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Spice Roasting and Blooming

Toasting, grinding, blooming whole spices in fat

19 rungs across 15 volumes

Dishes

Weeknight

Weekend

Project

Untimed

Africa

Ghana & Nigeria

Toast and bloom your spices, and grind them yourself

Ozoz Sokoh's method for a pepper soup blend is the template: toast each spice separately over low-medium heat for five to six minutes until fragrant, cool...

Ethiopia & Eritrea

Cook the onion dry, and cook enough of it

A very large quantity of onion, minced to a coarse paste, cooked in a heavy dry pan over low heat, alone, with no fat and no added water, until it has released...

Ethiopia & Eritrea

Treat spice as a fat-phase extraction on a clock

Two operations at opposite ends of the temperature scale, governed by one principle.

Somalia & Djibouti

Treat xawaash as a sequence, not a recipe

Every household has its own xawaash and every Somali cook will say so.

Egypt

The tasha is a controlled Maillard event with a hard stop

Garlic and ground coriander in samna, taken to golden and not one shade past, then shocked into the pot at the very end.

Morocco

Spice in three applications, three solvents, three timings

Volatility and solubility differ by an order of magnitude across a spice blend.

Algeria, Tunisia & Libya

Bloom the harissa in oil at the start. It is a fat-borne base, not a red sauce added at the end

Capsaicin is a lipophilic vanilloid: far more soluble in oil than in water.

Algeria, Tunisia & Libya

Toast the two seeds whole, grind in small batches, and treat tabil as perishable

The defining volatiles are linalool in coriander and carvone in caraway.

Kenya, Tanzania & the Swahili Coast

The pilau brown

The colour of a good pilau comes from onions and spice, not from turmeric and not from browning the rice.

Madagascar, Mauritius, Réunion, Seychelles & Comoros

Roussir the base, then obey the cari, rougail and civet grammar

Everything in Réunion and Mauritius starts with onion taken past soft to genuinely coloured.

Madagascar, Mauritius, Réunion, Seychelles & Comoros

Bloom the turmeric in fat, then quench it, and never use curry powder

The most transferable chemical fact here.

South Africa, Lesotho & Eswatini

Roast whole spice, bloom it in fat, and season in stages

Two traditions, kept apart here because the communities keep them apart.

Asia

Iran

Fry the herbs to near black before they are a stew, not a garnish

Ghormeh sabzi's whole character is decided before the meat is even added.

Europe

The Czech Republic and Slovakia

Bloom paprika for thirty seconds, then loosen it immediately

This is the single most diagnostic mechanism here for why a bad guláš tastes bitter rather than sweetly deep.

Estonia, Latvia & Lithuania

Grind caraway to order, because it is structural, not a garnish

Caraway's flavour compounds begin fading within minutes of grinding and a pre-ground jar has typically lost most of its character within six months on a shelf.

Catalonia, Valencia, Murcia & the Balearics

Build a real sofregit before anything else happens

A proper sofregit, the slow-fried base of onion, garlic and grated tomato that underlies nearly every dish here, needs twenty to thirty minutes at medium-low...

Oceania and the Pacific

Papua New Guinea