you add them to very hot food, you allow too much of the oils evaporate. Add these to foods after

cooking and to dish that cooled down some.

When adding whole dried herbs to your cooking pot, crush them first to start breaking down

the cell walls. That helps to release the trapped aromatics that the heat in the pot completes. When

you mix herbs into cold food, like in uncooked fruit sauces and fresh dips, soak the crushed herbs

for a minute in a few teaspoons of boiling water, just enough to barely cover the herbs, drain, then

add them to the food. The heat helps to release their full flavors.

Nearly all of the flavoring components of herbs and spices are in the essential oil part of the

plant. The only notable exception is a popular herb, cilantro, also called coriander and Chinese

parsley (not the coriander seeds but the leaf). Much of the flavoring in cilantro is water-soluble as

opposed to other herbs with oil-soluble falvorings. It is particularly important in case of cilantro to

add it very late to a dish, practically just before serving, to retain flavor. For the same reason cilantro

doesn't retain much flavor either when you freeze it, or in dry form. It is one of the few herbs that

you must use fresh or not at all. The only way I found preserved cilantro acceptable is in

commercial freeze-dried form. Unfortunately, freeze-dried cilantro is not readily available in retail.

How much to add

Freeform flavoring your food with guessing and tasting is never the best way. Using exact

measurements, then tasting and adjusting, is a much better, more reliable and more reproducible

method.

Those great chefs you hear about who never use measuring spoons and cups to flavor don't

have an innate ability to guess at the correct amount of a certain spice without measuring. Or your

grandmother whose recipe uses a pinch of this and a handful of that. More than likely, their method

of measuring simply doesn't include teaspoons and measuring cups. If you work with food all day,

every day (like that great chef or your grandmother), your eye can gauge the exact amount of cumin

the recipe needs, just like if they were using a measuring spoon. Until you get totally immersed in

cooking like these professionals are, there's no shame of using standard measuring tools.

It is particularly important that you measure when you are preparing a larger quantity than

you usually do, say 40 servings of a recipe. If you cook chili con carne for eight fairly regularly, you

can spice it reasonably well by approximating the amount of chili and other flavorings. When you

make it for 40, you need to multiply that same recipe by four. Ho do you multiply a "pinch of salt"

by four? You will have no idea whether you should add one teaspoon, two teaspoons or 1½

tablespoons. If you have the exact amount written in the recipe for eight servings, then scaling it up

or down eliminates the guess work, and your guests get the anticipated and expected wonderful dish

every time without fail.

If you are unlucky enough to fall in love with a recipe that uses such indefinite terminology

as a pinch and to taste, here are some hints of how to cope when flavoring a dish:

Err on the side of too little flavorings. It is easy to add a little more—impossible to take it away

if you start out being overgenerous.

A pinch is roughly equivalent to 1/8 of a teaspoon.

If it is salt, 1 teaspoon for eight servings is a good ratio for unflavored foods.

When you determine the correct amount of flavoring with a standard measuring tool, write it on

the recipe.

Serious Kitchen Play