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Qâlat Daqqa

Five warm spices and no chilli at all, with grains of paradise doing the work pepper usually does.

Vegan.

Ingredients

Method

  1. FIVE WARM SPICES AND NO CHILLI AT ALL, with grains of paradise doing the work pepper usually does. That absence is the thing to notice: in a cuisine whose other blends are built on chilli and caraway, this one has neither. Cloves, grains of paradise, nutmeg, cinnamon and a little black pepper -- all sweet and warm -- and it is used for lamb, for vegetable stews and in sweet dishes, where a chilli blend would be wrong. Mistaking it for a general seasoning and using it where the dry coriander blend is meant gives everything a faint taste of mulled wine.
  2. GRAINS OF PARADISE ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE WITH PEPPER. Two tablespoons. They are a West African seed, peppery-hot but also floral and faintly citrusy, and they are what stops this blend being simply a sweet-spice mix. Substituting more black pepper gives heat without the perfume, which is most of what they are there for.
  3. THE CLOVES ARE TWO TABLESPOONS AND THAT IS A LOT. Equal to the grains of paradise. Cloves are the loudest thing in the jar by design, and a timid pinch gives a blend that cannot be tasted through a lamb stew.
  4. EVERYTHING IS GROUND FROM WHOLE AND NOTHING IS TOASTED. Whole cloves, whole grains, broken nutmeg and cinnamon into the grinder together, cold. These are all volatile aromatics rather than seeds that need heat to open, and toasting cloves in particular drives off exactly what they are wanted for.
  5. THE CINNAMON IS BROKEN SMALL FIRST. A whole stick jams a grinder and comes out in splinters. Snapped to fingernail size before it goes in.
  6. IT IS SIEVED AFTER GRINDING. Through a fine sieve, and any gritty residue re-ground or discarded. Cinnamon bark and nutmeg leave hard fragments that are unpleasant in a finished dish.
  7. IT IS MADE IN SMALL QUANTITIES. This is about twenty uses. Ground cloves lose their edge fast and the blend is worth remaking rather than storing.
  8. The cinnamon sticks SNAPPED to fingernail-sized pieces and the nutmeg broken.
  9. The cloves, grains of paradise, nutmeg, cinnamon and peppercorns put in a grinder together, COLD. Nothing toasted.
  10. Ground to a fine powder.
  11. SIEVED through a fine sieve, and any grit re-ground or discarded.
  12. TESTED: cloves and grains of paradise should both be findable, and there should be no heat from chilli -- there is none in it.
  13. Stored in a small sealed jar away from light. Used within 2 months.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under Tunisia · All recipes