How do we make our spice blends?

Written by Suze
Published on 14th October 2016 at 13:26 • No comments yet, be the first!

Since freshness is the key to flavour, everything at The Spicery is kept as fresh as possible - we order top quality spices in small batches to ensure high turnover.

In the Spicery test kitchen the recipes are developed using ½ tsp of this, ¼ tsp of that, and so on. Then Robyn, our production manager, calculates the quantity of spices to order that month based on how many we’re making.

Tung, the chief spice blender, is in charge of making the spice blends for the subscription boxes and recipe kits, weighing out around 60 different blends each month in quantities ranging from just 1kg to 250kg. That’s a lot of spice! Once the ingredients have been weighed out, some of them will need toasting before adding to the blend. Toasting deepens the flavour of ingredients like seeds or chillies, adding complexity and aroma. We used to do all the toasting in non-stick frying pans but have upgraded to this machine! It was originally designed to be a huge stir-fry machine (for giant amounts of chow mein), churning everything around at a high heat - it now spends its days full of coriander, cumin or chillies! Grinding or toasting chillies is a potent process, so there are huge extractor fans in place. (Even so, gas masks are frequently worn - no one likes habanero powder in their lungs!)

Then any whole spices get funnelled through the grinder - some ingredients are roughly cracked or crushed, for example chilli flakes or peppercorns, and some are ground to a fine powder, like cumin or cardamon.

Then the giant mixer churns it all together, mixing around 60kg of spice at a time. We let it run for around an hour so that it’s thoroughly blended.

Once the blends are ready, Chris and Connor take huge tubs of them and funnel them through one final machine that takes the right amount of spice blend (1 tsp, 1 tbsp etc), seals it into a bag, and prints on the list of ingredients. John’s team of spicepackers deal with any whole spices that go into the recipe kits - such as bay leaves, cinnamon quills, or delicate saffron threads. These are packed by hand into resealable bags. Once both the blends and whole spices are ready, the team assemble the boxes (by hand), pop the bags into them, add a recipe card and seal them up!