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As requested by CommonShore, here's a general thread on spices, and what to use them for. I feel like when you're doing sort of impromptu cooking, where you're trying to make something tasty that doesn't necessarily follow a recipe, you're sometimes at a loss as to what specific spices to add that doesn't involve throwing everything and the kitchen sink at the pot. Here are some assumptions I'll be making. 1. You're already going to season your food with salt, chili/pepper, and any other ingredients you need to make the dish taste nice. 2. You have the spice in your pantry, and don't necessarily know where to use it at its best, but you also want to use more of it. This is not a thread where I'm telling you to run out and grab these random spices to experiment with, because that will get very expensive very quickly. I'll start with the basic South Indian ones, and expand out from there. Mustard Seed, Cumin Seed, Urad/Chana Daal, Asafoetida, Curry Leaves This is the basic tarka (spice mix cooked in oil) of drat near every Tamilian dish that I've eaten, in whatever combination you can think of. The urad or chana daal, asafoetida, and curry leaves are in everything. Some dishes use just mustard seed. Some use just cumin seed. Some use both. Either way, in my opinion, this very basic spice combination goes with any savoury food, be it daal, vegetables, or rice (!), as the other ingredients you add will completely change how this base works. The order (and the order IS important) is to add a few TB of oil to a pot, and let it heat up as hot as it can go. You want a tiny whisper of smoke to escape the surface. Use a neutral flavoured vegetable oil, like canola, sunflower, corn, peanut, coconut (not the extra virgin stuff; regular refined coconut oil is fine), vegetable, or avocado oil. Don't use extra virgin olive oil, as it won't get hot enough to pop the mustard seeds. You can use Indian sesame oil, but I don't care for how much the oil has to smoke before it's hot enough to pop your spices. Add your mustard seeds, and swirl around the pot until the pop like mad. Add the urad daal or chana daal (or both!), and stir until they smell nutty and fragrant. Add the cumin seeds, and let them get fragrant. Add the curry leaves and asafoetida, and stir well for a few seconds. THEN add this to whatever you've finished cooking, or add whatever you're cooking to this. For example, in a daal, you add this to the cooked split beans. However, most people will also add some dried red chilies when the curry leaves are done frying, and dump that whole thing into the daal pot. However, if you have cooked whole beans, like boiled peanuts, chickpeas, black eyed peas, or white beans, you can make a dish called soondal. Drain off all the cooking liquid before you proceed. It's meant to be a dry dish. Make the tarka mentioned above (mustard seed, cumin seed, urad daal, asafoetida, curry leaves), and add the cooked beans. Stir-fry to combine, and season to taste. How does this work with rice? Suppose you do the basic tarka, and then add a bit of grated ginger, and turmeric. Fry until the ginger is fragrant. Toss this through some cooked rice, add some lemon juice, and you've got lemon rice. Do the basic tarka, add some roasted peanuts, and some freshly grated coconut. Toss with cooked rice, and you've got coconut rice! There's a bunch of different variations on a theme, but they all start here. This also works with pretty near any vegetable you decide to cook, from potatoes to dark leafy greens to gourds and squashes to brassicas. Coriander Seed This one is used in conjunction with cumin seeds in North India so frequently that a common spice you'll see in Indian stores is "dhania jeera powder", which is ground cumin and coriander together in a bag. However, unlike cumin seed, you don't really want to have whole coriander seeds in the final dish you're cooking, because the hulls of the seeds are super tough, and annoying to bite through. What you can do is to crush them in a mortar and pestle, or with a few pulses of a spice grinder. In any recipe where you'd ordinarily want to use whole cumin seeds, crushed coriander seeds with go rather nicely in place of or in combination with whole cumin seed. For example, there's a really popular dish where it's potatoes and cumin as the main spices (jeera alooo). This is just as lovely (though in a different way) when you do the same procedure but with crushed coriander in place of or in addition to the whole cumin seed. Same goes for samosa, aloo gobi, and various other potato dishes. Where coriander really shines, however, is when it's elusive, and not in your face. There's a dish of boiled veggies that my sister-in-law's BFF makes. You get a bunch of chayote, and boil it in a pot with a tiny bit of turmeric and salt. When it's cooked, you do two different spice mixes. One of them is the basic tarka with the mustard/cumin/etc etc etc. The other is with roasted daal, roasted coriander seeds, roasted black pepper, and coconut. You roast 2 parts chana daal, 1 part urad daal, 1 part coriander seed, and like a teaspoon or so of whole black pepper SEPARATELY in a dry pan until they're toasted and fragrant. You add 4 - 6 parts frozen grated coconut, and just enough water to put it through the blender and make a smooth paste. Combine the tarka, the coconut paste, and boiled chayote together in the