Coriander, I Hardly Know Thee

That's my big take-away from my Week of Living Coriander-ly - I hardly know it. I feel like, with the other spices I've done, I've accomplished my mission - I've gotten a handle on how to use them, and when faced with them in the future, I'll know what they're doing. Actually, that's not the important part. I mean, it's useful to know what cumin is doing in a particular dish, no doubt. But the reason I started this is because it's much, much harder to know when cumin should be in a dish, but isn't. And that's the place that I feel like I'm at, now.


With coriander, not so much. I mean, I like coriander - it's a good spice. The coriander mushrooms were honestly my favorite thus far; the coriander really brings out the natural flavors of the spinach and mushrooms, making them taste more mushroom-y and spinach-y than usual. And the other things I've cooked with it were the same way - the coriander did a good job of enhancing the existing flavors, but I wasn't really sure what the coriander itself was doing.


So I spent part of the day brainstorming - I'm supposed to write about coriander, but I don't have anything to say - not even a lame music metaphor. Then I came up with the brilliant idea that I could talk about grinding spices. I've got coriander seeds, and I've got ground coriander that I made myself, and I've got ground coriander that I bought. The stuff I ground myself is a much coarser grind than the stuff I purchased, and I know that you can get grinders that have coarse or fine grinds, or are variable. It seemed a simple matter to figure out the circumstances in which you would you want a coarse grind, and those where you would use a fine grind.


And you know what? I came up just as blank there as I did with coriander as a whole. Which, to be perfectly frank, pisses me off. I consider myself a fairly apt researcher, and to not be able to find anything - ANYTHING! - about the topic means either the question is so obvious that nobody on the Internet has even bothered to ask it before, or that I am being a total moron and am using the wrong search terms.

Seriously - right now I am so irritated that the is my writing process. Write a sentence, go and try another search. Write a sentence. Try another search.

But... nothing. So, I'm going to speculate for a few seconds, then call it a night.

My best guess is that your approach to spices should be similar to your approach to salt. You use finer salts for situations where you really want it to dissolve easily, where you want a more intense salt flavor, or where you want small bits of salt to stick in nooks and crannies of a dry food. (Such as popcorn.) A seed has a lot of empty space in it; the more finely you grind it, the less air and more spice your final product will have. A tablespoon of coriander seeds will turn into far less once you pull it out of a spice grinder.

Were I grinding coriander for something like chili, I wouldn't mind the rough grind that I used in the soup the other day - the rough grind that had people picking the hulls out of their teeth. However, for that soup, as I said at the time, a finer grind would have done better.

All the same, I feel like there's got to be more to it than that. I'll keep looking, ask about it the next time I'm at the spice store, and keep you posted. Until then, I'm going to get on to fennel; it promises to be a bit more exciting.