Spicy!

I am having a love affair with my spice merchant.  Well, not him, exactly.  But with his exotic spices and herbs.  As someone who typically marvels at the beauty of simplicity, my recent romance with complex and mysterious layers of flavor has me daydreaming of new spice combinations and applications.  It is January, after all, and the highly acclaimed tomatoes, carrots, and baby lettuces of summer seem so far away.  I was gazing out the window this morning at the whitish-gray bleakness swallowing all of Washington, grinding toasted coriander with pink peppercorns and meyer lemon zest for Petrale sole on the canvas of empty sky.

In December, I entered World Spice Merchants in Pike Place Market.  I was immediately overcome with the I-want-one-of-everything feeling of a comic book junkie upon discovering Comicon.  And then I was overcome with a sneezing fit.  How do these spice gods and goddesses survive with their sinuses intact?

After curiously watching my hummingbird like flight from jar to jar, the merchant recommended The Spice Lover’s Guide to Herbs & Spices by Tony Hill.  I felt like Buddy the Elf when I actually started speaking with the expert spice blenders and toasters, “Hi!  I’m Aimee, I cook food.  What’s your name?  What’s your favorite spice?  What’s your favorite food?  Do you have a best friend?  Can I be your best friend?”  If I hadn’t been mopping my eyes and nostrils from overexposure, I surely would have tried to hug them.

Seventy six dollars and thirty two cents later, I arrived back home with enough spices and herbs to season the entire Pacific Ocean.  I did pick up the recommended book, but that still leaves me with over fifty dollars in spices.  Had I slipped and fallen on a wet grate upon leaving the store, the Puget Sound would have become a spicy dungeness crab and killer whale stew.

I spent the first two hours back home reading spice profiles and origins, (aloud, I may add, how annoying to be anyone around me, in this case Jaimy).  “Hey did you know that the black lemon is actually a lime?”  Of course he didn’t, who would know that?  “Well, it is.... ooh! Hey, we can make them ourselves, we just have to....”  Before I was finished, I had already mentally planned to plant an organic rooftop garden that included ginger and lime trees, a trip to India and China to taste how the locals used everything from finger root to Chinese five spice, and a trek across La Mancha to pick our own saffron.

In the meantime, I figured I should actually use the spices.  If you happened to receive some spice blends for Christmas from Jaimy and me, this was the story leading up to it.  Our apartment smelled like the neighbors everyone complains about.  Mixing, toasting, grinding, adjusting, jarring: we went into full production mode.  We debated the benefits of hand grinding with a mortar and pestle versus blending with an electric spice grinder.  We tasted the difference between the dry spices themselves and their toasted versions.  At the end of the night, the kitchen was powdered with everything from finely ground cassia-stick cinnamon to ras el hanout.  I swept the surface remains into a pile and set it aside for a seasoning surprise dinner later.  Don’t worry, I won’t use it on you.

Toasting Chinese five spice

Grinding Chinese five spice

I am very aware of the fact that I am probably committing spice blending blasphemy here.  Last night I put Chinese five spice in a pork belly brine with kaffir lime and ginger.  While China and Southeast Asia seem pretty close together from my vantage point in Seattle, I am sure that I broke a rule in regional cuisine.  Mixing the spices from one country with citrus from another region, well, I may as well be saying they’re all the same to me.  But I want to try them together, so I do so secretly at first.  I then admitted my sin to Jaimy, and now today to all of you.  I’m not planning on serving my pork belly to President Hu Jintao or anything, or even Morimoto (who is Japanese, so why am I assuming he’d know all about Chinese five spice?!  Of course he does).  But still, I feel guilty.*

There are a few projects in the works, and we plan to update with how the pork belly turns out.  We are doing a comparison between dry rubbed (and slightly cured) belly and brined belly, both with a Chinese five spice base.  Since I keep mentioning it and not elaborating, Chinese five spice is a blend of star anise, fennel seed, cassia-cinnamon, cloves, and Sichuan or black peppercorns.  After marinating in these flavors overnight, they’ll be slow roasted, (though braising is another favorite pork belly technique).  I’m thinking steamed buns, although Vietnamese sandwiches (Banh Mi) also sound good.  Anyone have any ideas for serving the belly?



*Upon further reading this morning, kaffir lime is used quite often in Chinese cuisine, even if it’s point of origin thousands of years ago was a few miles down the road.  AND, the kaffir lime is in the same family as the Sichuan peppercorn.  It was even recommended to use some lime to replace the absence of Sichuan peppercorns in spice blends (they've been banned for import through the years due to blight).  Sichuan peppercorns do not grow well in the U.S., but they've had success growing kaffir lime trees in California.