Week 3 is icumin in

The title to this post is a punne, or a play on words. It takes advantage of the fact that the first line of a traditional English ballad, in Middle English, starts out with the line "Sumer is icumin in", or "Summer is a-comin' in". However, the word icumin looks and sounds a lot like the spice that I'm working on for Week Three - cumin. Hence the joke. Funny, no?


I haven't magically solved my description problems in the last few weeks. Cumin, like turmeric, is delicious and complex. At least it's not earthy.I'm going to give it my best.

Cumin is mildly spicy – enough so’s you’d notice, not enough to send anyone running to stick their head in the water butt. It’s a little bit bitter, a little bit sweet. A little bit country, a little bit rock and roll…

Actually, I like the music analogy that I used in the final Turmeric entry better than I like having to try to describe the taste itself. My vocabulary about music isn't exactly master-level, but it’s a whole hell of a lot more developed than my vocabulary about tastes and smells. I really have no idea which is more helpful - the description above, or the one below.

I’ve really enjoyed getting to learn to cook with cumin. If turmeric is the bass, cumin is the lead guitar. You’re always going to be hearing it – it never fades totally into the background, the way a bass can. It can be a solid, dependable rhythm, content to be support while someone else is showing off. But like a guitar, what cumin really wants to do is wail. Give it half a chance, and cumin is doing a power solo on everyone’s taste buds. Sometimes that’s exactly what you want – to let the whole arena fall into a hushed silence while cumin just shreds.

It blends perfectly well with other spices, if you’re careful to keep all that power on a leash – and that’s not always easy. You can’t leash a tiger, baby!


A Brief Digression on Pronunciation:

I’ve been pronouncing the name of this spice as COO-min all week. People have been correcting me to Q-min all week. So, I decided to look it up… and the authorities are mixed, to say the least. Any of the following seems to be equally valid, with none particularly favored by dictionary sites:

COME-in

Q-min

COO-min

(I checked Dictionary.com, which is based on American Heritage and Webster’s, and Merriam Webster online. The OED, really the only dictionary that counts, does not make an online edition available for free, and I’m not somewhere I have access to one.) Among non-dictionary sources – IE, various forum threads where someone asks “hey, how do you pronounce cumin?” - Q-min seems to be the most favored, followed closely by coo-min with come-in as a distant third. Historically, it’s a fairly slutty word – it’s an English word, sure, but before that it went from Arabic to Greek to Latin to Spanish then again to Arabic, back to Spanish then French and finally English. That’s without even unsealing its juvenile record, which supposedly goes all the way back to Sumerian. So, depending on various little foibles of your own particular branch of English, any of the three is probably equally valid.


However you pronounce it, Cumin is an incredibly popular spice. Various unsourced statements on Internet claim that it’s the second most popular spice in the world. (Behind pepper, of course; remember, salt is not technically a spice.) I don’t know about that, but its morals are just as loose culinarily as they are linguistically. It shows up in the foods of western Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Central and South America, as well as in Mexican and Tex-Mex. The French use it in some breads, in South Asia it shows up in teas, and the Dutch put it not only in cheese but in liqueurs as well.

In general, there is only one choice you’re going to have to make when dealing with cumin – do you buy it whole, or do you buy it preground? There are two main reasons for that. First, while there are three types of cumin sold – amber, white, and black – amber and white are not particularly different, and black cumin isn’t really cumin, but a different type of plant entirely. There are some geographic differences between various types of cumin – we use Indian cumin almost exclusively in this country. I am led to believe that the other form of cumin does have a highly distinctive taste and much higher oil content. I would be happy to try out the differences for myself… but unfortunately, the world’s other leading cumin center happens to be Iran, a country that the US doesn’t do a whole lot of trade with.


We haven’t talked a whole lot about spice purchasing and storage, thus far, partly because I’ve been racing to keep up with the blog and partly because the subject just hasn’t come up. However, now is a great time to start having that conversation. If you go all the way back here you’ll find that the definition of a spice is some non-leafy part of a plant that contains volatile, flavorful essential oils. In the case of cumin, that non-leafy part is the berry of a parsley-like plant. (People generally refer to whole cumin berries as cumin seeds, which is not technically correct, but they look at you funny when you point out that they’re technically wrong. Ingrates.)

For now, I’m going to focus on one word out of the phrase “Volatile, flavorful essential oils” – volatile. In all spices, by definition, the oils bearing the flavor and aroma of the plant has a tendency to vaporize. Poof. Which means what you’re left with, after a fairly short amount of time, is a bunch of powder that doesn’t really add much at all to a dish. I’m sure all of us have that jar of cinnamon that has been sitting in the back of the cabinet since 1994 and pretty much tastes like sawdust by now. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. The rule of thumb is that whole (unground) spices have an ideal shelf life of about two years, and ground spices about six months.

This leads us to two conclusions. First, it is better to buy spices in smaller quantities; second, that it’s better to buy spices whole. Until I started this project, I was always a big fan of buying spices in bulk – it’s cheaper, and it means I have to go to the supermarket less frequently. The problem is, of course, by the time you get to the bottom of that pound of cinnamon, you’re just adding sawdust to your oatmeal. It’s worth the time and effort to find a local spice market and buy your spices by the ounce – or, to do so over the internet. You gain two things – first, control over how much you’re buying and second, a better idea of how fresh everything is.

Now, this leads to problems of its own – storage, as well as extra effort. The amount of effort you want to put in to getting high-quality ingredients is up to you; I mean, let’s be honest here. We’re not talking about the difference between an awful dish and an amazing one; we’re talking about a minor difference. Sure, stale cumin may taste terrible compared to fresh cumin, but once that teaspoon of cumin is spread out among a dish that serves four, we’re talking about a difference between pretty good and great, not bad and great. Now, if you’re talking about a dish that really includes only one spice, or a spice that you’re adding directly into something, freshness may well be the difference between bad and good. If you’ve got a specialty spice merchant that’s easy for you to get to – or at least easy enough to visit once every few months – I highly suggest buying there, rather than the supermarket. If that’s not the case, most people get along fine buying McCormick’s spices.

As far as storage goes, that’s something I intend to talk about at length at a later date.

Back to the second conclusion - that it’s better to buy whole spices than it is to buy ground. They last longer – hopefully the reason why is obvious – and many whole spices have uses of their own; for example, whole cumin seeds are an ingredient in many dishes. And, of course, you can grind most whole spices yourself. (This doesn’t apply to everything – plenty of spices need to be dried and powdered rather than merely ground; onion, garlic, ginger, and turmeric off the top of my head aren’t really something you turn from the whole form to the ground form on your own.) Alton’s suggestion is to keep a small coffee grinder handy to use on spices; Victoria and I own a mortar and pestle, which we occasionally use, but most of the time the coffee grinder produces better results, faster, and with much less effort on our part.


So, ideally, we’re going to work with cumin seeds (berries) that were picked sometime within the last two years, and grind them as necessary. Nota bene - cumin seeds should ideally be roasted before they’re ground to reach full potency. Before you shove them in the coffee grinder, warm up a frying pan to medium heat, and give the cumin seeds 3-4 minutes, stirring constantly. You’ll know when they’re ready because the color darkens and an aroma of cumin wafts. Let them cool down, and only then grind them. NOW we’ve got perfect freshly-ground cumin. (Again – it’s not that you’re going to get crappy, terrible cumin and ruin your food if you just chuck it into the grinder… but it’ll be better if you go through the extra effort. Cook up whatever you think you’ll need for the next three months or so at once, then store the rest.)


Any questions? If not, join me next time, as we make some really, really delicious hummus.