Food writer Jenny Garing runs community cooking courses in Marlborough and also creates exotic spice blends for her Ground Gourmet Essentials range.
She talks to Kathryn Ryan about how and when to incorporate cinnamon, cardamom and cumin into your cooking.
Some of her recipes can be found here, showcasing the spices in Cinnamon and Almond Lamb Curry, Cinnamon-Baked Apples, and Black Cardamom and Cumin Rice.
As a tropical tree, cinnamon doesn't grow well here in New Zealand, she says, and similarly cumin would require a long warm growing season.
Cardamom also can't survive outdoors here either, she says, and the cardamom trees sold at plant stores here are often ones that don't produce spice but just smell good.
All three are in the pungent range of spices and can often uplift or end up ruining a dish if there's too much, she says.
But she recommends grinding up your own spices in a mortar instead of buying the powder form, because the volatile oils and aroma are lost in the process of chopping.
"If you hand grind in a mortar and pestle or I use a big stone wheel grinder, then you actually mash those good volatile oils into the powder or ground spice, and they last longer.
"By the time this commercial producer has chopped this whole spice, packaged them, sent them half way across the world to a warehouse, put on the supermarket shelf and you eventually buy it, you have probably lost a good lot if not all of the flavour or aroma."
While different spices age differently, she says cardamom is one you'd be wasting money on if you bought it ground up.
"You are much better off to buy it off whole and grind it yourself preferably in a little mortar and pestle and use it straight away.
"Cumin would last a bit longer [when] ground, a few months. Cinnamon starts to lose its top note flavours within a few weeks."
Green cardamom is quite versatile from uses in sweet dishes like biscuits and cakes, to savoury dishes like Indian curries to balance out cloves or biryani.
"In the Middle East, a whole cardamom pod is put into the spout of a coffee pot, so fresh coffee is poured over it and into your drink so you can do that into your plunger," Garing says.
"If you're using a whole green cardamom pod, just crack it open a little to release the flavour and put it into rice or other dishes, puddings, custards and so on.
"Do remember to take it out before you serve it, because biting into it after its being cook is way too strong. Having said that, the seeds also make great breath freshners as well."
There is also the brown version of cardamom which is much stronger than the green one and with a smoky essence.
"It's good when you want that smokey flavour in things, so for example like a tikka masala, I quite often just bruise a whole brown pod and put it into a tub of yoghurt, leave it overnight and then use that yoghurt to marinate your chicken or whatever else you'd like to make with it."
Cumin is a full body spice and good for balancing in recipes, she says.
"Traditionally, you probably think of curry and kebabs and it is a Middle Eastern [spice], it's an essential spice in things like harrisa and chermoula - some chilly paste from the Middle East - in duqqa or do'a as it's actually pronounced - probably most people know as the hazelnut, coriander and seasame seed mix which can be sprinkled on salads and things like that."
Cinnamon is the more subtle version of cassia and helps balance and bring the uplifting notes to a dish, Garing says.
"When you smell cinnamon in a savoury dish, it just gives you an instant lift and makes you want to eat it.
"It is actually one of the few spices that has had research on it in terms of it being quite good for you as well, it's got a lot of manganese in it which is good sugar-balancing in the blood, but also a mood lifter.
"One warning I'd give is if you're using brown cinnamon in a dish, put it at the end because if you cook it directly at the beginning, you'll burn it and then it tastes bitter."
Cinnamon, cardamom and cumin all have a long history, she says, with cinnamon being used by the Egyptians in embalming thousands of years ago.
"It grows quite tall and originally from Sri Lanka, and that's still where the best cinnamon comes from.
"[Cardamom] grows predominantly in Sri Lanka as well but also southwest India, where its known as the queen of the spices.
"Up until about the 20th century it was just harvested in the wild, there was no cultivation of cardamom. It's one of the most expensive spices out there, apart from saffron.
"[Cumin] was actually found in the pyramids ... and they think it was used for the mummification process about 4000 years ago.
"But it does need a hot climate to grow well, so the best cumin comes from Turkey or Iran at the moment."
