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In this episode of the Pantry to Dinner mini-series, host Victoria Riskin sits down with food writer Caroline Saunders, a Le Cordon Bleu graduate, Bluedot Living contributor, and author of the Substack Pale Blue Tart, for a tour of the spices every home cook should have on hand.
Caroline traces cardamom from the Western Ghats of India to the highlands of Guatemala, where farmers are developing their own heat-resilient plant varieties and moving operations higher up mountainsides to adapt to shifting climates. Vanilla, it turns out, is a climbing vine that grows best in forests — which makes it both fragile and a quiet argument for conservation. And sumac, which most shoppers walk past without a second glance, is a native North American plant with Indigenous culinary roots and a lemon-bright flavor that pastry chefs rely on for a very specific reason.
What You'll Hear In This Episode:
- How long ground and whole spices actually last — and what to do with the ones that have been sitting in the back of your cabinet
- Cardamom: where it grows, how it's changing, and why one Indian farm is breeding its own resilient varieties
- Vanilla as a climbing vine — and why forest preservation is part of its survival story
- Sumac: the native North American spice with deep Indigenous roots that tastes like dried lemon and solves a pastry chef problem you didn't know existed
- Cumin, thyme, and the case for building your own go-to spice blend
- Where to buy spices that support farmers directly, including Diaspora Co.
- Recipes: cardamom sugar cookie with cardamom glaze, and a vanilla date hemp shake, from BluedotLiving.com
Read Caroline’s writing: https://bluedotliving.com/author/carolinesaunders/
About Caroline Saunders:
Caroline Saunders is a strategy and operations leader working at the intersection of media, climate, and sustainable food systems. She is the managing director and editor-in-chief of The SUNN Post, a national nonprofit student newspaper amplifying young voices.
Previously, she served as chief of staff at Grist, and she has written about sustainable food for outlets like The Guardian, Bluedot Living Kitchen, and SAVEUR. She also holds a pastry diploma from Le Cordon Bleu Paris, bringing a unique perspective to food and sustainability.
Meet the Host:
Victoria Riskin: I am Victoria. I’m always looking for the best life has to offer despite a turbulent world. I find comfort in the environment and joy in friendships. We have a great team of all ages at Bluedot who inspire me every day as we work together to build community.
Transcript
Victoria Riskin: Welcome to Bluedot Imagine If podcast. I'm Victoria Riskin, founder of Bluedot Living, and I'm here to offer you some ideas for your pantry and some easy ways of cooking, and save you some money at the same time, we hope, and care for the planet. The kitchen is the entryway to some important planet-friendly solutions. So I created this Imagine If mini podcast called Pantry to Dinner. And to guide us through this episode, which is going to focus on spices.
Last time, we were talking about beans, wonderful beans, and things you should have in your pantry that are delicious, nutritious, and not expensive. And we talked about some really interesting grains that are both unusual and some that are more conventional and yummy. And today, I wanted to talk about spices with our very special guest, Caroline Saunders, who has a super terrific Substack called Pale Blue Tart, and has deep knowledge, has gone to the Cordon Bleu, and has been writing for Bluedot and for many other magazines for years. And I always like to see if I can stump her on something. So I don't know what my stump is.
Caroline Saunders: Yes, an ongoing game we have.
Victoria Riskin: What, how am I gonna stump you today? You're so knowledgeable. So welcome back to our podcast. It's such a pleasure, always, talking with you. I get very hungry by the end of the episode.
Caroline Saunders: Thank you for having me. It's always so fun to be here.
Victoria Riskin: So do you think we can spend a little time talking about those spices that you should have in your pantry that you can pull out and spunk things up a little bit? And let me just start with one big question. What are the basic spices you should have, and how long do they really last? Do spices last a long time? Because I know herbs disappear, their flavor disappears. Fresh herbs are so much better. What do you think about spices?
Caroline Saunders: Great questions. So in terms of their shelf life, first, it varies, but the real truth of it is, the good news, is they don't typically go bad. It's just that their flavor will weaken in potency over time, and so that is why you'll see some advice online from experts about maybe refreshing them every couple of years.
But I will say I tend to lean on the side of using it up. And so one tip to have in mind is, if your cinnamon has gotten a little less strong because it's a bit older, you can just use a bit more typically, and that helps. But the real answer is the guidance that's often given is that spices last between one and five years, in terms of their potency and effectiveness.
And more in the one to three-ish years if they are already ground up, and they'll last on that longer end, let's call it three to five years, if they are whole. So think about a whole nutmeg, that's going to last longer than powdered nutmeg.
Victoria Riskin: Amazing. You know, we're so busy throwing things out, and it's not that you have to throw them out then. It's that they may not be as pungent or as flavorful as you would like.
