May 2024 Food Champions Challenge: Which spices do you use most frequently and how do you make use of them in your cooking?

Food & Drink
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Spices: the word is evocative of faraway and exotic lands, a reminder of the long history of their use to flavour, season, and preserve food while also being utilised as health treatments and as fragrant offerings to the gods.
The spice trade was the world’s biggest industry of its time; wars erupted over its control; explorers discovered new lands while seeking alternative sea routes to the East, to the places rich in valuable spices.

Spices form an essential part of many traditional dishes around the world.
We can now buy them at our local store, and create our preferred Garam masala or Curry or Mediterranean flavours.
Often the terms herbs and spices are used interchangeably, but spices come from the dried root, seed, flowers, bark of a plant whereas herbs are the leaves of a plant and are best when used fresh, especially the more delicate ones.

Common cooking spices:

Allspice (it’s a spice not a blend) A dried brown berry from West India and Central America. Tastes like a blend of clove, cinnamon, and nutmeg.
Anise: liquorice flavour. Cultivated in Europe and in Egypt for centuries.
Star Anise: native of China cheaper to produce.
Cardamom: from India and Indonesia. Strong warm spicy sweet flavour.
Cinnamon: from the bark of several tree species of the cinnamomum. The Ceylon one is the true one but mostly now it is the Cassia variety of China.
Cloves: Flower buds native of Indonesia.
Cumin seeds: native of Iran used in curry powder.
Cayenne (red pepper) from tropical chillies.
Ginger: (botanically a root vegetable) sweet and spicy.
Mace is the covering of the nutmeg seed.
Nutmeg: warm spicy sweet.
Paprika: from orange and red peppers, can be mild to hot.
Curry Powder: usually Cumin-coriander-ginger-mustard-cloves.
Garlic is a vegetable but it’s used more like a spice, usually added in small quantities to flavour food.
Pepper: widely used as a seasoning.
Chilli pepper: gives a hot taste to food.
This isn’t an exhaustive list, feel free to mention any other ones you use as well.

For this month Challenge please share with us:

Which spices do you use most frequently and how do you make use of them in your cooking?

Thank you to all participants of the April challenge.
Congrats to @Michaelhc @busyperson @Melinch6 @cliveed_15

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Most often used in our kitchen: garlic, chilli, cinnamon, cumin, and pepper.
All of these (and lots more) go into chilli beef/beans.
Garlic goes in most savoury dishes from roast to ragu and stir fry to daal.
Chilli (fresh, dried whole, flakes, ground, smoked) gets a good workout in Asian salads, pasta sauces, and anything else I can fit it in!
Cinnamon for baking, muesli, smoothies, and always in chilli beef.
Cumin in anything vaguely Middle Eastern (tagines, vegetable salads).
Pepper - used as general purpose seasoning - you can’t have mashed potato without it!
Another one I like to use is caraway seeds - great in old-fashioned seed cake, or with cabbage (with garlic and black pepper, again…)

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I can’t easily decide as I frequently use many you have listed and a few more. I think it is a tie between garlic, ginger and black pepper which are used the most. I couldn’t cook without all of them but ginger excites me most.

Ginger is not a root, unless you are a botanist this is a purely technical distinction. If you mean the rhizome it is very often called root ginger - but it doesn’t matter. You can however use the shoots of the plant too. The rhizome can be used in two different ways.

When it is young the skin is thin and the colour is pale yellow/green but it may have purple too. At this stage it is used fresh, usually peeled and sliced or grated. It is essential to Asian cooking, especially south east Asia. Fresh ginger keeps reasonably well but it will dry out and the skin will thicken and it will lose the fresh clean aromaticity. Sadly at some times of year supermarket ginger is old and course.

In Oz the annual fresh ginger harvest is around February-March and this is when it will be at its best. I use it more at that time, it can be used almost as a vegetable then. For example with seafood or in a vege stir fry. You could (for example) slice it very thin across the grain and wrap a morsel, like a prawn, in it.

Fresh ginger is also preserved with sugar to make syrups and sweets.

The rhizome can be harvested later in the season when the skin has thickened and the flavour is hotter and more pungent. This is dried and ground to produce ground ginger powder which is used in drinks, cakes and confectionary. The sensory qualities are rather different compared to fresh ginger and they are not interchangeable.

Shoot or stem ginger is rather rare but very attractive to me. It is simply the young green shoots of the plant. It is a milder form of fresh ginger that does very well in stir fry and Cantonese dishes, or as a savoury garnish.

I have ambitions to grow my own come the revolution - or a greenhouse. Those in QLD or other subtropical climates can probably grow it in the yard. Here I would have to grow it strictly as an annual as it will not tolerate frost and dry heat will be a problem. I have grown turmeric, which is a close relative but it died in a dry summer where I couldn’t keep it damp enough.

