of sturdy inches of ginger [roughly equal to your garlic quantity] plus 3 big tablespoons of ghee.
Once you're done & have eaten the first portion, you still need to find room in the freezer for the rest [plastic takeaway containers are great for that, they stack well & can go freezer to microwave if you need to]. This quantity isn't really going to change much whether you started with fresh or powdered ingredients.
I'd definitely look into at least using fresh onion [frozen garlic & ginger doesn't take up much room either; you can buy them separately or pre-mixed]. You can bring it all to the cookpot & stay with it until it's all nicely simmering. Chicken goes in a few minutes from the end, unless you're using bone-in thighs/quarters etc.
I usually take 100 grams of onion, one teaspoon of dried garlic, and half a teaspoon of ginger per kilogram of meat.