Caroline Saunders: Totally. And so that's a good time to then start tossing them into granolas or things where the spice amounts are a little more flexible, or even using some of them in a face mask.
Victoria Riskin: OK, stop there. I have to hear about that. I totally have to hear about that. Excuse me, I'm running… I want to go get the formula.
Caroline Saunders: I know, right? Back in my teenage years I had a huge DIY, like, use-it-up face mask era where I would use a lot of, or would make a lot of, brown sugar scrubs, and would work in some of those spices that are known to have good-for-you properties. This isn't a spice, but obviously, honey is super good for your skin.
And I'm forgetting… This is a little embarrassing. I'm forgetting which ones worked really well. The only memory that comes to mind is when I used turmeric in one, and then it made my skin a little…
Victoria Riskin: So yeah, you turned orange. So just as a little side note, I used to see my mother covered in honey. So, you know, this is an old remedy, but we're not talking about honey today, but you could probably mix something else in that would be lovely. We have to come back to that and see if we can figure out what to add to the honey. So moving on, you've written about cardamom, and it's a wonderful spice.
Caroline Saunders: It is.
Victoria Riskin: Yeah, so share a little bit about how delicious it is, but also about how it grows and where it comes from.
Caroline Saunders: Totally. So there are, I'm sure, so many listeners who already use cardamom really regularly. I was not one of those folks up until a few months ago. I think I probably had it in my spice drawer ground up, but I always thought of it, and again, sorry to offend the cardamom lovers, but I always thought of it as, like, the weaker cinnamon, the weaker something something.
Until I started looking into it more because I was curious about big climate impacts I had heard hitting the cardamom industry. And so that led to a little bit more of a culinary exploration with it, and now I'm obsessed. For context, cardamom, like many, many of our favorite spices, grows in relatively warm climates.
So it is native to the Western Ghats mountain range in India, and the two biggest producing countries in the world today are India and Guatemala. And both countries have seen their cardamom industries face intense climate impacts over the last several years between some hurricanes and then just a lot of extreme heat.
And it's led to price increases that have reached consumers in some cases. And so I was very fascinated by that. Like, some of the interventions that farmers and trade associations and others are using in Guatemala, for instance, as weather gets hotter, they’re literally moving their cardamom farms and operations higher up the mountain to chase those cooler temperatures.
And then I spoke with a few farmers in India for this piece for Bluedot who are not only using really savvy regenerative farming practices to create an environment that is more resilient to heat and other stresses, but are also doing some really impressive breeding themselves within their farms, finding the plants that are particularly resilient and cross-breeding those specific plants so that they're coming up with their own varieties that are adapted to these microclimates.
It's really amazing. The Indian Spices Board is really working on more resilient spices. There are interventions at a lot of levels, but right now cardamom is really climate threatened, and I think it is a very cool thing to find ways to support farmers and folks on the front lines of thinking through adaptation.
You can buy from Diaspora Co., which is one company that sells really flavorful spices and has these direct-to-producer relationships that are better for the economics for spice farmers. And it's their farmers that I talked to about these really cool breeding things that they're doing.
Victoria Riskin: There is so much packed into what you just shared. So first of all, understanding that climate change has an impact on plants and spices and so on, but also it has an economic impact on all kinds of businesses, but certainly we're paying for it. And the other thing that you said that's intriguing, and I think this is true for other products in the food business, is that small farmers are finding adaptive measures.
Probably easier for a small farmer to move slightly higher up, maybe not so easy, but the need to shift and find different locations is an important part of the story. I just want to mention while I have you, that you've written some wonderful pieces for Bluedot Living, and they appear in our kitchen newsletters, and also we link to the stories in our kitchen e-magazine.
And I think people will find them really interesting. It's not just a quick recipe, it's a sort of a deep dive, and then you feel like a more personal relationship with the spice, which I know sounds crazy, but that's how I feel. It's just like you went from, “Oh, it's a poor man's cinnamon” to “It's one of the most brilliant little spices.”
So … you can get it already ground, and you can get cardamom in seeds. Is there any advantage to getting the seeds?
Caroline Saunders: You know, just in my personal experience cooking with these cardamom pods, I find them to just seem a little bit more potent and nuanced in the flavor myself. So I've gotten pretty into using the pods and grinding them with a mortar and pestle or using them in recipes. My favorite versions of saag paneer have cardamom pods in them, and it just infuses such a lovely flavor.
Victoria Riskin: Like cinnamon, but they're a little bit, uh, pulpy.
Caroline Saunders: They are, the normal person is not chewing and eating them. I will admit to being so hooked on these cardamom pods which come from this one farm in India where I think the flavor notes that the farmer describes are mint, pine, pomelo, and something else. But I chew them like gum or like a mint, a breath refresher after a meal.
