Discovering Spicy Food For the First Time

Readers, a confession: I was born in Syracuse, New York, and I was raised by parents who grew up in Ohio. In other words, I didn't learn about the existence of spicy food until adulthood.

We thought onions were spicy. Black pepper--an incredibly powerful spice--had to be used with great care. There was even a joke back then that says it all about my childhood food environment:

Q: What's the definition of a long and successful marriage?
A: When you've opened your second bottle of Tabasco sauce.

And they were referring to the tiny 2-ounce sized bottle.

And then my lifetime bubble of blandness imploded during a visit to Dallas, Texas. My older sister had just moved there, so I paid her a visit during Thanksgiving weekend. I was maybe 18. She wanted to introduce me to Tex-Mex cuisine, we went to local restaurant, and I saw something on the menu that changed my life forever: a dish called "The 911 Hotplate."

I don't even remember what was in it. It was probably a mixed sampler plate with a burrito, a chile relleno and a taco or something like that. It doesn't matter. All I remember is how my entire mouth was so burned out with all the spice that I literally couldn't taste anything for the next four days.

Which was unfortunate, because this was the night before Thanksgiving dinner. Which meant that the turkey, the stuffing--even the apple pie--all tasted like Styrofoam to me.

To someone born and raised on bland cuisine, it was practically incomprehensible--even vaguely kinky--to learn that people could actually find pleasure in spicy food. More importantly, I felt like a complete pansy when I couldn't take the heat. I was determined to learn to like it.

That mouth-searing Tex-Mex meal had me hooked. And over the next few years, I made a point of sampling hot, spicy food wherever and whenever I could. It took a few years, but I eventually adjusted. Now, in Indian restaurants, I order the vindaloo without fear. I add cayenne pepper, chipotle pepper, and hot curry powder to spice up everything. And by now Laura and I are well past our hundredth bottle of Tabasco.

I'm not sure what that says about our marriage, but I'm pretty sure it means we've both adapted to spicy food.

Readers, what was your first experience with hot, spicy food? Share in the comments!

Related Posts:
Road Eats Secrets: How to Find the Best Local Food When You're On the Road
Shrimp Creole, Paul Prudhomme Style
Curried Corn
On Spice Fade, And the Utter Insanity of Throwing Spices Out After Six Months
The 911 Frittata
Fiery Sausage and Split Pea Soup


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On Spice Fade, And the Utter Insanity of Throwing Spices Out After Six Months

The spice industry--as well as many misguided cooks, chefs and food bloggers--will tell you that if you have any spices in your cupboard that are more than six months old, you should throw them out.

Pure hogwash. This is just another example of how the food industry tries to get you to spend unnecessarily. Worse, it makes cooking at home more expensive than it needs to be.

However, by now every savvy Casual Kitchen reader should have a sixth sense that starts to tingle whenever companies "recommend" doing something that is both in their interest and costs us more money. Most likely it's not in our interest to obey.

That's why you should verify--with a high standard of proof--claims like "throw out your spices after six months." For example, have you ever done a side-by-side recipe taste test of a spice you bought a year ago compared to a brand new jar of that spice? If you did so, would there be a perceptible change in the context of your typical use? Can you actually perceive this alleged "spice fade" in a recipe?

I'd bet against it. Very, very few of us have palates that are that finely tuned, and those of us who think we do still probably don't.

But even if you actually can tell the difference, I have good news: You still shouldn't throw out your spices. Instead, keep reading. I've got a solution for you.

Half Lives
Here's another way to think about spices--think of them as radioactive isotopes, with a half life. (Seriously--stay with me here).

Spices will fade slightly with time. Remember, I'm not arguing that, I just saying that the degree of fade is tiny and barely perceptible. So let's take a hypothetical example of say, cinnamon, and let's pretend cinnamon has a half life of three years (hmmm, kind of like Rhodium 101).

What does "a half life of three years" mean? It means that in three years or so, your cinnamon should lose about half of its flavor and smell. After six years, it should lose another half, which means your cinnamon would be roughly one-fourth as strong.

