Spicing things up

I held two spice classes this week for my food as medicine groups, looking at what benefits certain spices have to our health and how we can incorporate them into our daily lives.

Photo From Wikimedia commons

As well as tasting individual spices, we created a variety of blends from different countries and then tasted them in either applesauce, butternut squash or sweet potato - as vehicles for the spice, so you could get the true flavors.

Tasting stations at the ready!

The key spices we focused on were

• cinnamon - great for diabetes
• turmeric - anti-cancer and anti- inflammatory activity
• black cumin - immune system boosting
• cloves - toothache, mosquito repellent, anti-infection
• cocoa - great source of flavonols which increase nitric oxide production, and help heart health
• Plus we looked at those spices that can affect the Cancer "Master Switch" - NFkB

The blends we made we:

• Chai tea - India - we actually made a tea-less version
• La Kama from North Africa
• Garam Masala - India
• Golden Milk -India
• Panch Phoron - India
• Chinese five spice - China
• Colombo Powder - Latin America
• Quatre Epices - France
• Hot Chocolate - Mexican

We then ended up with a chocolate tasting of 6 chocolates with cocoa contents of >75%.  I'll tell you more about that another day!

It was a great class.  People really started to focus on tasting carefully and identifying different flavor and whether spices predominated or harmonized.