cooking pot, and let it boil for like a minute or two. The coriander is a strong flavour, but not one that overpowers, because the taste of the roasted daal is the dominant player here. [ b]Sesame Seed[/b] In my opinion, whole sesame seed does its best when it's combined with something starchy. For example, the next time you make a batter for frying, add sesame seed to the batter. If you're doing roasted potatoes, toss the potatoes/oil/salt with sesame seeds, and the final dish will be awesome. Lightly crushed sesame seeds that have been combined with a bit of salt, ground red chili, and a tiny bit of oil makes a fine accompaniment to steamed rice, idli, or dosa. Regardless of what I'm making, I like to add whole sesame seeds to my tarka, because I like the taste it gives the oil and the rest of the food. Methi/Fenugreek Seed This one's a secret super power, because it tastes like you've made stock when you cook it up in boiling water. It has this very savoury aroma when you're cooking it, and has a slight bit of mucilage when it's concentrated. However, in a large pot of water, it really lends a nice flavour to the water. When fried in oil along with a tarka, however, it smells like maple syrup. This goes extremely well with daal (when you add to the tarka) or in boiled vegetables (when you add to the cooking water before adding your veggies; you want it to cook by itself in the water for about 15 - 20 minutes to release the best taste). It does wind up in various spice blends, but as I don't care for spice blends in general, I'm gonna ignore that completely. ------------------------------------ What are some of the common uses that you have for spices that you use? This is a beginning primer on some basic spices, and I'd like to discuss other uses of other spices that you guys have. I know apples and cinnamon are a very common thing, but apparently cinnamon goes well with raspberries too! I figure this is as good a place as any to discuss spices, and their various uses. I'll update the OP if anyone else wants to do a write-up on the spices that they use in their cuisines.
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Jul 28, 2023 14:54
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 14:45 |
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I've been trying to use more sumac lately. Sumac is the fruit of Rhus species, most often Rhus coriaria. It's the reddish, hairy outer part of the fruit which grows in large clusters. Sumac is most often sold as a powder, and is a component of za'atar: a mixture of herbs, sesame seeds, salt, and sumac. Sumac is commonly used in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisines. Sumac has a sour, fruity character and is most often compared to lemon juice. Sumac's sourness however comes from malic acid rather than lemon's citric acid. I find that it has a bright, tangy aroma with notes of dried fruit like raisin. The taste is predominantly sour, with notes of dried fruit and some astringency. Since sumac is the hairy outer part of the fruit, sometimes it is steeped in water then strained to avoid the texture of the sumac. Uses for sumac include: - Garnish (often sprinkled over hummus, as is za'atar) - Salads (adds tangy flavor) - Roasted foods (meat/veggies) - As a beverage (steeped and strained) I've also been experimenting with adding it to rice, as a replacement for lemon/lime juice. I make kind of a sumac cilantro rice for burritos rather than a cilantro lime rice.
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Jul 28, 2023 15:25
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Ok question time: can you freeze refrigerated fresh curry leaves? A produce market near me sells the fresh leaves but I wouldn't use enough of them quickly enough. They also have fresh bay leaves, which I might get as well. I want to do more South Indian cooking so having curry leaves is a boon.
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Jul 28, 2023 15:27
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Eeyo posted:Ok question time: can you freeze refrigerated fresh curry leaves? A produce market near me sells the fresh leaves but I wouldn't use enough of them quickly enough. Bay leaves and curry leaves freeze for about 2 1/2 - 3 months, depending. Wash them well in plenty of cold water to get rid of any dust from the field. Lay out onto a large towel in one layer, with a fan blowing over the surface, so that they dry off quickly. You don't want to agitate them too much when they're wet, as they'll bruise easily. Lay them out on a paper towel lined cookie sheet. Shove in the freezer for about 3 hours so they freeze solid. Transfer to a ziplock freezer bag, and leave a good bit of air in the bag (so that it's kind of inflated a little) so that the leaves don't get crushed if they're up against something. The air will protect your leaves. Take out as many leaves as you need for a recipe, and immediately return the rest to the coldest part of your freezer. The reason they don't stay good very long is that they're so thin that they thaw out when you remove them from the freezer. I'll just take out the leaves I want with the freezer open, and then shut the bag, and shut the freezer door, so that my leaves don't have to be in the ambient temperature at all.
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Jul 28, 2023 18:28
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Hello Dino, love this!
