Day: December 28, 2017

Cardamom: The Queen of Spice

I Love Cardamom

In addition to being maybe the least well known spice, it has the happy distinction of being my unforgettable and exotic.  I also have good taste.  Cardamom is the third most expensive spice, right behind saffron and vanilla.

I’ve loved cardamom ever since I had an apfelstrudel. Yeah, the butter and the apples and the crispy crunch of perfect strudel dough, but beneath it all was the yet-to-be-identified flavor of ancientness. It was the cardamom.

Cardamom flowers and fruit growing from a plant.Cardamom grows as ginger and turmeric grow, a rhizome root from another plant. The shoots reach 10-12 feet into the air, but the business is near the ground. Small white and purple flowers produce the fruit which is the cardamom pod. I’ve read than the seeds from the fresh fruit are much more powerful than the dried seeds.

Flavor Profiles

Flavor is tricky to explain. Explain what blue looks like to someone who doesn’t see it. Indian cardamom has a sweetness which conceals a musty, piney, lemony aroma. Sri Lanka also produces a quality cardamom. As with many foods, imitations and poor substitutes are in the market. If you didn’t know (and now you do) cardamom from Guatemala is inferior in flavor and half the price. For that you get a camphor element which I find off-putting.

Cardamom once travelled by caravans for two years through desserts, on rivers, over mountains to China. Traders exchanged cardamom, cinnamon and other spices for their wants and needs and returned to India. The Chinese used what they wanted and then to parts east with the rest.

Cardamom is of course popular in Arab cuisine and coffee, where it may be ground with the coffee beans, added as seeds, or the whole pods steeped with the coffee. Cardamom pairs very nicely with turmeric, and those two alone make up the two most prominent ingredients in curry powder. It also pairs well with cinnamon, nutmeg, saffron and mixes well in chicken and pork dishes, sweets such as streudel, cinnamon rolls or waffles. The connection with those last three is a degree of caramelized sugar. If you are a caramel making person, add some at the end of your caramel making. Trust me on this.

What To Look For

Green cardamom pods showing the seeds inside.The best cardamom pods are blemish free, green, and tightly closed. The open as three leaves to reveal from 8 to 20 small black seeds. There are about 24 grades of cardamom and the best pods are about 8mm diameter. Interestingly, the grades are made on appearance and size only, never the seeds inside.

Cardamom pods can be white, but they are previously green pods which have been bleached with sulfer dioxide to conceal the fading green from a too old pod. Black cardamom isn’t really cardamom and hasn’t the refinement of proper cardamom. Make no mistake, proper cardamom has an elegance but packs a punch.

Cardamom, when found in a grocery store, will almost always be sold ground.  Getting it is good, getting it in a pod is best. Once ground, the volatile flavors of cardamom dissipate rapidly. If that is all you can get, use more for any recipe since the delicate flavor is likely less than it could be. If you find them whole, smashing the seeds in a mortar and pestle is best. The bottom of a clean sauté pan or the back of a knife will work just fine. Seeds from a good quality pod will be a bit sticky. In India, the seeds are used as breath fresheners.

Not Just For Dessert

The cardamom pod offers other uses including a reduction in stomach pain and, it is said, the reduce flatulence. You are liking the caramel idea a lot more, aren’t you? Other uses may help with cancer, reduce cardiovascular issues, improve blood circulation and help manage UTI.

Cardamom will go very nicely in your Easter carrot cake.  Add it to cinnamon rolls, mix your own curry powder, add it to tea, waffles from my friend Laura at Daily Improvisation, caramel sauce or, of course, nearly all Indian desserts.

 

 

 

 

 

Real Food/Fake Food

Real From Fake: Is There Really Any Harm?

 

 

 

Red snapper in an ice bin.
Red Snapper in an ice bin. Is it really red snapper? Hard to tell without seeing the tail.

Buying fish was one of my most favorite jobs. Cutting that fish was the second. I find cutting fish a zen place to be and can disappear for hours and never move my feet. We ordered our fish skin on and often whole so we could see what we were buying. Whole fish I knew, but a filet of something white, well, even the fishmonger might find that a challenge.

Olmsted does an excellent job of making a heady and bothersome topic, faking our food sometimes at the risk of our health or life, easy to read and understand.

A mound of shrimp.
A mound of fresh caught (maybe) shrimp. But, is it safe? Where did it come from?

You don’t need to be a chef or a food purchasing manager for a restaurant to be affected by the choices of someone else somewhere else. What you don’t know can hurt you and there is little better armament for guarding one’s health than knowledge.

Shrimp, nearly everyone’s favorite, might be less wholesome than you prefer.  A sushi fan are you?  There are about even odds that fish you are eating isn’t what you were told it is.  So, what is it?

More than meets the eye

There is more fake food than we know.  Fake doesn’t always mean inedible (but sometimes it does), but fake in that it isn’t what it claims to be.  Champagne can only come from Champagne, France.  Port only from Portugal.  Yet, you can go to your local mega grocery store and buy California Port and Champagne and get nothing like their namesakes suggest.  Fake.  It’s a big problem and one that Congress has been none too eager to help fix, even to go as far as help perpetuate the problem.

Perhaps the most vexing part of the problem, even more so that borrowing names for things that aren’t, the stealing of your money for inferior products at high prices, trusting that the box reads right about what’s in there is that the FDA has apparently little interest in doing what they are supposed to do and there is little we can do to solve that problem.

Is there any way to fix this?

Olmsted’s purpose seems to show the problems with for reals fake food and the only mislabeled or misidentified.  Sometimes those problems lead to real health issues, sometimes just lightening your wallet.

A libertarian solution is the disband the FDA which seems content to do as little as possible and employ 3rd party systems of verification, much like those mentioned in the book who sleuthed out the fish and sushi problem.

Between then and now, those two things almost never happening, being informed, which Olmstead does very well, and attending carefully to what you buy, grow your own, and be vigilant, the fake food in your house can give way to the real stuff and the market pressure to make the good goods will at least exert some pressure in the right places. Complaints might be that the market works too slowly: have you seen the speed of Congress?