[Sca-cooks] Whole to ground spice equivalents

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Also sprach lilinah at earthlink.net:
>Avraham wrote:
>>I don't think you can substitute ground for whole spices - they
>>generally get used so differently. Putting whole spices into something
>>generally gives a fairly subtle flavor, so you'd only want a tiny amount
>>of ground to achieve the same effect.
>
>Hmmm, i substitute frequently. I've cooked a number of recipes both
>ways. While there are differences in flavor,they are not really
>striking, and varying the amount of an ingredient (such as, not using
>the equivalent amount but rather more or less) could account for the
>difference.

I tend to agree. There are always going to be differences, but
they're not necessarily detrimental, and I have always found that to
dwell on them excessively smacks of announcing that this cheese was
obviously made from the milk of a lefthanded ewe with a bad back, in
the Perigord region on an overcast Thursday afternoon in July. And it
had recently seen, but not eaten, some chives in the field... it
tends to become more a comment on the palate of the person making the
proclamation than on the spice issue itself.

>Still hoping someone will take a shot at the cinnamon (stick vs. spoon)

There's a chart in "Food For Fifty", which in this case I suspect is
not the most accurate thing in the world, stating that an ounce of
stick cinnamon equals ten pieces (presumably those little ones in
foodservice jars, the two-inchers you sometimes see in mulled cider
and such), and that an ounce of ground cinnamon is 4 Tbs. That, of
course, doesn't necessarily imply that stick and ground cinnamon are
interchangeable, even if you take the ounce of stick, grind it, and
use it immediately. If you're using stored, pre-ground spices, you
get to weigh the staling effect of the storage versus the increased
surface area. Some natural forces will tend to make ground spices
"weaker" than whole ones, while other, simultaneously applicable
forces will make the effect stronger. It is very much a guessing game.

>>Note on galingale - this rhizome
>>is very similar to ginger, and powdered ginger doesn't really substitute
>>for fresh at all.

Kind of like substituting tomatoes for eggplant. They're closely
related and both fruits, so obviously it would be the _drying and
powdering of the eggplants_ that make them not taste like fresh
tomatoes, neh? I agree, though, that there's no point in substituting
galangale for ginger, and that there's a difference, in both cases,
between fresh and dried versions of each. I do think, though, that
galingale in its dried form is probably closer, for the flavors
sought after, to fresh than dried ginger, at least the powdered
stuff, is to fresh ginger. Both have a sweetness that tends to be
lost in the drying process, but with ginger there's just sort of a
generic hotness, while with galingale, there's a distinct eucalyptus
flavor.

Especially on an overcast Thursday afternoon in July ;-).

>Yes. I'm always encouraging folks to get actual galangal, if they
>have to order it on-line, as ginger is NO substitute even if they're
>both zingiberacea.
>
>I lived in Indonesia for a few years and they have a number of
>rhizomes in the same family and, again, none tastes remotely like the
>other. If i look a little bit, around here (SF Bay area) i can get
>family members fresh turmeric and fresh galangal, as well as fresh
>ginger which is everywhere. It's harder to find the roots known in
>Indonesian as kentjur and kuntji, although sometimes Thai markets
>have fresh kentjur.

This is all quite true, but then, of course, for medieval European
cooking calling for galingale, the range of differences may be
smaller since only some of these rhizomes might have made it to
Europe, and they would almost certainly have been in dried form.

>I still unpacking (or rather, ought to be, as the apt. is a forest of
>stacks of packing boxes). Otherwise, i'd powder up a cinnamon stick
>and measure it, but i don't know where my spice grinder is. I'm sure
>it will surface *some* day.

"Food for Fifty" probably has equivalent info to the cinnamon stuff
above for other spices, and all the same caveats apply. Let me know
if you need something specific.

Adamantius