Chefs secrets Spice my go to knowledge base.

Chefs secrets Spice my go to knowledge base.
According the Austrian Food Law, the term spice refers to plants or parts of plants (possibly dried) that are used to enhance the flavour or taste of human food.

Spices must not be technically modified or mixed with any other components (the law applies special names to such mixtures).

It will be seen that this definition is rather narrow: Many ingredients serving exactly the same purpose as spices, like beef extract, dried fish, fish sauce, shrimp paste, soybean sauce or fermented wheat, are excluded. This is probably because, with the exception of beef extract,

Of course, also salt is not considered a spice.

It will also be noted that this definition does not make any distinction between herbs and spices, as seems to be common in English language.

Thence, the meaning of herb will refer to a subset of the meaning of spice in all documents on this site, or, put the other way, the meaning of spice will include tropic plants with aromatic fruits or barks (traditionally called spices) and plants of temperate climate featuring aromatic leaves (traditionally called herbs).

You might call that bad and idiomatically incorrect English, and you’ll be right with this critique; still, that’s the price native English speakers have to pay for the advantage of reading the Internet in their mother tongue (please let me make perfectly clear that this is no private war against English language, but simply a statement about the dynamics of living languages).

Although at most forty different spice plants are of global importance (economically and culinarily), many more are used as condiments locally, in the region of their natural occurrence.

Some of these are traded in small quantities and used in ethnic restaurants or by emigrants who do not forsake their cooking traditions, other have some use as medicine and are therefore available in western pharmacies.

Many spices that have been used extensively in past centuries in Europe have now become obsolete and are now not even known to the Western public – mostly because other spices with similar sensory quality became cheaper and were preferred.
It is my interest to gather information about well-known and well-researched spices as well as about those exotics. Gernot Katzer

#Spice  of life
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