— Sheila Duncan

Yeah, that's a great question. And just by the way, in general, baking, I think spices are really great because they can reinvent dishes without messing with like the liquid ratio. Or you can kind of take similar recipes and make many different versions of it. So, Um, that's exactly right, and I love to do that. Absolutely love to do that. So I'll tell you like some of my favorite spices now that we're in kind of late summer. I mean, I, I love what Fran said about kind of moderating flavors, but I have some spices here just off screen. So let's talk about it. So like this black garlic, um, it's whole, uh, sorry, black, black lime. These are whole limes that are dried in the sun. They're regular green limes. As they dry, they oxidize, they turn black and they get ground into that powder. These are also called Persian limes or Omani limes. Um, but this is really like sour tart, a little savory. And so specifically with sweetness, I really like this as a kind of like moderating impact on sweetness. So like, that's a really nice thing to in, in sorbets and things like that. And so what I really like with the black lime is, especially at the end of the summer, I just put a little bit of this on fruit, maybe a little bit of salt. And it's really beautiful. And so I like that with all the summer fruits to kind of moderate the sweetness on the other side of it. Savory, um, I like this also in, in the falls we get the savory earthier flavors, all that. This is our sun dried tomato powder. So are tomatoes that are just extra sun dried and ground into that powder. Really earthy, really savory, like an umami bomb. Um, and then just to get into the winter, while we're getting into things, there's two things that I really love. I I just happen to have these here, but this buffalo ginger that Fran mentioned, it's a Vietnamese bigger ginger. It's called buffalo. 'cause it's, it's like the animal, like it's a bigger ginger, uh, they call it buffalo locally there, it's actually quite spicy and brings some heat. So this really feels like a warm hug, like it's warming, it's got some of the sweet flavors, but the, the heat really cuts through. And then the last one that I'll just share here is we have had something that's been really, really popular. It's called, we call NEA Vanilla Powder. It's from Tanzania by Lake Victoria, which was traditionally called Lake nea. Now, just to give you a little illustration of the spice world, often vanilla powder is made for twice used vanilla. So first they'll take vanilla beans and they'll make an extract out of it. Then they'll take that vanilla and make a sugar out of it, a vanilla sugar they'll still get, and then they'll grind those beans down. What we do is we get these vine ripened vanilla beans, and they're considered split beans. They're considered lower quality in the industry because when something gets really ripe, we've seen this all in fruit, fruit will split. This is actually the most flavorful, highest sugar moment of that fruit's life. And so people want their like beautiful vanilla beans. We take the split beans that are the most flavorful, and then we dry them out and grind them into a powder. And so each of these, we call these our mini jars. They're our half-size jars. This has six whole vanilla beans in it ground. And it's just really versatile. It, it's flavors best when you cook it with some heat, the flavor comes out. But um, you can also just sprinkle it on things and, and use it in cookies and bonbons and things like that. So just a few of my favorites right now in the moment and as I go through the seasons. But that's one of the really cool things is that you can take a recipe that Fran taught you and then just by changing the spices around you can make it appropriate to different weather, different cuisines and different seasons. That's really interesting. A lot of that was interesting. I held up the tomato powder because I, we have a lesson in Rouxbe Plant Pro in making powders like this. But I know my friend and colleague Kathy Gold used to sell, used to talk about using tomato powder a lot. And I love this in the summertime, I like a watermelon and tomato salad, for example. And then I marinate some tofu instead of feta, which is the usual. On a regular, I use this tomato powder. It was crazy. I also, it's fabulous when you're making fruit salads. And I did the cobbler that is in the course with fruit. I did berries and cherry tomatoes to spread those little yellow really sweet cherry tomatoes with a bunch of savory spices was fabulous. And as Ori said, when you're adding spice to a batter, you're not changing the liquid ratio. I mean, you're not gonna use a ton. So that really is terrific. And you know, when I was thinking, going back to these truffles, I was thinking about why I would use ginger. It made sense to me when I don't, if I'm getting a little cold or any, any kind of under the weather, I reach for ginger. It's just, it's one of my favorite spices.