Using this framework, then, what's going to happen in six months--when that all-important spice industry drop-dead date passes? Well, in six months, your cinnamon is going to be, oh, about 8% less flavorful.

Whoa. Better throw that puppy right out, right?

Again, these numbers are totally hypothetical and made up--although if you think about it, it's probably not unreasonable to think that three-year-old cinnamon might be half as flavorful as newish cinnamon. But just keep in mind that this is just an example to illustrate a point.

So, getting back to those unlucky souls who think they can detect an 8% decline in spice efficacy, here's your solution: use 8% more of that spice.

If your spice has a smell/taste factor that is 92% of what it was, then to bring it back to 100%, all you have to do is add another 8% more. (It's actually 8.7%, but nobody likes a math geek).

The point: if you detect a modest fade in the spices you use, you can always just use slightly more to compensate. Either way, even if you actually can tell whether a spice has a experienced any meaningful decline in flavor, you still should not automatically throw out your old spices.

Don't throw them out after six months. Don't throw them out after a year. Verify for yourself when your spices are truly past their prime. And even then, you can still embrace the solutions in this post to save yourself quite a bit of extra money.

Don't mindlessly take some expert's word for something--especially when those "experts" may have an agenda to get you to needlessly buy more of what they're selling.

Why You Should Always Read Ingredient Labels

Now that I've shared my preposterously easy and highly authentic Black Beans and Rice recipe, let me share a story, the moral of which is this:

Always read ingredient labels. At least glance at them.

Long time Casual Kitchen readers will recall from elsewhere in this blog how I've encouraged you to make all recipes by the book at least once before attempting any recipe modifications. Well, this time, going “by the book" kind of backfired on us.

But because I usually try and follow my own rules, this meant blindly following the instructions on the label of a can of Goya black beans, which is where I originally found this delightful and simple recipe. So when the recipe called for "two packets Sazon Goya without Annatto," I obediently grabbed a box of Sazon Goya packets. I was already in the Spanish foods aisle anyway, and hey, I was only following orders.

Unfortunately, after Laura and I had finished dinner, we started to feel just a tad bit hypotonic. I take that back. It was more like we'd been hit by a rusty shipping container-full of sodium.

Laura picked up the box of Sazon Goya and started reading the ingredients:

INGREDIENTES:
Glutamato Monsodico
Sal
Ajo en Polvo...

(Whoops! Wrong side.)

INGREDIENTS:
Monsodium Glutamate
Salt
Garlic Powder
Onion Powder
Spices
Spice Extracts
Natural Color
Tricalcium Phosphate (anti-caking agent)

Now I understood why we felt so woozy. Not only does this spice mix contain a lot of salt (as the second ingredient listed), but it contains even more MSG--salt on steroids! And I'm still trying to figure out what tricalcium phosphate is, but in any case we weren't even trying to make cake.

Needless to say, we made our modifications for the next time, and this second-order spice mix was left out of the recipe.

Related Posts:
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How to Live Forever in Ten Easy Steps
How to Get More Mileage Out of Your Cookbooks

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
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Ten Tips to Save Money on Spices and Seasonings: The Spice Series, Part 2

Please see Part 1 of this series, where we discussed the market dynamics that drive the cruel and unusually high spice prices in your grocery store.

Today's post, Part 2 of this series, contains advice on how to beat these unfairly high prices and escape the spice industry's stranglehold on your grocery bill.
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The spice industry has us between a rock and a hard place. Not only are most spices horribly expensive, but they are crucial ingredients in any recipe. Thus it seems like you have little choice but to pay through the nose for whatever spices you need.

In reality, however, there are lots of ways to spend less on spices and seasonings, and today's post contains ten tips to help you do just that. I'm sure this list is far from exhaustive, so readers, if any of you out there have additional ideas on how to save money on spices and seasonings, please share them in the comments section. Together, we can defeat the spice cabal!

1) Start With the Latin American Foods Aisle
If I had to give one commonality among today's tips, they all essentially involve running screaming from the traditional spice aisle of your traditional grocery store. But don't worry, you won't have to run very far (or scream for very long) to follow tip #1. In fact, you'll only run about 50 feet--to the Spanish/Mexican foods aisle! You can find many spices here at significantly lower prices than the regular spice aisle. Moreover, other foods, including dried and canned beans, can be found at discounts here too.

