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Garam Masala is a handy Indian spice mixture. It is good in lots of foods, with a very rich flavor and heady spice. Even if you don’t cook Indian, you’ll probably like it mixed in with other things to give them an exotic burst of goodness.

Most of all, its a handy intro to the world of making your own spice mixtures. Bulk spices are cheap as hell, and with very little effort, can be combined to produce fresh spice mixtures that blow anything you’d buy at the supermarket out of the water. Also, spices contain flavors that are very aromatic, which means they leave the spices and go away into the air. Meaning they won’t be in your food! Once a whole spice is ground, the surface area goes up by many orders of magnitude, meaning they begin to lose their punch immediately. In a few months, most ground spices are flat and dead. Keeping them well sealed in a cool dark place extends your time, but once ground, a spice has an expiration date.

Most spices can be purchased in a whole form, whole cumin seeds, whole nutmeg, whole coriander, etc. In these whole forms, the flavors are locked in, and shelf life is almost indefinite. When making a spice blend, just mix up what you need in whole form, grind it, and use that batch for the next few months. When you need more, just blend more!

Garam Masala Ingredients

• 5 teaspoons coriander seed
• 1 tablespoon cumin seed
• 1 tablespoon black peppercorns
• 1 teaspoon whole cloves
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon (or an inch of cinnamon stick)
• 1 teaspoon green cardomon pods

• 1 teaspoon nutmeg (about a 1/4 of a whole nut)

  Procedure

  In a dry pan over medium heat, toast the coriander and cumin for a few minutes. The color should just begin to change, it should smell delicious, and a few of the coriander seeds should just start to ‘pop’ like little popcorns, trying to leap out of the pan. Pour the toasted seeds into a spice grinder, mortar and pestle, or what I use, a blender. Add the other spices to the blender, put on the lid, and blend the hell out of it at high speed for a minute or two. If you need, stop the blender now and again, and mix things up in there for a good even grind. Don’t worry if its not super powdery, this is a hearty spice, and smallish chunks are OK.

  Put it into a spice bottle (this recipe makes enough to fill a small bottle), seal it well, and use it happily!

  Wasn’t that easy? Making your own spice blends is very easy, and the spices pack so much more kick now in their fresh form than anything your mega-mart would peddle to you. The spices will keep 3 months in that bottle, or longer if you refrigerate it. Its not that they will go ‘bad’ persay, they’ll just lose some of their punch, so if four months have gone by, don’t throw it away, just know that they aren’t as fresh, and use a bit more to compensate.

  What should you use it in? Well, my next post I’ll give a nice recipe for a lentil dahl that uses this very Garam Masala! You’ll probably like it. It’s easy to make too.

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