A Funny Thought

Okay, maybe it's not that funny.  I'm vaguely amused at how VERY undescriptive the names of most spice blends are.  What do I mean?  Well, most spice blends are not given an English name.  Instead, they just use the name from the original language which is then treated as a loan word.  This is probably because most seasoning blends have names that translate to something along the lines of "spice mixture".  Don't believe me?

• Chinese 5 Spice (wǔxiāngfěn) - literally translates as "five fragrance powder"
• Garam Masala - Warm spice mix
• Sazón - Seasoning (referring to the dried spice mix made popular by Goya)
• Curry Powder - Comes from the Tamil "kari podi" meaning "condiment powder"
• Adobo Seco - Spanish for "dry marinade/seasoning"
• Chaat Masala - Roughly means "lickable spice mix"
• Herbes de Provence - Herbs from Provence, France
• Baharat - Arabic for "spices", specifically the plural form
• Shichimi Tougarashi - Japanese for "seven flavored red pepper"
• Quatre Épices - literally "four spices" in French
• Advieh - the Persian word for "spice"
• Panch Phoron - Bengali for "five seasoning"
• Fines Herbes - French for "fine herbs"

These admittedly awkwardly literal translations don't have a good ring to them.  Leaving them in a foreign language makes them sound exotic.  It gives them zazz.  It makes them stand out on store shelves against the less interesting English names like "mulling spice" and "pumpkin pie spice" which sound tame and boring by comparison.  Of course, some spice blends escape this trope.

• Za'atar - This is the Arabic word for thyme.  The blend uses thyme.
• Ras el Hanout - Literally "head of the shop" in Arabic.  Implies the best spices in the store.
• Beau Monde - This is French for "good society".

I had a hard time find any others that had a name that didn't just refer to a seasoning blend in a generic sounding way.  However, there is a good reason for this.  When you trace the origins of spice blends, it generally comes down to marketing.  These spices certainly get used in their respective cultures, but they're often just ingredients common to a region's dishes.  For example, traditional Provençal cooking certainly makes use of thyme, moarjoram, rosemary and savory, but not as one fixed mixture made ahead of time.  "Herbes de Provence" wasn't known until the 1970s when it was marketed as a blend.  I've similarly talked before about how curry powder is made up by westerners, but it is certainly a blend of spices used in southern Indian cooking.  Basically, a culture's cooking tends to use certain spices repeatedly and someone will at some point decide to sell it as a pre-fab mix.  If it's meant as a general purpose seasoning blend instead of a specific recipe's spices (chili powder, pickling spice, Montreal steak rub, etc.) it's hard to give it a descriptive name.

These blends have become culinary shorthand.  You might be surprised to learn, for example, that Italians don't use anything close to "Italian seasoning".  They use all the herbs contained within, but the mix was invented in America to imply common ingredients to Italian cooking.  These shortcuts aren't bad per se, they're just not traditional.  Grandma might look at you funny for using them instead of doing it the traditional way, but she's not here right now so we don't have to worry about her cooking spoon being used as a weapon.

...or do we?

The Scorpion Challenge

I should have known better, I suppose, than to buy my father some of the world's hottest chili peppers in powdered form and think I could get away unharmed.  My father has a long history of liking overly spicy food (though he seems to be recanting this somewhat in recent years) so for his birthday, my sister and I got him powdered ghost pepper and scorpion pepper.  So naturally, we had to eat it.

Let me introduce you to the Scoville scale.  You see, we measure the "heat" or "burn" of spicy food in something called Scoville Heat Units (SHUs for short).  Here is a chart showing the SHU rating of some common peppers and spices.

Now let's add the ghost and scorpion pepper to the chart and see what happens...

ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE WORSE THAN HABANERO!!!!!!

We decided the best way to handle this would be with chili.  This way we could use a tiny pinch and hope the chili would act as insulation against the ridiculous heat.  This is the recipe we used and it was quite tasty.  I recommend giving it a try.  As a control, we made the recipe without adding any ghosts or scorpions then added the fiery madness to each bowl.  Fortunately, when dried and turned into powder, the SHUs drop to a mere 450,000 and 500,000, respectively.  Because that's so very manageable, right?

...so we made some videos of me eating this stuff...

Amazingly, I survived the ghost pepper experience without much pain.  I used maybe an eighth of a teaspoon in my bowl and, while I did break a sweat from the heat, I wasn't about to do my Madeline Kahn impression.

I felt empowered.  Perhaps I had more heat tolerance than I thought.  Maybe...  MAYBE NOTHING COULD STOP ME!!!!  With one pepper defeated, I confidently moved on to the scorpion pepper.

This...  was a mistake.  That extra 50,000 SHU is a lot.  It stings.  A lot.  HOLY HECK does it hurt!!!  But I was determined.  I felt a need to conquer.  To overcome.  I would not tap out to the vicious scorpion no matter how bad the pain got, but the more I ate, the worse it was.  I felt my lower lip swell and I thought I should stop, but looking at the bowl I only had about 4 bites left.  As my father cringed, I shoveled it into my face and powered through the last of it.

Just how bad is it?  Well, let's put it this way.  The steam from washing the bowls out in the sink made my father's eyes water.  It was that bad.  Even at just one eighth of a teaspoon it was still amazingly potent.  We decided that we're going to let it sit on the shelf for a few years and maybe by then it will have reached its half life and the burn won't be as bad.

So what did we learn from all this?  Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.

Whatever, at least I finished it.

SAGE ADVICE #5: How Old Is Too Old?

This isn't as black and white as you'd hope, I'm afraid.  Every plant breaks down at a different rate.  Just as your mushrooms will spoil long before your carrots and your garlic will outlast them all combined, some herbs just don't last as long as others.

