Buy Local, Buy Organic, Buy Online!

Over the past year or so, we have personally seen an increase in the number of sustainable online grocery delivery companies that have listed the Spice Sanctuary spices. Coming from the UK, online grocery shopping is quite a tried and tested phenomenon and it is so exciting for me to see that growing in Canada!

The emphasis here, though, is on these companies offering locally grown or sourced, organic and sustainable produce, groceries and more. It is changing the mindset of the consumer from driving to the grocery store or multiple stores if one store does not carry everything to having it all delivered to you. It has never been easier to support local farmers, local producers, Canadian brands and eat more sustainably and healthier. Check out these five reasons to eat local below (while our spices may not be grown in Canada, our Farm to Pantry and Best Grade Promise means these reasons also easily apply to our products).

 

The Organic Box, Spud.ca, Green Earth Organics, On The Move Organics, Peacefull Pantry, Farm Box, Eat it by Vitahealth all carry and offer our organic spices and blends but more importantly, they are all stewards and shining examples of where the natural food retail industry is heading in Canada.

What Spice Recalls Mean for Canadian Consumers

Just a few days ago, a major US brand issued a recall both in the States and Canada of their whole organic peppercorns for salmonella. 

The full recall notice can be found here as well as details of what to do if you have bought the affected items:

 http://www.inspection.gc.ca/about-the-cfia/newsroom/food-recall-warnings/complete-listing/2014-04-05/eng/1396736705517/1396736719852?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter#recall-media

The impact a recall can have on both consumer and brand is significant. Organic spices are a food product (usually free from irradiation and fumigation) and therefore not immune from microbiological issues and pathogens. Indeed, no food company is immune from this happening to their products or spices but there are ways this can be mitigated by both the brand and consumer (believe it or not), especially as not all organic spices are the same. 

There are many factors that contribute to pathogens like storage conditions, transit times, micro analysis at harvest and beyond. However, the larger the company, the more likely they are to buy their products in very large quantities leading to potentially longer warehouse and storage time until sold, increasing the risk of pathogens growing in the product. This also increases the reach of people who could have bought the products, taking longer and making it harder to contain the issue and to ensure safe return of affected products. Recalls on a large scale may also cause price fluctuations in the affected product for other brands and ultimately you, the consumer. So what can you do?

What can consumers to do to mitigate their risk?

• Buy from local or smaller companies.
• Don't be afraid to try other brands - you might be pleasantly surprised!
• Don't be afraid to ask questions to the brand. You are the consumer and you have the right to know!
• Consider buying packaged versus bulk organic spices as this ensure better traceability in case of recall issues.
• Consider choosing brands that offer the shortest supply or most recent harvest.
• Use your spices everyday to avoid long term storage issues in your home.

What does Spice Sanctuary to do to mitigate this risk?

• Buy their products in smaller batches
• Ensure products meet all requisite screening parameters before and after buying them
• Ensure products are recent harvest to maximize freshness and minimize spoilage
• Ensure products are only packaged the once - rebranded or repackaged goods are exposed to multiple environments that may contribute to contaminants.
• Ensure spices are the best grades available - high volatile oils can act as inhibitors to bacterial micro-organisms

Creating Moroccan Harmony in Your Kitchen

One of the most amazing gifts the spices in our cupboards gives us is the ability to go on a culinary journey around the world right from our kitchen! This weekend, I hosted a dinner party and the theme was Morocco! Although the food was themed, the preparation and ingredients used all had another common theme: they can be used in and for so many other dishes.

The harmony of flavours created from cumin, coriander, chili, mint, cinnamon, garlic, orange flower water, rose water and nuts is quintessentially Moroccan but why just use them for this when there is a whole world of food and dishes to explore too!

Eggplant Boats

We started with an eggplant dish that I created using the Spice Sanctuary Moroccan Harmony Spice Blend. Just 3 Tablespoons of the blend mixed with some garlic, honey, lemon juice and a little oil and voila! A marinade you can use on almost anything! Try on steaks, lamb, as a salad dressing...

Harissa, Tagine and More!

Our mains consisted of one of the very first recipes I ever created - a chickpea and butternut squash tagine. This was accompanied by Harissa shrimp and a divine nutty rice dish cooked in a tagine which our friends brought!

This was the first time I made Harissa and again, I quickly realized just how versatile this paste can be too! You can use this as a hot and fiery pasta sauce, as a flavouring for soups, in place of store bought Ketchup too....

For my version of a Harissa paste, click here! 

