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!

A LIST OF EQUIPMENT FOR WORKING WITH MIXES

Making of a perfect spice blend is not a hard task to do. And I am going to describe devices you will need to make it easier for you to create different combinations.

Mortar and pestle

A mortar is perfect for mixes that require coarse or medium grinding. Simply crush the seeds with a pestle until the desired grinding and combine them with other components of the mix. Also, you can use a mortar to make spices of fine grinding or powder. First, you need to crush the whole spices, for example, star anise or cinnamon in a mortar and then put them in a coffee grinder. This will help you to prevent incomplete grinding in a coffee grinder since not every device is able to cope with this task and create a fine powder. There can be pieces of whole spices remaining in a coffee grinder if made without preliminary preparation. Also, mortar is hard to replace when it comes to fresh ingredients such as chili, ginger, garlic, lemongrass and many other ingredients for spicy pastes. You should avoid poor-quality and wooden mortars. You should purchase a wide stone mortar that will serve you for many years.

Coffee grinder (mill, food processor, blender)

These kitchen appliances are hard to replace when the mix requires fine grinding or powder. Besides, blender is useful when you need to grind fresh ingredients for mixing them with dry ingredients for making paste. All you need to do is put the spice you need into a blender and grind it to the required substance. Use a particular blender designed only for grinding spices. By no means use the same appliance to grind coffee, spices and other products. I recommend that you use a blender or grinder for fine grinding of spices with a flat double blade made of stainless steel. Do not grind the whole spices with nozzles consisting of several blades, especially those located at different angles. If you try to use this kind of nozzle you will not be able to get fine powder and just get exhausted with attempts instead.

Thick-walled frying pan

Many recipes in this book require preheating, and even roasting grains and seeds sometimes. As I mentioned before, warming up helps to effuse aroma and to release essential oils from spices. This process brightens the taste of spices as well as the whole dish. In some cases, it is allowed to heat several ingredients at once, in other cases, the spices should be heated one by one. It is necessary to keep in mind that after heating the seeds and grains should be put into a separate bowl, otherwise the spices will simply burn, since the frying pan, as you understand, retains heat for a while even after you have removed it from the fire. Therefore, as soon as you sense the aroma rising you should immediately put spices into a bowl and cool them down. If there are many different kinds of whole species in a recipe that require preheating, then you need to sort them by size and warm them up separately. Do not warm up the seeds and grains of different sizes together as there is a chance to overdevelop smaller ones or not to activate essential oils that will, in its turn, not let the flavor open at its fullest. Also, the frying pan will help you to roast fresh ingredients for adding them into a spicy paste or sauce later.