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Spices are one of the best tools that home cooks have in their toolkit— they’re a super easy way to add a ton of flavor to your food and customize the flavor profile of what you’re cooking. All with almost no additional effort!
Think of a roasted chicken. You could add cumin + coriander for a Middle Eastern vibe, smoked paprika + garlic for a Spanish profile, chile powder + cumin + garlic + oregano for a Mexican spin, or turmeric + ginger for something South Asian. Same core ingredient, totally different flavor profiles. That’s the magic of spices.
Spices are an incredible time-saving, flavor-boosting resource for home cooks. They add flavor, enhance existing ingredients, and help to define the identity and flavor profile of a dish.
In this lesson we’ll explore how spices work, which ones to keep on hand, and how to use them to transform your cooking.
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Before we dive into the world of spices, there’s one thing that I think is really important to understand, and that’s the difference between spices and salt.
There’s a pervasive myth in cooking that everything should be seasoned with salt and pepper—they’re treated as a kind of all-purpose pair. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
As we’ve gone over already in this course, salt is a mineral. It’s in a category of its own. Salt enhances existing flavors in food and makes food taste more like itself. Foods that are unsalted often taste flat, whereas foods that are properly salted have sharper, more acute flavors. Pepper (aka black peppercorn) is a spice. It belongs in the same category as cumin, turmeric, paprika, bay leaf, and hundreds of other spices. The key difference you need to understand is that salt enhances existing flavors in food. Spices add flavor to food.
Spices each have distinct flavors, and they impart those flavors onto the food they’re paired with. Pairing salt & pepper is like pairing salt & paprika or salt & cumin. Sure, there are many dishes where they’re both used, but they serve completely different purposes. When you add salt and pepper to a dish, you’re simultaneously enhancing existing flavors (salt) and adding new flavor (pepper). You might occasionally want to do this, but it’s much better to add them separately, since you have more control over how each one is used! This is a big part of the reason why I try to seek out spices and spice blends that don’t have any salt added. I like to wield those tools separately.
Salt is a tool that you use on its own every time you’re cooking something. It’s the key ingredient that we use to draw out and enhance the flavor of the food we’re cooking. Spices are optional, and they’re something you use when you want to add a specific flavor profile to food.
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There are two factors that you need to consider when buying spices— quality and freshness. Spices will transform your cooking, but you’ll only get the best results if you buy good spices that are fresh.
I actually started a spice company with my brother several years ago, so I’m quite familiar with how the spice industry operates. Unfortunately, the vast majority of spices that you’ll find in most grocery stores are low-quality, stale spices that are often irradiated or sprayed with chemicals. A lot of these spices are mass-produced, sourced at scale, and generally lack any depth of flavor. If you contrast those with some of the single-origin, small-scale spices sourced from really good farms, you’ll be blown away at the difference. This isn’t to say that you have to break the bank to source spices— there are many good companies that sell at reasonable prices. But the difference in flavor between high-quality and low-quality spices is huge, and you will notice it in your cooking.