Spreads and Flavoring Recipes & Ideas

From ras el hanout to herbes de provence, herb and spice mixes are essential to many cuisines around the world. Bringing these blends into your own kitchen can lend authenticity to international dishes and provide creative inspiration for your everyday cooking. Ready for this trip across the globe? No passport required! Berbere Berbere – A heady combination of spicy, bitter, and sweet spices used in Eritrea, Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Somalia.

If you see a lot of fruit dehydrating in your future, buying a food dehydrator makes sense. Using one is more energy-efficient than slowly baking fruit in a low oven, and the results are more consistent. But if you just want to make the occasional batch of crispy apple chips or intensely-flavored dried tomatoes, keep things simple and gadget-free: use your oven to make dried fruit!

Vanilla beans are magical. Not only do they look like fairy wands and have an aroma that always brings me to a standstill, but these beans have the ability to transform scoops of ice cream into childhood memories and dishes of crème brûlée into marriage proposals. Using them is easy; wait to scrape the seeds out of the vanilla pod until you’re ready to use them. They are definitely not to be squandered or taken for granted.

I’ve been adding curry paste to an assortment of old standby dishes to give them a bit of kick. If you have half a can of curry paste lying about here are a few unexpected ways to put it to good use!I’ve written about my favorite curry paste in the past and it should be noted that I am a huge fan of green over red curry pastes. That’s simply a matter of taste, but I have found that I have better luck controlling the heat without many surprises.

Grab a few sticks of butter and a small saucepan and let's upgrade our beloved butter to fragrant, nutty brown butter.

Celery leaves — known primarily as a throwaway top to an already underappreciated vegetable — are so often discarded. It’s a real shame. Celery leaves are actually a bonus to their stalks and completely virtuous on their own. Here’s everything you need to know about prepping them and turning them into a vibrant pesto. Celery leaves are delicious, nutritious, and packed with intense celery flavor.

Pickling and fermenting are two methods for naturally preserving foods, and both produce some delicious, tangy results. Do you know what sets them apart? While both pickling and fermenting produce different results, there are some areas of overlap that can easily spark some confusion.

I am an equal opportunity fruit jam eater. I am just as happy with the loose, sloshy batches as I am the ones that have a firmer consistency. I love to use the runny varieties to flavor plain yogurt or as a sweetener for green smoothies. The slightly overset batches are perfect for serving with cheese plates or as the filling in a thumbprint cookie.

Nut-free? These tasty alternatives will make you forget all about peanut butter.

These tangy little buds are a pantry staple when it comes to jazzing up a weeknight pasta or adding the perfect finishing touch to a plate of cured salmon. Just a spoonful of capers can make a whole dish sing. Do you ever cook with them?Capers are actually the immature flower buds of the caper bush, a shrub-like plant that hails from the Mediterranean region. The buds are picked just before they reach ripeness and pickled either in a salt brine or in vinegar.

Flavorful shiitake mushrooms are such a foundation of Asian cooking. They have an intense flavor that always reminds me of my Chinese grandmother’s cooking, where she used shiitake mushrooms in soups, braises, and steamed dishes. My grandmother always had a big glass jar of dried shiitake mushrooms in her pantry, and I’ve picked up this habit too!

Pad thai and many other Southeast Asian dishesThese blocks of tamarind pulp are the tamarind fruit pods stripped of the outer husk and compressed tightly together. Sometimes the seeds are removed, but we usually find a few errant seeds even in packages marked “seedless.” The pulp itself is very fibrous, so we need to soften it and push it through a fine-meshed strainer to separate the edible pulp from the strands of fiber.First cut off the portion you need.

Do you have a bottle of clam juice in your pantry? Maybe the bottle you have is lurking in the back of the fridge after you used it in that one recipe that called for one tablespoon. Let’s be honest — this isn’t an ingredient making it into your everyday cooking. Well, not until now. Clam juice can also be used in cocktails, pastas, stir-fries, and deglazing your pan. Here are five ways to use clam juice so that bottle doesn’t get lost in the dark depths of your fridge.

Maybe you’ve heard of harissa, but have you ever tried it? If you love condiments and adding a kick of spice to your meals, you’ll want to check this out! Harissa is a spicy and aromatic chile paste that’s a widely used staple in North African and Middle Eastern cooking. Harissa recipes vary between countries and regions, but a standard version includes a blend of hot chile peppers (which are often smoked), garlic, olive oil and spices, like cumin, coriander, caraway and mint.