Using Herbs & Spices More Easily In Your Cooking - Advice For You

Tuesday, April 19, 2022



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Any beginning home cook will need to know a few basics in order to thrive. Of course, the very basics, including how to actually cook certain types of food, is important. A good way to practice is to use basic ingredients like eggs to practice in the kitchen, such as learning to fry, poach, boil, and scramble the perfect egg. Then, you can make a worthwhile omelet, and you’ve mastered anything that may require this ingredient from now into the future.

Anther great way to think of cooking is to consider the building blocks of taste used in all cultures around the world - herbs and spices. While some cuisine is known more for spices and herbs than others, having a fundamental understanding of what these are and how they best operate can help you avoid overusing them in your cooking, or suffering from improper balances. It can also help you unlock the taste in basic and simple meals, such as placing a cinnamon stick in your pot as you gently cook some morning oats.

In this post, we’ll discuss how to properly use herbs and spices in your cooking, and the effect this can have:

Have The Herbs & Spices Rack To Hand

When you have your herbs and spices to hand, you’re much more likely to use them. This can be a cute addition to your kitchen design, as an overhead or shelving rack can be a beautiful place to line all your herbs and spices in a row.

Of course, you may even decide to grow a few herb as your windowsill, giving you the freshest chopped parsley possible, for instance, and allowing you to learn how to identify various plants and their immediate use in cooking. While it’s certain that you won’t be able to grow everything, it can be nice to have a few mint leaves to add to certain dishes, even if you’re just using them as a garnish.

Balance Spices In Simple Dishes, Like Soups

The best way to truly understand how spices and herbs will influence a dish is to take something relatively simple but also delicious, like Tom Yum soup, and then add your spices according to the recipe. When you’ve enjoyed that, you may decide to focus on adjusting that which you add into that recipe, allowing you to taste the immediate difference of various combinations of flavors, and how your additions actually change. Sometimes, you’ll come to a result that isn’t quite as enjoyable as you had thought - such as adding mint leaves to oatmeal in the morning, other times, you may find yourself smiling as if investing a brand new cuisine for the first time. In some cases, such as when slow-cooking chicken over a few hours, the slow adding of spices acts like a marinade, allowing you to truly see how a little patience can help “neutral” tasting food become much more enjoyable to eat.

Consider Both Sweet & Savoury

It’s healthy to consider both sweet and savoury foods and how they can be improved by your herbs and spices. Deserts can benefit from spices just as much as other foods can, but you need to be careful about where you place them. For instance, mace, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, anise seeds, and ginger are considered to be the primary spices for lifting deserts and are often used in baking in the best possible way.

This way, you can properly label and classify them in your rack, so that you never make the mistake of adding cumin into your biscuits. Or - perhaps you might do that. After all, Indian cuisine is absolutely incredible at using spices to help flip the script of what our Western taste buds might consider “normal,” but Indian cuisine is one of the most popular worldwide for a reason - it is absolutely delicious in every single way. Such is the fun of spice.

When Adding Spices, Take It Slowly

Take the process of adding spices slowly and adopt it as your own. Sure, spices are fun, but we can never take them out of food when they’re added, and so it’s best to be cautious and to keep tasting until we get a sixth sense for how much to add whenever we cook. This can take years, so until then, don’t be afraid to take it slowly and do your best to be rational with it.

With this advice, you’re certain to use herbs and spices more easily in your cooking, looking to thrive from now into the future.



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1 comment:

  1. I love using spice in my food.

    http://www.amysfashionblog.com/blog-home

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