You wouldn't think your grocery would sell a product at one price and then 50 feet away sell a similar product at a totally different price. But it's just another of the many idiosyncrasies of the grocery store industry. Indeed, the Latin American foods aisle is dominated by an oligopoly of food manufacturers completely different from the rest of your grocery store. Some of these companies are big international firms like Goya which are trying to establish their own dominant market position in the USA, and as a result, these companies will often price their spices and other food products below market in order to gain share. That means extra savings for any consumer willing to travel a few feet to do a little comparison shopping.

2) Visit Local Ethnic Food Stores in Your Town
In most western countries, towns of even modest size have enough immigrants to support a wide range of fascinating ethnic food stores. But ethnic food stores are more than just places to visit to learn about new and unusual foods. These stores also fundamentally subvert the spice cabal.

I've already shared my experience buying a lifetime supply of guajillo chiles for only $2.50 in a Mexican food shop two miles from my home--heck, I even got the chance to practice my Spanish. And just a few months ago I was in an Indian specialty food store in Manhattan and found cayenne pepper at $3.99 for a 1/2 pound bag. That's less than a third of the price at my local grocery store.

Let's face it: there are some 35 million people in the USA who are either first- or second-generation foreign born, and many of these people buy much of their food items at smaller ethnic food stores. That is simply an enormous market opportunity, and best of all this market is widely fragmented and not under the control of large distribution or retailing oligopolies.

The companies that sell to these customers don't have the distribution clout to get onto the shelves of major grocery store chains, but so what? They can simply bypass the spice cabal by distributing to these smaller stores. And this is an opportunity for you as a consumer, because you can find spices and other products in these stores at prices that reflect true competition, not the faux competition of the spice aisle. Visit some of these stores in your community, and you may be shocked at the deals you find.

3) Speak Up
You might recall in Part 1 of this series how I suggested that the spice cabal keeps prices high in part because we as consumers tolerate these high prices. Let me a make a contentious statement: if only two or three companies control what's on our grocery store shelves, then we as consumers have an obligation to undermine this control. In short, we need to become intolerant consumers.

One way you can do this is by telling the store manager (or by writing to the store chain's management) that you're disappointed in the number of choices of spice brands in the store and as a result you're considering taking your business elsewhere. And when you see a new--and reasonably priced--spice brand in your grocery store, buy it, and be sure to tell the store manager. If enough consumers speak up, the store actually will offer more choice to its customers. Everybody wins this way.

4) Buy in Bulk...
The next time you're buying spices, compare the price per unit of bulk sizes to the price per unit of the smallest jars. Even at Penzeys Spices, a popular but relatively expensive spice supplier, you can buy a one pound bag of cayenne pepper for about 40% of the per-unit price of the smallest 2.1 ounce jar. That's a massive savings. And if you're ever buying a spice that's common to a lot of different recipes that you like to cook (spices like black pepper, cayenne pepper, cumin and oregano come to mind), always buy the largest container you can find.

Also, if your store has a bulk foods section, be sure to look it over. Many grocers carry spices in bulk, as well as other expensive foods like nuts, teas and even granola.

5) ...And Don't Worry About "Spice Fade"
Whenever the subject of buying spices in bulk comes up, there's always an immediate and predictable response from the spice snobs out there. They argue that you should never buy spices in volume, regardless of the savings, because spices lose their spiciness over time. In fact, a truly crazed spice snob might claim that you should throw out all your unused spices after no more than six months.

Bunk. Here's the real truth. Yes, some spices will by definition lose their efficacy over time. The real question is, how much time? If you are careful to store your spices in a cool, dark place in airtight containers, your spices will last for years, not months. You can even consider storing your spices in the freezer where they'll keep still longer.

A general rule of thumb for ground spices is they will last up to three years before losing a significant degree of their fragrance and flavor, as long as you keep them cool and dry. And if you can buy bulk spices in seed or kernel form rather than in ground form, you can extend their shelf life to four years or more, depending on the spice. We'll address grinding your own spices in more detail in Tip #7.

