Blend the Hell Out of Your Spices

A small glass container filled with blended spices and a label on the front reading “Veg!” Elazar Sontag/Eater

My best cooking tip: throw your seasonings in a blender

This post originally appeared in the June 29, 2020 edition of The Move, a place for Eater’s editors to reveal their recommendations and pro dining tips — sometimes thoughtful, sometimes weird, but always someone’s go-to move. Subscribe now.

I’ve spent a lot of evenings during shelter-in-place trying to figure out what makes Bjorn Qorn so much better than the popcorn I make at home. For the uninitiated, Bjorn Qorn is a brand of popcorn with a cult following, whose most popular flavor features little more than salt and nutritional yeast. It’s very simple and extremely satisfying. But my attempts to recreate it, despite buying high-quality yeast and popcorn for my DIY version, didn’t stack up. After months of head-scratching, and many bowls of popcorn consumed, I realized what I needed to do to make the perfect popcorn: blend my seasonings.

What really sets Bjorn Qorn apart is the way the salt and yeast cling to every nook and cranny, adhering perfectly to each piece of popcorn. Mixing the seasonings in a blender, or pounding them with a mortar and pestle, gave me something much closer to that result. Popcorn’s a very good place to start, but this lesson applies nearly everywhere. Blending spices and seasonings before applying them has made pretty much all of my cooking better. I use my coffee grinder (I should really buy a proper spice grinder) to blend brown sugar, salt, paprika, and cumin to cover ribs and chicken. Dill seeds, black peppercorn, and whatever else I dig up from my spice drawer are pulverized to coat salmon. Even a simple combination of black pepper and salt can be blended before applying.

Blending spices ensures all the little seasoning particles are roughly the same size, allowing them to distribute more evenly. Big grains of salt or brown sugar don’t sink to the bottom of the bowl, getting left behind as I sprinkle my mixture over chicken thighs. The blending or pounding also opens up the spices, making their flavors more intense.

Admittedly, I don’t always follow my own advice. It’s not exactly a major undertaking, but blending spices takes more effort than I’m willing to put in some days. To avoid having to pound or blend every time I cook, I make bigger batches of seasoning mixtures to use throughout the week or month. Each glass jar gets a label, so that when I’m rummaging through the clutter of my pantry I know which seasoning is for chicken, for pork, or for vegetables.

Putting in the extra five minutes of work on a Sunday to prep some seasonings for the week is a small project, but it saves me on a Wednesday or Thursday, when my imagination is shot and I really don’t want to think about cooking. Recently, because we can’t cook and eat together during the pandemic, I’ve started making extra jars of seasoning blends to give to friends. It’s a small gesture, but it’s nice to know we’re eating the same meal in our separate bubbles, even if it’s just a bowl of popcorn with a dusting of salt and nutritional yeast.

P.S.: Looking for more spice options? Here’s where to find options from across the globe.



from Eater - All https://ift.tt/38gfzwj

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Comforting Braised Pig Feet Recipe Perfect for Your Pressure Cooker

Image
Louiie Victa Chef Jenny Dorsey’s recipe is a testament to the trotter’s versatility When I go grocery shopping, I always look for pig feet. In the sea of unrecognizably standard-looking cuts of animal muscles at grocery stores — disk-shaped loins, round humps of pork butt — trotters are always the anomaly. They look most precisely as they were: feet, hooves, the tired bones and tissue that kept an animal upright its whole life. Unfortunately for pig feet, their look hasn’t exactly made them a popular part of the mainstream American diet. As Cecil Adams wrote back in 2016, one of the challenges in encouraging more Americans to consume offal and organ meat is that “organs resemble, well, body parts: any steak slapped on a plate looks like dinner, while a lovingly presented calf heart may suggest an autopsy.” And, Adams added, there’s the “socioeconomic stigma…that had a racial component too,” which is only exacerbated by “travelogue shows [like] Bizarre Foods .” Despite being mali
Read more

Beyond Impossible: The Sanitarium and World War II Past of Meat Substitutes

Image
Photo by Tom Kelley/Getty Images We’ve come a long way from John Harvey Kellogg’s “protose cutlets” It’s no stretch to say that fake meat is having a moment . With the popularity of brands such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat joining fast-food menus and grocery store aisles alike, plant-based meats are no longer seen as a sad option for vegetarians long denied flavor with meat substitutes (though, as we know, plenty of vegetarian food is packed with flavor), but for anyone who enjoys a good burger, fried chicken, or nuggets. But are meat substitutes really the future of eating? Maybe by necessity as food resources run out, but not likely by choice. In fact, despite the big money raked in by Impossible and Beyond over the past few years, industrial meat consumption in America is actually on the rise. This week on Gastropod , Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley see how the not-sausage gets made, with visits to the Impossible Meat lab and Meati , a Colorado-based start-up that’
Read more

Restaurant Workers Are Combing Through Job Listings — But They’re Not Applying

Image
Photo by Dominic Lipinski/PA Images via Getty Images Culinary Agents CEO Alice Cheng on the restaurant worker shortage and how workers will return to the industry ‘on their timeframe’ As restaurants across the country expand capacity, reopen for indoor dining, and prepare for a new season of outdoor service, owners are struggling to find staff to meet their needs. Many workers still don’t feel safe returning to work during a pandemic. Others don’t want to fight with patrons over health and safety guidelines. Some may have left town or joined another industry while they were laid off and will return when the timing and opportunity are right. Alice Cheng, CEO of hospitality industry job search engine Culinary Agents , has a macro view of the hiring trends across various cities and states and is a careful observer of candidate behavior. “A lot of the data that we see is there’s so many people looking at jobs, more so than in the past, and they’re waiting,” Cheng told Eater’s Digest
Read more