Make your spices powder and garam masala at home. Little effort will bring great reward as you will be consuming fresh homemade, unadulterated spices with authentic wonderful flavor.
- Before making powder of whole spices clean them and dry under the sun to remove the moisture from them.
- Roast the coriander seeds for few minutes before grinding to powder. Grinding the dry crisp coriander seeds to fine powder is easy.
- Cumin seeds should always be roasted to light brown color before grinding.
- Red chilies should be cleaned of all seeds and stalks before grinding.
- If red chili powder is being made in rainy weather then they should be roasted before grinding.
- For each 100gm. of whole chilies, cumin seeds, coriander 1 tea spoon of salt should be added while grinding to ensure fine grinding.
- Never roast anything especially if they have essential oils (Like spices and nuts) to the exact shade you want, always roast a shade lighter. Because, the heat along with essential oil in them, will cause them to cook while cooling also, thus making them a shade darker than the color to which they have been roasted.
- Green and black cardamom should be roasted with the cover.
- Before roasting the cardamoms pound them slightly to just crack / split the cover so that during roasting the cover does not burst.
- Never roast the spices on high flame because they will burn and all essential oil which gives them the flavor and medicinal values will evaporate.
- Do not roast the spices like clove/ star aniseed/ cinnamon/ cardamoms for too long even on low flame, because it will cause evaporation of most of the essential oil in them rendering them less useful and the flavor will become very less after roasting for long time.
