Cooking with spice mixes, pastes and sauces

Alex Cramer, 2018

This cookbook is about the art of mixing herbs and spices.– You will get acquainted with the main theory of mixing the spices and herbs.– You will discover the 35 most popular spices and herbs.– You will find out a description of the 35 most popular varieties of chili peppers.– You will learn many more useful information.And finally you will plunge into the world of spicy combinations and get acquainted with the recipes of more than 300 dry spice mixes, pastes and sauces, as well as their variations.Step by step you will learn the art of fragrant spice balance and the taste's magic of spicy combinations!

INTRODUCTION

Combined with one another, spices can turn into delicious and mouth-watering dish any food, even the simplest food. And the opposite is true: even the high cuisine dishes can be easily ruined by wrong spices combination.

Spice blends or seasonings are undoubtedly the most important ingredients for creating delicious dishes. They are able to turn ordinary food into an incredibly tasty masterpiece.

Nowadays, there are thousands of different books written about spices, however spice blends are hardly mentioned in those books. My book is devoted to different aspects, fine points and nuances of making spice combinations. I will not get into much details with spices, I will just mention them. Instead, I am going to pay full attention to spice blends and combinations.

Many of the culinary amateurs and enthusiasts are familiar with the situation when they follow the recipe, use fresh products and quality ingredients, but the dish they cook does not turn out well. Do you know what I am talking about? Why do we often stick to the exact recipe accurately, strictly follow the cooking time but still the dish turns out to be flavourless? We try to analyze the whole process and understand that we did everything right. So why did the food we cooked turn out to be different from what we have expected it to be?

The answer is simple: we are afraid to use and absolutely do not know how to use seasonings and spices in our daily cooking. I'm sure that you have some, maybe even dozens of spices and seasonings hidden in your kitchen. So why do not you use these gifts of nature to cook a truly delicious and healthy dish and enjoy it?

In this book, you will find solutions to the problems of many cooks. You will find specific directions to learning the art of mixing spices and creating unique aromatic spice combinations that can improve, emphasize and give an incredible taste to any dish.

This book will also be useful for those who masterfully mix spices and know how to use their unique purpose. You will definitely discover a new mixture and combination of spices that you will certainly add to your favorite dishes.

PART I. BASIC KNOWLEDGE.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Basically, all spices originate from plants. Some of them include the whole plant, and some include only spare parts such as flowers, roots, bark, leaves, stalk or seeds. This is where all flavoring and aromatic components of spices are hidden.

Freshly made spices — slightly roasted in a frying pan, crushed in a mortar or ground in a coffee grinder into a powder — display an incredible aroma both individually and combined with other spices.

Skillful cooks never buy spices and seasonings in a store. They prepare spices by themselves in the kitchen. And it is irrelevant whether it is a simple mix for marinating meat and pilaf flavouring or a deeply-rooted all-purpose regional mix such as garam masala and ras-el-hanout — home-made combinations are much cheaper, more aromatic and, most importantly, much healthier than those you can find in stores.

Another, by no means unimportant, advantage of home-made mixes is the fact that you can make a small amount of mix at a time rather than buying a whole package of seasonings that will be stored for a long time which can lead to flavor and aroma fading.

In this book, you will learn recipes of blends from all over the world. You will know how to create truly incredible culinary delights filled with an abundance of flavors and aromas from different world cuisines.

There are so many different ways to mix spices together and an abundance of flavors and aromas of each mix you have prepared will allow you to improve up same dish an infinite number of times. You will get familiar with a huge variety of dry mixes, spicy pastes and sauces based on those mixes, from the most popular to very rare combinations. On learning this material, you will be able to play with flavors and tastes of dishes like never before.

If you have all the necessary herbs and spices stored in your kitchen, you can easily make any of the spice blend described here. Nowadays, you can easily find some spices in any store, though you might have to look up in specialized shops for some other spices.

I personally recommend using the whole spices only. In most cases, it is necessary to warm up seeds or grains before grinding. It will help to release essential oils which leads to intensification of flavor and aroma.