This could very well become your new hobby: making your own spice blends. Once you discover that it's cheaper, healthier (ready-made mixes from the supermarket often contain salt, sugar, and flavorings), and tastier, you won't want to go back to anything else.
Of course, it's fun to recreate well-known spice blends and adapt them to your own taste. For example, make your own garam masala, speculaas spices, curry, or ras el hanout. But it's even more fun to create your own blend (start thinking about the name you'll give your own mix ;-)). Inventing your own mix isn't difficult, as long as you understand how taste works.
For this, let's briefly go back to the basics. What exactly is a spice? Spices are parts of a plant. Think of roots (turmeric and ginger), fruits (star anise and paprika powder), tree bark (cinnamon), seeds (cardamom, fennel seed, coriander seed, and cumin), and berries (black pepper). When we talk about the green leaves of a plant, we're talking about herbs (think of basil, parsley, rosemary, etc.). But let's not make it too complicated. These terms are often used interchangeably. And in fact, it doesn't really matter what you call it, as long as it tastes good ;-)
Plants contain aromas. These aromas are found in the essential oils of a plant, and these oils contain scent molecules. What we experience as taste is, to a large extent, actually smell. This also explains why you don't taste much when you have a cold.
Each spice has its own flavor profile, consisting of different aromas. Often there is one main component (in cinnamon, for example, it's cinnamaldehyde), which, together with other aromas, forms the entire flavor profile. Various factors such as origin, plant species, how it's dried, etc., influence the flavor profile. That's why the same spice from different places can taste very different.
The more a spice is exposed to factors like CO2, light, and moisture, the more aromas are lost, and the blander the remaining taste.
Okay, back to making a spice blend. When you make a blend, you combine different flavors. This works best if the spices have at least one shared flavor compound (aroma).
How to 'design' your own spice blend
Step 1: Choose the main flavor
What do you want your spice blend to do? Should it be warming and earthy (to flavor comfort food like a lentil stew or a pumpkin soup, for example) or do you want to create a blend with sweet flavors, or fresh citrus flavors, for a dessert? Choose 1 or 2 spices that contain the flavors you want to highlight in your blend.
You will add three parts of this flavor to your blend. So, if you're working with teaspoons, your base flavor will consist of 3 teaspoons. For example, if you want to make a warming blend, you choose two warming spices. Cinnamon and ginger, for instance. You could then use 2 teaspoons of cinnamon and 1 teaspoon of ginger. Or maybe you want the base to be a bit spicier, then you reverse it. You go for two teaspoons of ginger and 1 teaspoon of cinnamon.
Step 2: Choose the deepening flavor
The deepening flavor consists of 2 parts. In this case, two teaspoons. Perhaps you want your blend to be earthy, or floral. You can add that in this layer. For example, add two teaspoons of cumin to emphasize earthy flavors and tones, or turmeric if you want to go more towards the floral side.
Step 3: Add complexity
Here too, you can choose basic flavors like warm, earthy, or sweet, but you can also opt for the more 'funky' flavors, such as spicy, pungent, or sour. You don't want these flavors to dominate your blend, as they would overpower it, but by adding them as a "top layer," they can give your blend a lot of complexity. And a basic blend with a spicy accent has a completely different flavor profile than, for example, adding cardamom last for more pungent and fresh flavors. You add 1 part of this last layer (in this case, 1 teaspoon).
Want to learn more about this? And understand how to interpret the flavor profiles of spices? Then join our Spice Blend workshop!