For the other recipes mentioned, it's a tease but you'll have to wait for the cookbook :)

The Spice for all Bellys: Asafoetida (Hing)

Do you end up avoiding foods that are good for you but give you gas?

 What if you could find a simple everyday ingredient that would allow you to digest these gas prone foods better?

Sometimes named the "Food of the Gods", this is the spice that every belly needs! Asafoetida (Hing) (pr. asa-fe-teeda) is traditionally used in Ayurveda and Indian sub-continent cuisine where the diet is predominantly lentil or bean based. Asafoetida is a resin that is extracted from a perennial herb plant. The resin dries to a dark red, brown colour and on its own is difficult to grate or ingest as it is so potent. It is, therefore, more commonly found and consumed in a compound form where the powdered asafoetida is mixed with wheat and gum arabic.

The hunt for a certified organic asafoetida which was suitable for celiacs was proving really difficult but with perseverance, research and development, we were ecstatic to finally source a very good version. It is gluten free, grain free and has a minimum of 30% asafoetida resin content, making a little go a long way!

HOW DO I USE IT?

If you've used asafoetida before, you will know that it has a sulphuric smell but don't let this put you off! As soon as you add it to your cooking, the smell and taste dissipates.

Our recommendation is that you always use about 1/4 tsp in any dish (doesn't have to be Indian!) that uses the following ingredients:

Beans

Lentils

Pulses

Brocolli

Cabbage

Brussel Sprouts

Asparagus

Starches like potatoes

It is also a great substitute for onions and garlic if you have none in the house!

WHAT ELSE IS IT GOOD FOR?

Apart from being heavily used as a digestive aid, Asafoetida is a proven anti-bacterial and thought to be excellent at fighting influenza and candida. In fact, scientists even found it really effective in fighting the H1N1 virus!

Meeting the Spice Farmers

Wow, it has been over a year since we've posted a blog! This hiatus was not because we had nothing to write about but the total opposite..we were extremely busy building up the business and spreading the Spice Sanctuary spice love!

We started this year with 55 retail locations across Canada stocking our spices and a fabulous trip to go and meet the farmers who are growing our increasingly popular products! Apart from learning so much about how far organic farming has come along in India and of course seeing the spices in their sapling form to ready for harvest, the one thing we took away from our tours was just how much love, effort and skill these farmers dedicate to growing such beautiful spices. Their infectious smiles and warm hospitality was only a tiny glimpse into the love they pour into their farms and crops. No wonder we feel so much more connected to our products and more appreciative of their freshness and journey.

Meet Farmer Dehra AKA the King

He owns a small farm near a windfarm in southern Indian growing organic ginger. The ginger is then washed, sliced, sun dried and then powdered. Did you know that the ginger crop takes up so many nutrients from the soil that, once harvested, ginger cannot be grown in that same plot of land for a few years? This means Farmer Dehra has to be so versatile in what he grows on this plot in future years and hope that the yields will be good.

Meet Farmer Joy and his daughter

Farmer Joy has a 2 acre farm growing ginger and turmeric. Both of these spices are from the ginger family so grow in similar soil conditions. Turmeric takes about 9 months to grow and when the leaves are dry, the roots are ready to harvest. Shortly after, it is boiled for many hours before being sun dried (what the daughter is holding) and powdered.

Meet Farmer Shruthi, the Cardamom farmer

Farmer Shruthi's farms are in the Coorg region of India where the best Cardamom in the world is grown. Who knew that cardamom needed such skilled pickers for it to be the best quality - the difference between the inside of your cardamom pods being black seeds or gray or brown seeds is all down to the picker knowing which pods are ripe or not. The pods are then dried and graded by size and volatile oil content, bold grade being the best available.

Meet Farmer Ganesh

Farmer Ganesh owns a beautiful farm with his family and brother. They, like many farmers, utilise intercropping. This means they learn to grow different crops among different trees and soil conditions to optimise yields. Here we saw organic nutmeg, bananas, vanilla, turmeric, tamarind, lemongrass, dragonfruit and more!

We met so many other farmers and saw how organic composting and manure is made and even visited a biodynamic farm where the crops are grown using an astrological calendar and other prescribed methods and the crop yield has multiplied by 30%. There is only word to describe this experience. 

Amazing.

Six Ways to Knowing How Long Your Spices Will Keep

This is the $64,000,000 question in the spice world and the THE most common one I get asked so it was time to post about this.