First, some good news.  Just because your spices have "gone bad" does not mean that they are now bad for you.  They will not make you sick or give you indigestion.  Well, normally they won't.  If they're starting to grow new lifeforms you'll obviously want to toss them.  Also, just because a spice is past its prime doesn't mean it's completely useless.  Give it a taste if its age makes you wary.  Has it turned into flavorless sawdust or is it just less potent?

In general, dried leaves (rosemary, thyme, basil, etc.) are going to last about a year.  Ground spices (cumin, coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, etc.) can last as long as two years.  Whole spices will last much longer, so your 3 year old cloves are probably still fine.  There are a few variables, of course.  Exposure to air and light will greatly reduce the lifespan of your spices.  Moisture can also ruin things.  Dill is notoriously short lived so don't buy it in bulk unless you're planning on running a pickling business.  Fresh herbs aren't going to keep much longer than a week once picked.

Tony Hill, in his book "The Spice Lover's Guide to Herbs and Spices", suggests changing out your spices every 6 to 8 months.  I don't know about you, but to me that's just a bit more expensive than I'm comfortable with.  While ground herbs start losing their complexity very quickly, I've got some savory that's a year old and still going strong.  Besides, who can afford that much mace and saffron?

The ultimate judge is your nose and mouth, but if it's been a year, start sniffing and tasting your spice rack every few months.  Longer than a year and you're going to notice a big difference in quality.  Just don't be like some people I know who haven't updated their cabinet since the 80s.

Curry, The Great Lie

Forget what you have been told.  There is no such thing as curry.  At least, not in India.  It is an entirely western concept that came about from attempting to capitalize on the exotic novelty of foreign food.  Similarly, curry powder was made up by spice merchants for the exact same reason.  It is not the powder of some sort of "curry seed" (there ARE curry leaves, but that's another story), nor is it one specific spice blend.  It is, in fact, pretty much whatever you want it to be.  However, we've gotten so used to it in the west that it's sold in stores as a pretty standardized product.

While curry isn't an Indian concept, it is certainly one that the rest of the world has embraced wholeheartedly.  The biggest example is Thai curries, which are traditional dishes called "kaeng" in Thai.  There's also Jamaican curry powder, which is the same thing as normal curry powder but with the locally grown allspice added.  Japan eats quite a lot of curry, but they recognize it as a western dish brought to them by the British.  So while you'll find curry has pervaded the world, it's still not a word familiar to Indians.

The word curry comes from the Tamil (a southern Indian and Sri Lankan people with a language dating back thousands of years) word "kari" meaning sauce or condiment.  The British East India Trading Company traded with spice merchants who sold them "kari powder" and the word stuck as a bit of a catch all for local foods.

If you wanted a close cultural analog, garam masala is a northern Indian all purpose spice mix.  What gets sold over here as curry powder is very different and much more complex.  If you'd like to make your own, I've included a basic recipe I've found that should do the trick.

How to make your own curry powder.

Since curry powder is a fake concept, I figured the most appropriate recipe I could give would be from a very fake person.  So, please enjoy this Martha Stewart chickpea curry recipe.

It's hard to talk too much about what curry powder tastes like since the ingredients vary pretty wildly, but in general you'll see a lot of cumin, coriander, turmeric, fenugreek, cinnamon, cloves and hot pepper.  It is most often used in dishes that have the word "curry" in the title.  The smell that hits you when you walk into an Indian restaurant is what it imbues.  It may not be the most authentic thing in the world, but don't let that stop you from using it.  Is it a blend of spices that tastes good in your food?  That's the real question for me.

Dat Indian Food Smell Doe

I just don't understand some people.  I've heard so many people complain that their desi neighbors cook and thus their homes "always smell like Indian food." And?  Is this a problem somehow?  Indian food smells amazing!  It is the olfactory equivalent of attaining nirvana by binge watching all the cat videos on youtube in one sitting.  That smell comes mostly from a funny little rectangular seed called fenugreek (trigonella foenum-graecum).

Fenugreek, interestingly, is a plant whose entirety is eaten.  The seeds, sprouts and even leaves are all used in some way or another.  Even cilantro can't claim that kind of hat trick.  The rectangular seeds are rock hard and need to be ground down for consumption.  They're not turmeric hard, but you can't crack them with your teeth like you can with most seeds.

Never eat the seeds whole, kids.

The name "fenugreek" comes from the Latin words "foenum graecum" meaning "Greek hay" since the Greeks were using the plant as hay to feed their cattle and sheep.  They weren't the first as the plant gets mentioned all the way back to ancient Egypt.  Cultures that ate beef or veal adopted it and so it became popular in India and Thailand, but also it was well liked in Moorish countries.

The flavor of Fenugreek is actually a bit of a letdown.  While the wonderful scent of caramel and walnuts hits your nose, what hits your tongue is more like celery and fennel with perhaps some nuttiness in the background.  It's sort of like that one friend who still thinks it's funny to put a small present inside a huge box.  Since the flavors aren't terribly strong, it's actually hard to notice when used in recipes, so put a little in to make all your guests drool at the smell.   Just make sure the rest of the dish tastes good.

I had a hard time finding a recipe for Fenugreek, mostly because it's not prominent in any of the recipes I use.  That said, I haven't tried this particular one out but it sounds good to me.  Please forgive me if it's not great.

If you've ever wondered what that certain something is that your Indian recipes need to give them that signature taste and smell, look no further.  From what little research I've done, it seems that the leaves are actually much more popular than the seeds, but that's an article for a later date.