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Jul 29, 2023 01:24
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And just to add a little bit of context to the germ of the discussion - we were talking tarka cooking in the Indian thread and I realized that I never really have any plan with the spices I use when making any of these kinds of dishes. I just sorta... grab whatever is in reach and run with it. It pretty much always turns out tasty, but I'm not going to get any better than I am now without learning to become deliberate about what I'm adding, especially when it comes to the spices that I add after the cumin and coriander. Getting outside of the Indian food galaxy for a moment and to give my own contribution, I'm really a big fan of smoked paprikas, whether as direct additions with the spice itself, or indirectly by adding chorizo to something. When I'm making shashouka type of dishes that always comes into play, whether I'm going meat or no meat.
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Jul 29, 2023 05:17
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My favorite is probably the pride of szeged Hungarian paprika.
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Jul 30, 2023 01:52
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Sprinkle sansho on your breakfast sausage of choice then take a sip of orange juice---don't know Why it does what it does...but man alive does it do a thing. Mainly though, you rage that legit sansho is nigh impossible to find in recent years(Kroger are fools for bowing out of the Hemispheres venture) to a degree almost on par with non-neutered/nuked szechuan peppercorn.
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Jul 31, 2023 20:37
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I just learned that Sichuan pepper can be called "prickly ash" on ingredient labels. I learned this the most delicious possible way. Sichuan pepper and chili oil is good on garden green beans.
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Jul 31, 2023 22:50
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I bought some dried mint to add to my lentil soup and it was delicious. Now I am testing it with almost everything else and most experiments are delicious. Especially everything with either dark meat or lentils.
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Jul 31, 2023 22:58
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VictualSquid posted:I bought some dried mint to add to my lentil soup and it was delicious. Spearmint or peppermint?
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Aug 1, 2023 00:33
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Eeyo posted:Spearmint or peppermint? The pack is labelled in Turkish and German, neither of which make the distinction normally.
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Aug 1, 2023 00:47
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It seems that the mint varieties most often sold as a cooking herb are spearmint or curly mint. But it could be any of some 25 species called “mint”. Peppermint has so much menthol that it’s not really great for much except making oil/extract or tisanes.
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Aug 1, 2023 01:45
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Mint is good with green chili. I threw a mix with that on some boiled potatoes and it was good
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Aug 1, 2023 05:02
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Eeyo posted:I've been trying to use more sumac lately. Za'atar is pretty great - it's used in recipes throughout the Mediterranean, Middle-East and North Africa. I've started making it myself, as the pre-made blends I've found are dusty and tasteless. I really like sprinking it on roasted eggplant, fried chickpeas, tagine dishes like Moroccan chicken and as a spice rub for lamb. It's also good for sprinking on flatbread with olive oil. Try it with fried eggs! The definition of Za'atar varies wildly from region to region but this is roughly what I've landed on. I'll add or subtract ingredients depending on what's in the cupboard but you gotta have the sumac, sesame and thyme. I like to add dried orange rind as well - Not sure if this is proper but I like it. It isn't necessary for dishes that already have some citrus in them though. Ground sumac berries Toasted sesame seeds Ground cumin Ground coriander Fennel Thyme You can also add dried mint, marjoram or oregano. Dried citrus rind, especially orange rind is a good addition for savoury dishes. E: dino. posted:Suppose you do the basic tarka, and then add a bit of grated ginger, and turmeric. Fry until the ginger is fragrant. Toss this through some cooked rice, add some lemon juice, and you've got lemon rice. Do the basic tarka, add some roasted peanuts, and some freshly grated coconut. Toss with cooked rice, and you've got coconut rice! There's a bunch of different variations on a theme, but they all start here. Just a cautionary note for folks trying this out, I've found that ginger doesn't tolerate the high heat of the cooking oil well, so I'll usually take it off the burner and and add the ginger at the very end. The same counts for garlic in SEA food. Fruits of the sea fucked around with this message at 10:15 on Aug 1, 2023 |
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Aug 1, 2023 09:58
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 14:45 |
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Get a tiny container of rubbed sage, and sprinkle it on chicken dishes, egg dishes, white/cream sauces. Had some as an additional seasoning in a carbonara (do not put cream in a carbonara) and it was a lovely addition. Speaking of extra additions, there's a greek diner nearby that I swear has a tiny bit of rosemary in their breakfast sausage, and it adds an amazing light extra something-something to their sausage gravy (which makes it go even better on chicken-fried steak) Also: When in doubt about some of your older spices in the cabinet (that you haven't replaced yet, which you should), they probably wake up decently if you do the Indian thing and fry them lightly in some fat until aromatic. My family's generic paprika they keep buying instead of good hungarian sweet or smoked stuff reacts well.
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Aug 14, 2023 00:45
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