We don't give spices the credit they deserve. For one, we can be quick to misname something a spice when, in fact, it's really an herb. (A spice is made of the aromatic roots, bark, seeds, or flowers of a plant, whereas an herb is the leaves.) We also tend to avoid spices, misuse them, or barely tap into their potential at all. Yet spices can be the ticket to opening up our world in the kitchen.

My friend, chef Amanda Ramirez, thinks so. Ramirez views spices not as a rigid requirement or a last-minute add, but as a way to experiment with food—and even to visit other cultures, right from the kitchen. I've always admired the way Ramirez elevates a dish, using only a few fresh ingredients to open up certain channels and profiles. She is also a wealth of knowledge when it comes to food and whole, clean ingredients. What I love most about Amanda's style is how flexible and generous it is. That is why I garnered her take on approaching spices—and what she feels is essential for us all to know.

A Conversation with Amanda Ramirez

I know how passionate you are about spices, so there's so much to talk about. I'd like to start with the health aspect. Do you ever seek out specific spices for their health benefits?

Yes. The most popular would be the anti-inflammatory ones, like turmeric, and soothing digestive ones, like mint and ginger. There are also spices for the warming foods, which get into Chinese medicine and Ayurveda. Those are traditional medicines. They’ve been used for a very long time.

When I am working with clients, I definitely look, holistically, for more information, such as: What does your sleep look like? There are so many other elements that go into what’s causing inflammation in someone’s body. It could be stress levels. Acidity in their foods. So, to focus on one thing would mean to not looking at it holistically. What you want to be doing is trying to find balance, equilibrium, and peace in your body. It’s not going to be in one place. It’s going to be a holistic approach.

Our bodies are genius. All the systems are doing everything they can to balance out everything that we are giving to it. And I think that one thing can be too much. If you eat too many carrots your skin may turn orange. I also like to try things in little amounts, especially if it’s a new spice or if your heritage is not from where that spice is from originally. Starting small is a good thing.

It’s so interesting that you talk about using moderation for spices, or anything, that is not from where our genetics evolved because we are always thinking about diversity and looking at the cold spots in the world. This makes sense.

This may not be a surprise but one of the ones that I think about often is coconut oil. Coconuts don’t grow in Washington state, Oregon, or California—that I know of. They grow in Mexico, which is kind of close. I do wonder how that may be affecting people who are having a lot of coconut milk and a lot of coconut fat. I am not saying that it’s not healthy. But it’s an interesting perspective and we are lucky enough to have access to all these things. It's fun to try out the flavor; and your body will let you know.

From the perspective of a chef, particularly one that goes into people’s homes and cooks for them or with them, what is the importance of spices to you?

Oh my gosh, everything. Technique in cooking is way up there, but spices are too. If somebody can have spices, that is where a lot of the flavor is. To touch on technique, if you boil a sweet potato versus browning it, caramelizing it, or roasting it in the oven where it's going to caramelize, it’s going to get the sugars out and sweeten it. That is one way that technique gets the flavor out of a plain vegetable with just oil and salt. But spices make It so much more fun and interesting. And again, the spices are coming from all these exotic places so it's almost like your taste buds get to travel with the unique experience of umami, or the sweetness or savory-ness that you wouldn’t traditionally get.

One of the first questions that I ask people is: “What is your favorite cuisine regardless of your food restrictions?” I cook for a lot of people with food restrictions, or who have children with allergies. I know a mom who couldn’t have Thai food when her daughter was born. She found out her daughter was allergic to peanuts, so the family just cut out all Thai food. I met her seven years down the line and I thought: That’s the first thing that I am going to cook you. I am going to cook you Thai food because you can do it without peanuts. You can do it with almonds. You can do it without soy. So being able to bring different culinary flavors through spice and other ingredients to someone’s home is really a joy for me. Especially if they couldn’t have it before due to dietary restrictions.

So it’s really a way to travel and experience different cultures, through a little shake of something here or a pinch of that.

Yes. And there is a nostalgia to it, too. Sometimes when clients have expressed what their favorite foods are, they say “I remember that restaurant when I was in London” or “that’s my favorite Indian because they do it this way or this way." You can tell when it comes from the source and it’s homemade and I want people to feel that. It is definitely a vehicle from where you have traveled.

For someone who knows nothing about spices, where do you start? What are the basics?

I feel it starts at: What’s your favorite cuisine?. If it’s Mexican, for instance, you really want to get cumin in there. Add it to a chicken broth. Add it when you sauté onion. Add it to rice or are when you are sautéing vegetables. Add in cumin (which is also used a lot in Israeli food). For other Mexican spices I would say to add oregano and green chili. I would start with one of those things in combination with salt. If you like Indian, then add in turmeric and ginger, again in just a little amount because these are quite strong. Diaspora has a single origin turmeric. I have never smelled turmeric quite like this. It’s a dream. You know that it is fresh. It smells actually like fresh turmeric. (She also does single origin green cardamom which apparently is very hard to get without any pesticides. It’s really hard to get clean.) For ginger, it’s difficult to find a good tasting ginger that’s dried powder, so I recommend using it fresh—grating it or mincing it, as opposed to powder.

