Ingredients
- 1/4 cup ground cumin
- 2 tablespoons dehydrated lemon zest
- 2 tablespoons paprika
- 2 tablespoons ground cardamom
- 2 tablespoons dehydrated oregano
- 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
- 1 tablespoon coarsely ground black pepper
- 1 tablespoon (15 ml) cayenne pepper
Instructions
- Almost everything on this list arrives ground already, so the mill is here to blend rather than to break anything down. Short bursts, and stop as soon as the colour is uniform.
- Smell the cumin before it goes anywhere. It is a quarter of this rub by volume and ground cumin fades quickly on a shelf, so if it smells dusty rather than warm the blend will taste of nothing else.
- Put the cardamom in last and grind it least. It is the most expensive and the most volatile thing in the jar, and every extra second in a warming chamber costs some of it.
- Break the dried lemon zest up between your fingers first. It dries into curls that lodge in the corners of a mill and come out at the end exactly as they went in.
- Rub a pinch between your palms and taste it before you jar it. The cayenne and the cinnamon pull in opposite directions, and this is the only point at which the balance can be shifted.
- Choose a jar it fills rather than a large one half empty. The air above a spice blend is where its aroma ends up, and a half-empty jar loses it in weeks.
- It stays worth using for three months and merely edible after that. The paprika tells you first: once its red has gone to brick, everything else has faded with it.
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