For The Love Of Spice

Find out how spices heighten your eating experience while offering a myriad of health benefits to complement your diet.

- Priyanka Elhence

Spices have been around for thousands of years. They are an indispensable part of our cooking and can make or break a dish depending on how you use them. They vary across the world, essentially bringing with them the bedrock of a country's culinary culture or a region's food heritage.

The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) defines spices as aromatic vegetable substances, in the whole, broken, or ground form, whose significant function in food is seasoning rather than nutrition. Simply put, spices are the dried parts of plants that are used in small quantities to flavour food. Herbs generally come from the leaves of plants, while spices come from the seeds, berries, bark or roots.

Spices can come from many different plant parts: roots (ginger, turmeric), rhizomes, stems, leaves, bark (cinnamon), flowers (saffron), fruits/ berries (black pepper, chilli powder), and seeds (cumin, nutmeg). That's why a wide variety of spices provide a wide range of flavours!

While most people immediately tend to associate spices with ethnic cuisines like Indian food, most of what we know of and use today actually originated from the Middle East, Asia and the Mediterranean.

And don't get confused - spice does not mean spicy. Rather, spicy refers to something that provokes a burning sensation in your mouth while spiced means something that contains spice. Some of the more popular spices include black pepper, ginger, garlic, cinnamon, cumin, vanilla, mustard, cacao and turmeric.

A CHEF'S ARSENAL