Then there are spices that work really well with ground turkey or chicken breast. For beginners, you can start with just one. In poultry, rosemary, oregano, and thyme all work really well. Even sage. Fennel also goes well with ground turkey. So if you’re making ground turkey or ground chicken, choose one and use it with salt and pepper and see how that tastes. A lot of time when I make patties, I’ll just take off a small section to test it out, if you have the time, of course. Then if you’re feeling really ballsy, try to do two, like basil and fennel and salt and pepper. It makes it so much more interesting.

Back to cumin: It probably is one of my most favorite spices. I mean, you can take a steak and just sprinkle on a little cumin and it will taste so different. That might be my number one thing: If you don’t like any spices, try to add a little bit of cumin and maybe some granulated garlic to something.

Sometimes certain recipes are very complicated and call for more than a home chef wants to do for a weeknight dinner. This gets into buying something and only using it once. What do you recommend if a recipe has twenty ingredients or seven different spices? Or if it requires something that you might not use again?

I’ve definitely fallen into that. One of those spices would be allspice. You buy an allspice and use it one time. What do you do with the rest of the allspice? I will admit that I've been intimidated by allspice for sure. It's a spice that I’m not too familiar with. It’s in between a lot of other spices that I use frequently in my flavor profile. I highlighted it in a big catering gig that I did, so if you have an opportunity to cook for a lot of people that might be a good time to try out a spice. I used it in a tomato sauce. Allspice also is sometimes used in a baking mixture. But I find it to not be entirely necessary. But there may be someone out there who’s like, “no, absolutely, allspice." I would say you don’t need it, unless it’s a prominent spice in the recipe. Oftentimes when you’re reading a recipe, they’ll have all of the ingredients in order of the spice you’re going to use the most. And allspice might be way down at the bottom.

Just like the ingredients on packaged food, the most concentrated ingredients are listed first.

Exactly. And actually that’s how I moved away from recipes into creating my own. I’m not Israeli, but I love chicken shawarma and I love that spice blend. I think it’s so much better if you’re not buying a spice blend, you’re actually doing the spices yourself. I cooked for an Israeli family. Tori Avey has this great recipe for a shawarma spice and I looked at the proportions of the spice, so I noticed that there were a few spices that had the same ratio. As soon as I understood the concept of the proportions of the spices, I could move away from the recipe and I could look to see that the majority is cumin, with only a little bit of this spice, a little bit of that spice. I’m a visual learner. I like to work in that way. I think that it’s good to make mistakes, I think that it’s good to go a little bit overboard on a spice, and taste what it's like to have the overwhelm of that particular spice. You’ll know that you put too much fennel in it. Or if it doesn’t have as much flavor, you want to put in a little bit more.

I would love to hear your take on salt.

Salt is the most basic. Everyone knows how to use salt, but not everyone is using the same salt. There’s table salt—sodium chloride—which has been processed to eliminate so many of the trace minerals that are in sea salt or “real” salt. It's so interesting how depending on the size and where it comes from, salt really does taste different. I think the only way you could tell is if you put three of these salts side by side and you actually tasted them all. I cannot stand the taste of table salt now because I know what real salt tastes like.

Do you really stick your finger in it and taste it?

Literally taste it, in your hand, on your finger. And it’s fun! I didn’t know that Jacobsen Salt Co. was located on the Oregon coast until we accidentally came across it. We saw how they were making their sea salt and how the salt naturally dries in the crystalized form. To me, that’s fun, to taste. I know that people have done it, if not in their own home then when they're out. You might get a Maldon Sea Salt chocolate chip cookie. It adds joy and texture. My opinion is that natural salt that is not refined and has the trace minerals in it is going to be the best. The other problem with table salt is that it often has a caking agent in it. Unadulterated foods are the best. The whole wheat with the germ and with all of the oils and proteins in it. That's how God made it; how the earth made it. I like to keep my food as clean as possible.

A common spice that people will buy, which my parents used when I grew up, is Lawry’s spice. Oh my gosh, do you know how many ingredients are in that garlic salt? It’s not just garlic and salt, there’s so many other things in there. It blows my mind! And then your taste buds get used to those kinds of synthetic flavors, so it might be that if someone’s coming off of that and trying to just use garlic and salt on their own, it might taste a lot different.

That’s a really good point. It’s like what tastes sweet to someone coming off of a standard American diet may be very different than if your palate has been reset.

Right. So it might take adding in some stronger spices to get a stronger flavor. Or it might just taste really great to somebody, but I can imagine that it may taste strange to someone else. You really have to read labels. I had a client whose daughter couldn’t have rice. She didn’t know that for over a year, this spice blend that they had been using had rice in it. And I’m sure also some food coloring.

