30 DAYS OPEN PURCHASEThe Spice Companion solves something oddly overlooked. Every kitchen has thirty jars of spices and almost nobody has a book that explains them.
Lior Lev Sercarz trained at Institut Paul Bocuse, worked in Daniel Boulud's kitchens and founded La Boîte in New York in 2006, a spice shop that creates custom blends for a large part of the American fine dining world. In practice, he is the person chefs call when they want something nobody else has.
The book covers 102 spices, one per spread. For each spice, it gives the origin, botanical name, flavour profile, which other spices it works with, three concrete uses and a recipe for a blend in which it appears. Altogether, that makes 102 previously unpublished blends.
The most useful part, however, is what he establishes about handling spices. Their shelf life is measured in months rather than years, which means most spice racks are effectively dead. Whole spices retain their volatile oils until they are ground, while ground spices start losing them immediately. Dry toasting or blooming in fat does more for flavour than simply adding more. And the point is rarely one individual spice, but the proportion between several.
Botanical illustrations and photography throughout also make this one of the few reference books that deserves to be left out on display.
Number of pages: 304
Number of spices: 102
Number of blends: 102
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
ISBN: 9781101905463
Language: English
First published: 2016