Furthermore, this alleged loss of flavor will be extremely gradual, and discernible only to chefs with the daintiest palates. I'd argue that the typical Casual Kitchen reader is more interested in striking a reasonable balance between spice freshness and cost rather than militantly throwing out all spices after six months.

Just in case, though, if you'd like to test your palate for spice snobbery, try making two versions of, say, my mole sauce recipe. Make one batch using nine- or twelve-month-old cinnamon, and make another batch using brand new cinnamon. If you can clearly tell the difference, then you should probably stop reading Casual Kitchen and resign yourself to a life spent paying through the nose for expensive spices.

Spices may not quite last forever, but they last a really, really long time. Buy them in bulk, and instead of worrying about spice fade, concentrate on cooking more.

6) Never Buy Spice Mixes--Make Your Own
If there's one rip-off even worse than store-bought spices, it's store-bought spice mixes. Regular readers of Casual Kitchen will recognize spice mixes as textbook examples of second-order foods, which contain extra manufacturing and branding costs imputed into the retail price. Worse, you don't have any control over what the manufacturer puts in these spice mixes, and many of them contain excess salt and MSG.

The solution here is to make your own. It's easy to find great spice mix recipes, and they're actually fun and quite satisfying to make. Start with Cheap Healthy Good's post on making your own spice mixes--it contains a well-researched list of sites for any and all kinds of spice mix recipes as well as some compelling math on how horribly overpriced these mixes can be.

You can also use your cookbooks as a resource. Many cookbooks make a point of including directions on how to make various spice mixes right alongside their recipes. I rely on Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen for my Cajun and Creole spice mixes, and for my Latin American spice mixes, I rely on Daisy Cooks.

7) Grind Your Own
It wasn't until Laura began experimenting with Indian food recently that we took our first tentative steps toward grinding our own spices.

There are quite a few advantages to grinding your own spices, and these advantages extend beyond simply saving money. First, as discussed in tip #5, spices will keep significantly longer in their whole form than in ground form. Thus you can confidently buy bulk packages of whole spices without worrying about spice fade. Furthermore, many spices (not all however) cost much less in their whole form. Thus, by buying whole spices in bulk you get a layer of savings on top of yet another layer of savings.

But the best advantage of grinding your own spices is culinary. Food tastes just a bit better when you go that extra step and freshly grind those spices just seconds before you put them in your recipe. However, there are limits to how much extra work we'll take on in putting dinner on the table. This blog is called Casual Kitchen after all, and by the way, didn't I just spend half of tip #5 mocking spice snobs? You'll have to decide for yourself to what extent it's worth it to you to experience the culinary and economic pleasures of freshly ground spices.

Let me share one final detail on this tip and then we'll move on. Here's a link to the spice grinder that we have in our home, which sells for a fairly reasonable $19 on Amazon (and for the old-schoolers out there, here's an elegant and even less expensive mortar and pestle for grinding spices too). If you regularly use spices like cumin, black pepper or other seasonings that are reasonably easy to find in whole form, it shouldn't be too long before you earn back the modest cost of an inexpensive spice grinder.

8) Dry Your Own
Let me share some math with you: a half-ounce jar of dried parsley flakes can cost anywhere from $2 to $3 in the traditional spice aisle. Yet you can buy an enormous bunch of fresh parsley in your produce section for as little as 99c. Heck, half the time when I use fresh greens or herbs to invigorate one of my recipes, I end up using 25% of the bunch and letting the rest of it go to waste. Why not make good use of those leftovers greens--and save a ton of money--by drying them for future use?

Drying your own spices and herbs can be done easily and with very little equipment. The method I've used successfully requires only an oven and a basic cookie sheet. Set your oven on warm, spread the herbs out on the cookie sheet, and place them in the warm oven for a few minutes. Then, turn the oven off, leaving the oven door closed, and let the herbs sit in there for the rest of the day. Note that some herbs are hardier than others, so keep an eye on them while the oven is on, lest they (speaking from experience here) burn to a crisp.

