Tired of cooking the same recipes?
New season, New spices
April 8, 2017
It isn’t often that I recommend products to buy because everyday cooking should be fun and easy. When I find a product that does both, I want to pass the advice along. Spice Trekkers is one answer to adding variety to weeknight meals.
iwannabeacook has featured three recipes from the Spice Trekkers already: Coconut orange sauce, Spanish-style sautéed potatoes, and Sweet and sour vinaigrette.
This week’s Satay chicken wings recipe is also inspired by the Spice Trekkers cookbook and uses the included spices. After extensive use of their spice kit and cookbook, it is time to highlight their product.
Ethné and Philippe de Vienne travel around the world looking for spices to use in their unique spice blends. After traveling around the world for more than 30 years, they’ve built relationships with people to provide high-quality spices to use in their blends.
This package comes as a spice kit and cookbook. The spice kit contains 20 spice blends in small containers. There are six additional tiny containers, which are used to teach you the difference between taste and flavor of spices. A mystery spice is included as well.
The cookbook starts with an introduction of spice categories—Bitter, Sour, Hot, Sweet, and Aromatic—and then continues with tips on purchasing and storing spices. The next section is dedicated to the spice blends.
For each of the 20 spice blends, the cookbook includes a recipe for the actual blend, which means you can make it yourself after using the initial container. While this sounds like a great idea, the expense of buying the necessary spices may not be practical because some unusual spices are included. For example, my spice pantry is well stocked, but it does not include cassia buds, voatsiperifery peppercorns, cubeb, galanga, or kentjur, just to name a few of the more unusual spices.
After the spice blend recipe, three recipes are given that use the highlighted spice blend. The range of recipes in the book is vast, including soups, salads, vegetables, pasta, potatoes, chicken, beef, fish, and desserts. Each recipe includes a photo and takes only one page. The cooking time is less than one hour for most recipes, not including marinating time.
After the recipes, a two-page spread highlights a person or group of people and how they relate to that particular spice blend. These are stories about people from everywhere. The stories are worth reading. It’s a reminder that cooking is important to people everywhere.
A few details about the spices. The spices are whole, meaning they must be ground first. A spice grinder or dedicated coffee bean grinder is essential. Why are the spices whole? Freshly ground spices are more intense and have more flavor.
The spices are gluten free. They do not mention whether blends are processed in a nut-free facility.
Are all of the blends hot and spicy? I did not find the blends overly spicy, but they are full of flavor. The recipes using the blends include spicy ingredients, but those can be adjusted to suit your taste.
What if you run out of a spice blend and cannot make it due to the lack of unusual spices? Actually, I’ve used some of the recipes without the spice blend and instead added the spices I did have. The recipes are forgiving and should be used as a guide. Experiment with spices and adjust them to your palette.
Where can you buy this spice kit? Spicetrekkers.com sells more than just this product and includes additional recipes and a blog. Zingerman’s also sells this product.
These are the twenty spice blends included:
Singapore Curry
Madras Curry
8 Pepper Blend
Aleppo Seven Spices
Colombo
Koftes Spices
1001 Nights
Tex-Mex Spices
East Coast Spices
Classic Fines Herbs
Chinese Five Spices
Cajun Blackening Spices
Panch Phoran
Berbere
Silk Road
Creton Spices
Vegetable Spices
Yunan Blend
Mediterranean Herbs
Satay Spices