Most spices naturally have a long shelf life but there is no real way to audit this as a consumer.  To define spices as fresh is a little odd given the reality of the process involved from growing them to getting them to your pantry. Freshness is, therefore, better used to describe how long the spices will keep their volatile oils for and this is dependent on what happens to the spices at every stage in their journey. Think of it as a bus journey and the number of stops it has to make to get you from A to B, the journey time in between stops and how long you stop and what happens at each stop too.

The next time you go to the grocery store or are thinking of replenishing your spice cupboard, here are the 6 questions you should be asking yourself or the grocery store:

1. Does the package tell you whether the spices are irradiated and fumigated or not?

2. Are the spices certified organic?

3. Are the organic spices certified to the standard of your country?

4. Are the spices packaged in your country?

5. Does the spice company directly import the spices into your country or do they source from intermediary suppliers?

6. How many times have the spices you buy been packed and re-packed?

Why you should be asking these questions and what impact they has on the longevity of your spices is discussed in the table below. Click on the image to view in larger format.Please note this does not speak to quality of the spices as, needless to say, the better the quality, the better your spices.

That was the long answer! The short answer is, assuming the spices are non-irradiated, of high quality and delivered to you from Farm to Pantry in as short a supply chain as possible,  and, once opened, you store your spices appropriately, seeds should maintain a good level of volatile oil and aroma for between 1-2 years and the ground spices 6-8 months.

The Bulk v Packaged Spice Debate

Going to a spice market to buy your spices from bulk bags is a great experience and one reminiscent of many Asian and North African cultures but for the majority of us, this is not reality when it comes to buying spices for our everyday cooking.

So, which is the better way of buying spices - bulk or in pre-packaged form? This is a debate I have been having with myself for a while now and as you will see from the pros and cons I have outlined below, I have finally reached a conclusion. 

 

Why Buying Bulk Spices can be good

1. You buy only as much as you need at a time.

2. Minimal packaging and therefore, it is arguably more environmentally friendly.

3. Cheaper.

4. Better for experimenting - if you just want to try a little of a particular spice before buying more.

Why Buyers should beware of Bulk spices

1. There may be no brand attached to the jars and so consumers do not know which company is behind the spices they buy.

2. It is not so easy for consumers to know when the spices in the bins or jars have been replenished, is it a swap out or first in, first out basis? How are batches and lots separated and identified in case of a recall?

3. There is unlikely to be any information on the spices themselves.

4. The spices oxidise each and every time the jar is opened, scoops are taken in and out. The oxidisation compromises whatever quality the spices had in the first place.

5. It is not so easy for consumers to know how the stores receive and store the bulk spices. If they part open bags to put into bins or jars, how are the remaining spices stored and is their quality compromised?

6. There is a risk of cross contamination from not just other bulk spices or products but bacteria from different consumers.

Why Pre-Packaged spices can be good

1. These are always branded and so there is consumer confidence in the quality associated with different brands.

2. The packages cannot be opened or tampered with and so oxidisation is not an issue.

3. There is more likely to be a wider selection of spices available.

4. Labelling on the packaging has to be government and regulatory compliant and so if spices are labelled as "organic", in almost all cases, consumers can take comfort that the company is compliant and has met all certification requirements.

5. Buying quantity spices may inspire you to cook more with them which is a great thing!

6. Some spices or spice mix packages may come with recipe ideas which you would not get with buying bulk.

7. You don't need to have separate spice containers at home as usually if you buy spices in re-useable packaging, they can be stored as is.

Where Pre-Packaged spices may fall short

1. Arguably more packaging is required and so there is more of a negative carbon footprint impact.

2. There may be more wastage if people do not use the spices as regularly as they would like.

3. More expensive than bulk.

4. Depending on the length of the supply chain, there is no guarantee that pre-packaged spices are any fresher or older than their bulk counterparts.

My conclusion?

As biased as it may sound, my preference is in favour of pre-packaged spices. While the environmental impact does not sit entirely well with me, the issue of quality of spices prevails over all else in my mind. I wouldn't go and buy good quality wine from a bin and so this is no different.

Even though I still don't think there is nearly as much transparency to the consumer from most pre-packaged brands as there should be, it is better than not having any information at all. Accountability is more likely to be better with branded products than bulk.

"There is a greater appreciation and awareness for packaged products for health and sanitary reasons, and a recognition of the value of what a brand brings to products. If we look out over the next five to 20 years, we are confident that we are going to see more of a migration from bulk spice to the packaged branded product" Keith Gibbons, CEO McCormicks Canada.

This is by no means a right and wrong debate and so let us know how you prefer to buy your spices and why!