Fresh Spice: Vibrant Recipes for Bringing Flavour, Depth and Colour to Home Cooking

Spice cookery has grown up. In a world of monochrome seasoning of white salt and black pepper, Fresh Spice breaks with tradition and fuses together spices and dishes from different cultures to create a unique cookbook. This book will change your perception of seasoning, flavours, textures and taste, as well as how you use spice. The science of cooking with spices is explored alongside the key rules for blending them together. The first rule is to divide them into categories of base, medium and high notes, with base being the earthy, strong spices such as turmeric, and high being more fragrant spices such as cardamom; the second is to divide them into colour groups, and to try to stay roughly within these when blending. But the real highlight of this book is its 120 extraordinary recipes, which use spices to transform classic dishes from all over the world. There's Poached chicken with lemongrass and herbs, Roast herbed salmon with cardamom sauce, Asafoetida risotto with walnuts and celery leaf, Winter leaves & spiced squash and Ginger & lime pudding. In the introduction Arun describes how to buy and cook with spices and takes a simple look at the science of flavour and the role of ayurvedic medicine in blending spices. In the comprehensive A-Z of Spices, he gives a description of the spices used in the book, along with their flavour and aroma profiles and how best to buy them.