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Katsuri Methi. An absolute essential for a decent curry. Also Hing aka Devil’s Piss, if for no other reason than the name.
MSG
Okay so who here toasts their spices?
Black cumin and rosemary, sometimes habareno pepper
What do you think habanero goes well with? My father had no taste buds and could really only detect oil, salt, fat, and heat. Naturally this lead to him overloading in one area or another, because that’s all he wanted to taste. One time he served me pizza with crushed habanero and the floral perfuminess bowled me over. I’ve never really used them since, but I remember loving them before that incident!!
Summer savory!
Salt, pepper, cumin, and paprika.
Thyme.
Yes actually you win. I had fresh for the first time last year and it destroyed my mind.
Hungarian paprika is awesome, I like to mix the sweet and hot varieties 50-50, and often use smoked paprika on top of that. I like paprika
I’m British
So ketchup on everything?
Salt, maybe
beige is not a spice
old bay
Smoked paprika ‼
Smoked paprika. It just adds so much depth to anything that I add it to! I’m also a big fan of cumin and turmeric.
The only 5 spices you’ll ever need:
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Salt
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Pepper
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Onion powder
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Garlic powder
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MSG
There is nothing, and I mean nothing, that doesn’t benefit from these 5. You can always add other spices, too, but these are the baseline for every single dish that isn’t meant to be sweet. And even on some sweet stuff, it’s pretty good. I tried it on waffles once and it was amazing.
I agree with the first two and sometimes the last (though I tend to go for stocks instead to get the umami). I’m really not a fan of the onion and garlic powder, though. If I need onion and garlic I get onion and garlic. Don’t like the powder forms.
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Cinnamon. Love it to bits.
Could you guide me on where to get some from a reputable, honest seller? There is none and I mean none in my city and I have looooooked and looked. I detest A-Z, too much tomfoolery and fake stuff.
Yeah, cinnamon (“true” and cassia) bark is a great spice!
Bebir (Aleppo pepper) - it’s a very mild red smoked chili that has incredible earthiness, and only a soupçon of warmth. I put this in everything, even dishes that are supposed to taste bright
Espresso - I make lazy pot espresso and save the dregs. I put the coffee in so many dishes. Sometimes where the base ingredients are too acidic or sweet. But I will also add it in gravy, sauces, stews, braise my meat with it. A couple tablespoons in a pot of spicy soup. It’s so versatile and deep
Cane sugars - raw, turbinado, or demerara - minimally processed where the molasses remains in the crystals. I know sugar has a bad reputation in our insane twisted diet lifestyle, but it’s fine for a cooking, and it’s amazing to caramelize things when frying or to take the edge off acidity. You need the tiniest amount. I will also pulverize it in a mortar and pestle… A teaspoon sprinkled on kettle corn is ludicrously delicious
Does cooking with espresso mean all your food is caffeinated? Or does it cook out eventually like alcohol?
That’s a good question.
I don’t know if the molecule is destroyed or transformed.
But I use so little that it wouldn’t affect anybody anyways… I don’t even think a child who is naive to the molecule would feel a thing
Edit… My curiosity got the best of me, I wasn’t able to Google the answer directly, but I found articles asking if reheating coffee destroys the molecule. Apparently an organic chemist got involved and stated that the molecules pretty stable, it will only break down around 350 F. So that would mean most of my food probably has the full effect of whatever caffeine was there.
I accidentally poisoned a love interest when I made her lasagna with espresso in the sauce. Turned out she was allergic to coffee, not caffeine. I didn’t know… but whoops a daisy lol
Caffeine is very stable, yes. But you’re not adding much if you’re adding just the dregs post-brew. Most of the caffeine is gone by the end of a normal brew. (This is quite unlike tea where you need several brews to get all the caffeine, so despite teas having more caffeine by weight than coffees most of the time, brewed tea has less.)
You sound confident, like you know things!
I feel like the espresso I brew isn’t really that potent? I get a 330ml mug of espresso out of 10g coffee grounds. And then it’s not even real espresso, it’s just crummy stove top pot “espresso”. I started drinking it that way because I was poor and it was a great way to get a lot of flavor for a little coffee grounds. Which I’d also occasionally recycle haha. But I’d be curious to know how actually potent it becomes. How would a person measure such a thing?
There’s coffee snob sites out there that will go into incredibly gory detail of roast levels and brewing mechanism and caffeine measurement. Like this one. And a myriad of others. (I just took the first hit off a search here, but the search terms were “detailed caffeine breakdown in coffee by varietal, roast, and brewing mechanism”. There were many, many, many more hits if that one’s not suitable. Like this one.)