You can also air-dry your herbs, using nothing more than some paper bags and rubber bands. Bundle 4-6 branches of each type of green or herb with a rubber band, place the bunch upside down in a paper bag with several holes cut into it, and hang the bags upside down in a warm airy room. In two weeks or so you should have a wonderful bunch of dried spices that you can crumble into jars and keep for years.

9) Grow Your Own
Why stop at just mixing, grinding and drying? Why not take that last, final triumphant step and create your own seasonings entirely from scratch? You'll find herbs like oregano, basil, parsley, dill, chives, rosemary, sage and many others surprisingly easy to grow, and you don't need a big backyard (or even a yard at all) to do it. And it goes without saying that eating these herbs and spices fresh will give you a taste sensation you'll never get from the store-bought stuff.

Despite living in a small apartment, we've successfully grown chives and basil indoors with very little effort. One year, using seeds I got for free from my father's garden, I literally grew a lifetime supply of chives from a single medium-sized pot that sat on our windowsill. We nicknamed our little chive plant Beaker and we used to joke about giving him haircuts when it came time to harvest and dry the chives. How can you beat something that gives you an occasional laugh, takes almost no effort and helps you save money on spices?

If you're interested in pursuing herb growing further, here's another helpful post at About.com that can get you started (see especially the "suggested reading" and "related articles" links at the bottom of the page).

10) Use the Internet to Disintermediate the Spice Cabal and Your Grocery Store
Our final tip on how to save money on spices and seasonings comes from the same resource you're using right now to read this blog.

Yep, the Internet. It's the ultimate consumer protection tool because it has fairly low barriers to entry (after all, it's a lot cheaper and easier to set up a website than it is to set up a national grocery store distribution network), and because it allows consumers to compare prices from multiple vendors without even having to get out of their chairs. This means you get fierce competition among spice and seasoning vendors for your consumer dollars.

Here's a typical example: At Atlantic Spice Company you can buy one pound bags of cayenne pepper (at different hotness levels no less) at prices ranging from 23c to 26c an ounce. That's less than a third of Penzeys price for their one pound bag, and it's less than one-tenth the price of the store-bought McCormick brand. In fact, an entire pound of cayenne at Atlantic Spice costs less than a single 1.75 ounce jar of McCormick!

Where else but in the spice oligopoly can these companies mark up merchandise by a factor of ten (ten!) before selling it to the public? Preposterous.

In the "Related Links" section below, I share a list of well-regarded websites where you can buy spices at prices far below your traditional grocery store spice aisle. If you have a favorite spice site that you don't see there, please feel free to tell me about it.

Conclusion
I hope you've found this series of posts on spices helpful, and I hope you can successfully apply today's tips towards beating the spice oligopoly at its own game. I'm sure there are many more ways to save money on spices beyond the ten I've listed today, so readers, please share your thoughts: what ideas have I missed?

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Additional Resources:
Online Bulk/Reasonably Priced Spice Sites:
Spice Barn.com
Atlantic Spice Company
Buffalo Creek Spices
The San Francisco Herb Company
WholeSpice.com

Other Spice Sites:
Penzey's Spices: expensive but highly regarded spices and spice mixes

Advice on drying herbs from About.com
CheapHealthyGood's encyclopedic post on spice mixes

Related Posts:
How to Live Forever in Ten Easy Steps
Mastering Kitchen Setup Costs
Stacked Costs and Second-Order Foods: A New Way to Think About Rising Food Costs
Ten Strategies to Stop Mindless Eating
How to Write an Effective Complaint Letter

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

Why Spices Are a Complete Rip-Off and What You Can Do About It: The Spice Series Part 1

One of the key cooking challenges everyone faces at one time or another is the shockingly high cost of spices.

Who hasn't had the experience of enthusiastically poring over a great new recipe, diligently writing down all the ingredients--only to have that enthusiasm utterly crushed when you find out it's going to cost you 20 bucks for four lousy little jars of spices?

You are not alone. Even the most experienced cooks get a little sick to their stomach in the spice aisle.

In order to help you understand and deal with the high cost of spices, I've written a two-part series on the subject. Today, in Part 1, I explain the market dynamics behind your local grocer's spice aisle, and show how those market dynamics conspire in various ways to keep spice prices artificially high. In Part 2, I'll give an extensive list of tips, advice and websites to help you save money on spices.

