kattitudes

So in talking about getting organized for the holidays, and holiday preparation, I said that you could actually do your baking and kitchen gifts now. This month. November.

That means baking now. And that means that you need to know your supply stock, your pantry stock and you need to review the condition of your spices.

Seems silly, right? It did to me. It took my Mister to really nag me into it, and I finally whipped myself into doing it. And good lord was he right. Imagine that, the one I taught to cook when we got married nine years ago. And here I was poopooing him because I didn’t want to have to do the work. But we finally sat down together and dug through the antiquities that was our spice cupboard.

I love spices. I love collecting weird and unusual spices. I love their unusual tins and odd smells. They are gorgeous. What they are not is fresh and worth using.

So, together we went through all these and found that the bloom was off the rose (and in one case, my organic eatable rose petals and lavender buds, quite literally).

You want to be looking for faded colors in your spices. If the colors are faded, apparently, so is the potency of the spice. I went with the advice on the McCormick webpage, which is to rub or crush the spice/herb in your hand. If the aroma is weak and flavor is not apparent, it is time to replace it.

The big name foodies recommend replacing spices every six months.

OK.

Have you priced spices lately? If I did not cook frequently, maybe. And I guess to some degree, we do replace some spices within every six months.

But if you are asking me to replace the contents of that cupboard every six months, you need to put down your crack pipe and send me a check to cover the cost because I wish my money tree was growing that big.

Now if you want a great laugh, you can go through your spices and see how old some of them are in age. McCormick Spice has provided a webpage to check the age of their spices, but I have not found one available from the other name brands. It was enlightening. I cannot tell you how many spices that are more than fifteen years old we found in Mom’s cupboards! Fifteen, peoples. Um, yeah, I think maybe the bloom was off those particular herbs.

I did find a more budget friendly guideline for keeping spices, herbs and seasonings. I still think this might be stretching it just a bit. I found after our expedition into our personal spice cupboard that the very best judge of the quality and condition of spices was the old crush and smell test. If I could not make a determination, my Mister would run through. We kept the coffee beans out to clear the old sniffers between and that worked a charm.

Ground spices, 2-3 years.
Whole spices, 3-4 years.
Herbs, 1-3 years.
Seasoning blends, 1-2 years.
Extracts, 4 years.

The only thing in the spice cupboard that I understand lasts forever and a day is vanilla extract. A high quality vanilla extract will never go bad. And with the price I pay for my vanilla extract, I am glad. Of course, at the rate I go through vanilla extract, I would never have a chance to experiment with that particular theory. I replace it repeatedly long before forever would ever arrive.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 4th, 2007 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Recipes, kitchen gifts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.