On Food and Cooking

— and rehydrated in a small amount of warm or hot liquid before being added to a dish, in order to ext ...

A Survey of Tropical Spices Among the tropical spices, family relationships don’t readily translate into flavor ...

combination of clove, cinnamon, and nutmeg. It is indeed rich in clove’s eugenol and related phenolic volatiles, ...

of orange, yellow, and red. Some of these are soluble in water, others in oil; large food manufacturers u ...

that ripen at different times, so the capsules must be picked by hand one by one, and slightly be ...

color more uniform. Mysore cardamom is often sold green, its color fixed by a three- hour dose of ...

flavor for two reasons: much of the crop is smoke-dried, and the seeds are rich in the penetrating terpenes ...

Arabs, medieval European cooks did too. Nowadays most cinnamon goes into sweet dishes and candies ...

from a phenolic compound, cinnamaldehyde, of which cassia types have significantly more than Sri Lankan ...

of aroma molecules of any spice. They are as much as 17% volatile chemicals by weight, most of this s ...

galangal, and Alpinia officinarum or lesser galangal. The former, sometimes also called Thai ging ...

Ginger was domesticated in prehistoric times somewhere in southern Asia, had been brought in dried form to ...

in the United States now comes from Hawaii, where the main harvest runs from December to June. Fresh gin ...

of ginger and members of its family comes from the gingerols, chemical relatives of the chilli’s c ...

rarity. It’s both somewhat pungent from gingerol and relatives (paradols, shogaols), and faintly b ...

until the Middle Ages. Today they provide the characteristic flavoring for doughnuts and eggnog, and are add ...

rounded. Both spices carry fresh, pine, flowery, and citrus notes, but are dominated by woody, warm, somewhat ...

America. We think of it as a basic seasoning, like salt, and use its moderate pungency and pleasant a ...

producing black pepper. Today India, Indonesia, and Brazil are the major world sources. Pepper Production Black pe ...

Peppers Pepper berries are processed to make several different versions of the spice. Black and white pepper. Pepp ...