I want to talk about sourcing. Does organic matter? And where do you buy your spices?

Absolutely. For all the reasons organic food matters, it really comes down to soil health. The amount of fertile soil is limited, so you want to keep that soil as healthy as possible. Anybody who is following organic practices is going to be my first choice, because that’s where they stand on soil health. The pesticides and the herbicides and fertilizers that are not organic contaminate water beds and kill the soil. If they’re meant to kill bugs, what’s it doing to our internals? So yes, I would definitely always support organic at the grocery store. There’s a few options, like Frontier Coop.

I also look for non-irradiated spices. On Spicely Organics, for instance, it should say: no artificial coloring, no gluten, no MSG, no soy, no preservatives, no wheat, no eggs, no sugar, no irradiation.

I was wondering about that because I'm still drawn to mom and pop brands. Small batch, artisanal because it seems like they’re doing it because they’re passionate about it and they have a moral purpose. What are your thoughts?

I have to trust that they’re doing the best that they can. The larger a company gets, and the more hands that are in it, it’s hard to control the quality of that product. A lot of these companies did start out really small. General Mills is investing tons of money into all kinds of food companies, from drinks to organic grass-fed bison bars, and these brands they’re investing in started as a really tiny company. How do we know that they’re upholding the original standards? I don’t, for sure. That is why I love Diaspora. She’s a one-woman show and she’s showing it all on the internet. I think that’s trendy these days to be super transparent with everything from production costs to labor. Transparency is really attractive. On Frontier Coop cayenne pepper, and it says Non-ETO, which is ethylene oxide, a sterilization chemical commonly used in the spice industry but never by Frontier Coop. How would we ever even know that that sterilization compound is used, ever? The laws don’t require people—companies—to indicate that.

That transparency is really what it comes down to, and you get that less and less with a big company. This is something I’m very very passionate about with our food supply system, but at some point is it a necessary evil? If we want to make this more mainstream, we have to include big companies and get them to shift their way of doing business. We’re not going to push them out of business, but they’re going to have to make some changes, so is it just painful and imperfect along the way? That’s a big topic.

Let's switch over to storage. How do you like to store your spices? And how do you decide for how long to keep them?

I’ve definitely tossed spices out. I would say that when you get a spice and you use it, smell it. Use your senses, look at it, look at the color. When I got this turmeric, I thought, wow, I’ve never seen turmeric this color, it’s so bright. I’ve never smelled it quite like this. Even though I cook a lot, there’s something I like about having smaller jars because I know I’m going to use it within a year, whereas if it’s in a big bulk bag it’s harder to decipher how long I'm going to take to use it. Obviously air-tight is going to be the best, in a dark cool place.

Just be sure to check labels to see if it’s bad. If it is a year or two years old, and you know you’re going to throw it out, I would still open it and smell it. If you smell a spice—I’ve smelled old spices that don’t smell like anything—they’re going to lose their smell. If you know that it’s super old and you go and order a new spice, keep, if you can, keep it so you can smell the difference between them.

And also, plants and seeds have natural oils to them, so you definitely don’t want to keep those past the expiration date that is marked. That's why there’s an expiration date on whole wheat flour: There are natural oils in that, too.

So it’s not just a matter of losing pungency, flavor, or smell, but it’s also that there can be potentially harmful effects from rancid oil.

Absolutely, because oils go bad. As you know, this takes extra work, I don’t know if people will want to do this, but buying spices whole—whole cumin seeds, whole pepper. The flavor is incredible when it’s fresh and when you can smell it. Which I think is kind of a great kids project, kids love grinding stuff up and touching things and smelling things. And if you were to buy in bulk it can be cheaper. Frontier Coop does sell in bulk. I would also look up your local spice shop, especially now, small businesses are really needing our help, and in Los Angeles there’s the Spice Station and they’re happy to talk with you.

Back to storage, you don’t want to get moisture in your spices, which I’m always worried about. I’m also worried about sprinkling spice over a steaming pot of stew or soup. That steam definitely gets on, so it’s nice to wipe down the tops of spices.

You've mentioned that it can be fun to experiment with a spice before cooking with it. What's an example of this?

I know people who buy spice blends from Trader Joe’s. They might add a spice blend to a bagel with cream cheese to get familiar with the spice before cooking. Or to avocado toast. Add on some pepper, a little bit of garlic salt, and a little bit of red pepper spice. That’s a way you can use spices before cooking. Oh, and on the avocado toast.

Another great way to use spices is with hummus. That’s a really cheap way to test out spices. One day I had an extra spice, and I wondered if lavender hummus would be weird. I used all the traditional spices and I added a little lavender, and it was amazing! Like the herbs of Provence so there was a little bit of rosemary and a couple other herbs in there. A dip, a bean dip might be a good way to test out some spices if you don’t want to cook.

To learn more about Amanda, visit: madetonourish.com.