Let me start off by giving you a sneak preview of my conclusion--and it's a disturbing one: high spice prices have almost nothing to do with supply and demand. Instead, high spice prices come from an almost total lack of competition in your grocery store. And that lack of competition is a logical and deliberate result of two things: 1) the structure of the grocery and spice industries and 2) the willingness of the consumer to tolerate high prices.

Now don't let the above paragraph, as defeatist as it may sound, cause you to lose heart. Keep in mind: in order to defeat high spice prices, we need to understand what causes high spice prices. In just a few short minutes, you'll be well on your way towards understanding the rules of the spice industry's game. And once you know the rules of the game, it will be a lot easier to subvert those rules and escape the spice industry's stranglehold on your food budget.

Idiosyncrasies of the Grocery Industry
Globally, there are zillions of companies that sell spices, but there are very few companies that sell the branded spices that actually make it to your grocery store shelves. Why aren't there more companies in your local store competing in what surely must be a highly profitable niche market?

Well, it's unfortunate, but there are four idiosyncrasies about the grocery store industry that conspire to limit competition:

1) Grocery store chains have extremely thin margins--operating margins of only 2-3% are quite typical. Thus grocery chains will look for creative--even diabolical--ways to cut costs and squeeze incremental profits out of the business.
2) Grocery chains already deal with hundreds--if not thousands--of vendors and suppliers. Adding multiple suppliers for every product would increase costs beyond reasonable levels.
3) If you are a vendor who hopes to sell to a large grocery chain, you must have well-established and geographically extensive distribution capabilities.
4) Grocery stores will often charge slotting fees (extra fees paid to the retailer in exchange for prominent placement on your store shelves) in order to ration limited shelf space and help profitability.

These four factors significantly increase spice distribution costs and create artificially high barriers to competition for smaller spice makers. And those are the perfect conditions for the creation of a textbook oligopoly in the spice industry (a quick definition: an oligopoly is an industry with few players, a stable division of market share and little effective competition).

The Spice Cabal
Indeed, a spice oligopoly (or spice cabal, as I've started calling it lately) is exactly what we have. The spice aisle, as well as most other product areas in your grocery store, tends to be dominated by just a few key brands. When two or three companies control a market, even a market as small as your local grocery store's spice aisle, prices somehow magically seem to stay much higher than normal.

And of course your grocery chain doesn't want extra competition in the spice aisle either, since it also benefits from this industry structure because it can charge slotting fees, save money on vendor logistics and charge higher than normal markups. Regrettably, this industry structure serves the interests of everyone involved--except the consumer.

In our grocery store, we have an even more laughable situation: McCormick's is not only the dominant brand, but in a particularly sneaky example of faux competition, McCormick's also owns our store's #2 brand, Spice Classics! Not since Mr. Burns blotted out the sun in Springfield have I seen that kind of diabolical genius.

Inelastic Demand
Worse, because spices are critical ingredients for cooking, demand for them tends to be stable regardless of price (economists call this "inelastic demand"). If your recipe calls for cumin, you basically have no choice but to buy cumin. And even if you have the temerity to risk your recipe by substituting another spice, that other spice is still in the same spice aisle at a similarly preposterous price.

And that, my dear readers, is why your local grocery store sells cayenne pepper at unit prices approaching $45 a pound, and ground cumin at prices approaching $50 a pound. In short, if you limit your spice purchases to your local grocery store's spice aisle, the spice cabal simply has you over a barrel.

I'll say it again: don't lose heart--there's help on the way. In my next post I'll bring you several ideas to help you save money on spices. Together we will defeat the spice cabal once and for all!

Please see Part 2 of this series for a list of ten specific tips on how to save money on spices.

Related Posts:
Stacked Costs and Second-Order Foods: A New Way to Think About Rising Food Costs
How to Modify a Recipe: The Six Rules
A Rebuttal of "The Last Bite"
Two Useful Cooking Lessons From Another Cheap and Easy Side Dish
The Bhut Jolokia Pepper--The World's Hottest Chili

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.