The Spice Guide: Enhancing Your Dishes with Flavor

For the cook who owns twenty jars of spices and only ever reaches for three. This is a guide to using them, not a book of dish recipes: which ten spices earn a place in your pantry, how cultures from India to the Caribbean build flavour with them, how to toast, bloom, grind and layer them, and how to rescue a dish you have over-seasoned. It does include four measured spice-blend recipes you can mix at home.

What's inside

• The ten pantry essentials, from salt and black pepper to cumin, turmeric and the herb twins oregano and thyme, with what each one actually tastes like
• A tour of spice traditions: Indian masalas, Middle Eastern sumac and za'atar, Mexican dried chillies, Chinese five-spice, Thai aromatics, Moroccan ras el hanout and Caribbean allspice
• How to balance a dish: starting small, understanding sweet, earthy, hot and bright profiles, and layering spices at the right moment
• Four measured blends to mix yourself: taco seasoning, garam masala, pumpkin spice and Italian seasoning, plus a method for building your own signature blend
• A chapter on the wellness reputation of ten common spices, with the book's own caution about using large amounts
• Technique by technique: toasting, blooming in fat, grinding fresh, infusing liquids, roasting and making spice pastes
• Fixing over-seasoned food: too spicy, too salty, too bitter, too muddled
• Storage and shelf life: the four enemies of spices, how long whole and ground spices keep, jars, labels and stock rotation
• A pairing cheat sheet of classic and surprising combinations, from cumin and coriander to chilli and cocoa

Details

• PDF, 39 pages
• Instant digital download
• Read on any device, or print it
• For personal use