Spices Part 1: How to Buy & Store Them
Contrary to what some interior designers may say, in glass jars, exposed to light on a pretty rack is far from ideal....
When I teach my in person cookery workshops we start every session with a spice tour of my masala (meaning spice) dabba (meaning pot or container) pictured above. I also have a smaller round dabba, which I refer to as my number 2 dabba, as the spices it contains I use far less frequently than the ones in my beloved giant dabba. In total we look at, touch, smell & sometimes taste around 25 different spices.
For most of my life I took spices for granted. I remember as a child in Kensal Rise in the 1970s how strong the smell of spices was, wafting from neighbours doorways or out the back of restaurant kitchens. I remember that people who were newly arrived in the UK would smell of their cooking & food & I remember how different it was to what I was used to & I remember realising as a teenager that the cooking remained but the smells had faded & I remember realising a little later in life that this was because we were all eating the spices & exuding similar aromas & so it wasn’t so much of a badge of difference anymore.
It was only when we moved down to Sussex in 2010 that I realised how important spices & their counterparts, aromatics & the many dishes that used them in their creation were to me. Having lived for 4 decades exclusively in London, I never anticipated this moment of bereavement when we left, but it hit hard. The food soundtrack to my life abruptly stopped & for a while a bleak empty silence replaced it.
We were living in Hackney, just behind the town hall, when rents went nuts & we had to leave. We had a Turkish supermarket in one direction & a Vietnamese one in the other & between the 2 we could get our hands on pretty much anything. Great bunches of coriander with the roots still attached (oh how I still miss this, the flavour is in the root, it is this part of the plant that should be used in pastes, the leaves reserved for garnish), piles of sweet & lovely sultana grapes in season, lemongrass stalks long & fat like the big brothers of the twigs you get in supermarkets. Lime leaves, curry leaves, pandan leaves. Great tubs of feta floating in brine, olives, halva, baclava, stuffed vine leaves. Baskets full of giant snails in Ridley Road market (never appealed but I loved that they were there). Mountains of fresh produce piled up outside corner shops, dizzy under artificial light outside the 24 hour shops at all times - affordable & easily accessible to all.
This is the first part in a series on Spices - I will be sharing here over coming weeks all that I have learnt through the years since leaving London & variously burying myself in kitchens learning how to try to emulate & recapture the flavours & dishes I was missing. Spices Part One - how to buy & store them.
It drives me not a little spare that so many spices are sold in clear glass jars. I am driven spare for a number of reasons….Spices like to be stored in the dark - this is best for them to retain their oils & so their flavour, glass not only exposes them to the heat & light but also, in some instances, can magnify the heat & light - this is bad news! Heat & light will encourage your spices to give up their oils & so their flavour, it is to be avoided. Next up is the con, pick up 35g of anything & you will think it weighs next to nothing. Put 35g of anything in a thick bottomed glass jar & huzzah, you have a weighty product that can perhaps justify its price tag. My final bugbear is the carbon implications of moving this not fit for purpose packaging around. So when buying spices, go for the refill boxes or tins when you can.
If you have a lot of spices in glass then the best thing to do is store them in the dark in a drawer or cupboard. Irreversibly committed to your on the wall spice rack & its made to fit glass jars? Think about perhaps painting the outside of the glass & so restrict the exposure to light that way. Masala Dabba, the stainless steel tins that can be found in nearly every Indian kitchen are the best ways to store them for more than just the dark & cool conditions they maintain. Have you ever spent way longer than you would like rummaging around looking for a spice? Searching amongst a plethora of pots, boxes & jars? The joy of the dabba is it sits on your counter top, with its spoon in place, ready to serve all of your spices with ease. And then when you’re done, you just pop the lid back on & leave them to one side.
Looking at my large dabba pictured above you will notice that most of the spices in it are whole. This is not because I cook mainly with whole spices, far from it, but again this is about conserving the flavour. As soon as you crack the shell on a spice seed you are releasing those precious oils. Whole spices will keep a lot longer than pre ground ones - think 6-12 months instead of 2 -3. Plus, when you cook with whole spices you get to experience the total joy that is releasing their flavours just before cooking with them - it cannot be beaten by opening a pot of pre ground equivalent. Consider the provenance of pre ground spices - just when were they ground? Where? What has happened to them in the meantime? It is like fresh ground coffee, the principles are exactly the same.
Of course there are some spices that do I buy ground - cinnamon, ginger, turmeric, nutmeg & mace - because they are all very hard in their unground state & so present a challenge to grind at home (I do buy whole mace for spice blends that require toasting before blending - more on that in a later post). I also buy paprika & kashmiri chilli powder in powdered form (I also buy whole kashmiri chillies, more on them later too).
With all this in mind, this is the moment when I will tell you that it is likely - in fact most probable - that you could go to your spices, if you have some, & throw them all away! This may sound brutal, but can you honestly remember how long ago you bought them? It is very common, indeed I have done it myself in the past, for people to make a curry & to buy the spices necessary & then forget all about them. This brings me to my next point….
Where to buy your spices. If you are fortunate you will have a local health food store or other niche & normally independent food shop local to you, that sells spices by weight - use them! If you are making a spiced dish from scratch, buy the quantity of spices that you need & no more, this way you skip the whole ‘how old is this?’ question. Also, often this stock will have been brought from Organic Herb Trading, a great ethical wholesaler where I buy my spices from. This brings me neatly to the question of organics…
It is getting easier to buy organic spices. Often they are available in supermarkets. Why is it important? I give 2 reasons when teaching & these are based more on my own opinion & understanding than hard facts. First the organic trading standard protects more than the consumer, it protects the soil the plants are grown in & the people who cultivate & harvest them. We still import the majority of our spices to the UK from the global south. We could easily grow them here but don’t, most probably because of the cost implications. Buying organic is a protection against the often very far from fair trade conditions that spices are grown in. The second reason I give for buying organic spices is the way that pesticides are being developed in these hyper capitalist hyper industrial times - they are targeting the seeds. This is based on economics - they want plants to grow with pesticide defences built in, so rendering spraying redundent. Now as I said, I do not know the extent of this within the spice trade, but it is food for thought, no?
Thank you for reading. Next up in Spice Part 2 - Toasting & Grinding. This will hit the inboxes of all subscribers next month. Next up from me is my Indian Supper Weekend Wonder that will be going out to paid subscribers on Friday.
Chloe x