Cooking with Spices

It can be daunting when cooking with spices for the first time.  For you would not know how much is enough to make the dish taste good and palatable.

According to the Chef at Home, Michael Smith ( I love his show, he always teaches something useful: the variety of flours, the differences of salt types etc) – Spices can come from a plant’s roots, seeds, bark, buds, or berries. (Herbs are produced from the stems and leaves of a plant).

What I love most about using spices is that we can have chicken everyday, but with different spices and using different forms of the chicken, everybody would feel we are serving different menus each meal.

Say on Monday we bake the whole chicken with peppercorns, the next day we could make chicken pieces with sumac in a tagine. (Sumac is generally known as a blend of spices from the Middle East).

The only thing is that, spices should be used according to the recipe and in proportion to the amount of the main ingredient – meat, seafood, vegetables – because if we are unfamiliar with how it would taste in the dish or how much is sufficient, your dish may at worst, be inedible.

So to avoid such disasters, I recommend watching your favorite chef demonstrating the use of that certain unfamiliar spice before attempting to use the spice or mixing it with others.

For example, grounded turmeric, cumin and coriander (and salt) goes well when marinating prawns for deep-frying.  But the measurement for each spice should not be equal to each other.  In theory, for every teaspoon of grounded coriander, you should only use a half teaspoon of grounded cumin and a half teaspoon of turmeric powder.

Having said that, everyone should try at least one new spice every couple of months to expand our cooking repertoire and make the everyday meals something to remember every once in a while.