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Ginger and Tumeric can grow very well in pots. With pots you can move the plants to areas that support the continued growing as the seasons change and using water reservoirs you can manage the moisture needs quite well. I do the same for Avocados using dwarf species to keep the plants more suited to pot life. An example of a home made wicking pot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fEgR10Wijk or a commercial variety of reservoir https://www.iotagarden.com/advice/what-is-a-self-watering-reservoir-and-do-i-need-one/.

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I am sure you right. Sadly, my collection of pots that have to be watered and fussed over because I am pushing the limit of what will grow outside is already too large and the places that are sheltered but have strong light or part sun are already taken.

So for now growing ginger sits with quite a few other exotics, for when my ship comes in.

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I use allspice and turmeric the most . Sometimes dried garlic powder .I use them mainly in my rice infusion cooker .

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We are spice addicts and use a lot spices.

Commonly used ones are fresh garlic, fresh ginger, cinnamon, star anise and pepper.

We have a well stocked spices in the pantry, I believe we have all on the list with exception of mace. Others we also like and use in dishes are Sichuan pepper, fenugreek, sumac, coriander powder, mustard, fresh bay leaf, Tasmanian pepperberry and ground ginger.

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We use harissa, cumin, curry leaves, bay leaves, pepper, dried and ground bush tomato, cocoa (particularly in some chilli dishes), acacia seeds ground, cinnamon (stick and ground), nutmeg, mace, coriander, tumeric, saffron, various infused oils, vanilla essence, vanilla bean, allspice, rosemary, mint, oregano, basil (sweet, Thai, Mediterranean), chives (fresh and dried), star anise, lavender, ginger, garlic, chilli (fresh, pickled, and dried), paprika (sweet, hot, and smoked), pickle juice, liquid smoke, sumac, and a number of others.

We have quite a large array of possible dishes and desserts. We like Mediterranean (Italian, Greek, Portuguese and Spanish), Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, Mexican, some Nth American dishes and European cuisines so our spice needs are very varied.

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Cardamom, cumin, ground coriander, ginger, nutmeg, paprika, cinnamon, cloves, pepper, garlic, allspice, cayenne pepper, mustard seed, star anise, saffron. I use some only in savoury dishes, some only in sweet and some in both. There are a few others I only use very occasionally.

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For those who would like to know more about herbs and spices Gernot Katzer has produced a wonderful free resource.

It provides a detailed description of over 130 herbs, spices and mixtures including their history, growing, chemistry and culinary uses. It cross references many synonyms in many languages and also provides lists organised by botanical description and geography as well as by name.

I have used this resource for many years and find his scholarship to be accurate, comprehensive and well presented. Good images are supplied to supplement the text. He includes footnotes for his sources if you want to take it further.

If you want to learn more about spices you could spend $100 on a fat book that would not be as easy to navigate or just use this web site.

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Thanks @syncretic, looks very interesting. Couldn’t open his…spice-pages.com… websites, but I did look at the ‘chef of the month com’.
From what I can see there his list includes herbs, fruit like orange peel and juice, olive, rose…all wonderful ingredients to add and enhance flavours to the appropriate foods.

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Spice-pages.com does not seem to exist. Did you try the link I gave?

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Apologies, was just trying to be brief. The ‘gernot-katzers-spice-pages.com’ (Welcome to Gernot Katzers Spice Pages) and his ‘introduction to spices’ websites have a warning of Not Secure on my device and I exited quickly. I’m sure it’s just my device, others might not have a problem.

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Safari (Apple) will report it is insecure for any one of several reasons. I get the same warning.

The level of risk will vary depending on how one is using the site and on the level of protection provided by the device/OS being used. One of the wiser in IT might offer further advice on the risks in this instance. Nearly every web resource I access these days Safari tags with a lock symbol - encrypted/secure/valid certificate.

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Happens rarely. Just noticed that it’s a http:// (not https://) website.

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Correct assumption in regards to the warning that the site is not secure, it is purely that they have not bothered to get a SSL certificate and used it for the site. There is a bit more coding required to set up a HTTPS site compared to a a HTTP one and often to get a SSL certificate either costs time as the free ones usually only last a few months each time or getting a paid one can add significant expense for a “home” developed site.

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Chillie powder+ground Cumin,ground coriander,black mustard seeds,cinnamon,cloves and cardomoms,in various combinations eitherroasted or raw with ground coconut pulp,as used in Sri Lankan cooking.Curry leaves provide further aromatics for the curries so does Pandan or Screwpine leaves.For Seafood curries added Moringa leaves are needed to give extra aromatic hit.

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