Victoria Riskin: So let me just say, if you don't have the mortar and pestle or the time to grind, would you suggest an extra dose of it in the ground, pre-ground form? Or is that…
Caroline Saunders: Great question, and I feel like I'm now contradicting myself because there is always this rule about, like, if it's powdered, the flavor should go farther, and if it's whole, the flavor should infuse a little more in a subtler way out into the dish. What, I don't know. What do you think, Vicki?
Victoria Riskin: I'm lazy and I don't like the pulpiness of the pods, so I would go with the ground. All right, let's move on to what's your number two spice? Because I knew you would knock that…
Caroline Saunders: Had to go there. Well, OK, so I don't know if this counts because in the U.S. we think of this more as an extract, but I just fricking love vanilla.
Victoria Riskin: I knew you would. Oh, of course. It kind of counts, right?
Caroline Saunders: Right. And it's technically classified as a spice, so maybe we'll humor ourselves.
Victoria Riskin: All right. As a person who is a pastry chef by training, vanilla has to be an important friend to you.
Caroline Saunders: It is such an important friend. And when I'm making a million dollars, that million dollars is going solely toward vanilla beans. There is such a difference in scraping out the seeds from a vanilla pod and putting that into a crème pât, for instance, or a crème anglaise versus the extract.
It really is just night and day. Oh my goodness. But vanilla is, I think we could comfortably say, the most climate-threatened spice, which is why it's fascinating to me. And a big part of the reason is just the geographic concentration. It happens that the vast majority of vanilla is grown in the northern end of Madagascar, which is remarkably hurricane-prone.
And it grows on that coast where the hurricanes just like clockwork come in from the Indian Ocean. There are some other climate threats too, but really it is this threat of powerful storms that have the ability to tear down these really delicate vines. And so one of the things that I would say the vanilla industry is working on writ large, like a concept we were just talking about with cardamom, is actually thinking about diversifying the origins.
Vanilla happens to have this hyper-local concentration. It is grown in other countries — Kenya, certain island nations, other parts of Africa, I think Uganda. So that's one big adaptation, and then of course, farmers on the ground in Madagascar are really focused on regenerative and other practices to make their forests and farms better able to withstand hurricanes.
Victoria Riskin: OK, so the vanilla pod, is it on a tree or a bush?
Caroline Saunders: It's really interesting. It's a climbing vine, so it requires the stability of a tree trunk to snake itself up. And so that's a really cool thing when we think about environmental preservation and resuscitation because vanilla creates an economic case for forests. It does better in forest environments.
Victoria Riskin: Wow. I did not know that. I'm so happy to know that, though. I'm going to picture that thing climbing, you know?
Caroline Saunders: Yeah.
Victoria Riskin: So vanilla. Well, we're going to ask you for some recipes at the end of this that have cardamom and vanilla. Maybe you have one that has both. What's your other use? Do you have a third spice that you love?
Caroline Saunders: Yeah. I'm a huge thyme girl. T-H-Y-M-E.
Victoria Riskin: Yeah. But is that not an herb or is that a spice?
Caroline Saunders: Oh yeah, I guess it's kind of both, kind of herb, dried herb. Yeah.
Victoria Riskin: I'm… yeah, it is kind of a dried herb. I'm willing to give you a chance to riff on thyme, even though in my book it's an herb.
Caroline Saunders: You're so generous, Vicki. OK, just really briefly on thyme and then we'll find another spice. I've spent a decent amount of time in France because I did culinary school, but my first time in France was when I was in college. I worked on a farm in the south of France for two months through this WWOOF organization that I'm sure some folks are familiar with.
And I stayed with this homestay person who's really amazing and has this bed and breakfast and an amazing garden and orchard. She took me on all these cool excursions around the south of France, including to the side of a castle, sort of like the hillside that this castle was on, where thyme grew wild in these huge rambling bushes just all over the hillside, and we brought back armfuls of it to dry, and I have just been unable to not put thyme in everything since.
So one of my favorite recipes is just, like, whipping up a dumb creamy wine pasta sauce when I have too little time and just, like, a ton of thyme in it. It's so good.
Victoria Riskin: So, OK. So it must have smelled incredible when you went to that castle. That's probably one of those smells you never forget. But how do you use thyme? I mean, it's like a little hard leaf, you know, teeny leaf. So what do we do with that?
Caroline Saunders: So the nice thing is if you're putting it in a sauce, which is often how I use it in a pasta sauce, it will soften. And so it ends up being a fine texture. And I find that it’s the same with putting it on roasted vegetables, as long as you're not overdoing it. I find that texture to be OK, kind of just like oregano.
But as with any dried herbs on roasted meats and veggies, you know, useful to a point and then don't overdo it so it gets a little… yeah. Don't overdo it, OK?
Victoria Riskin: All right, one more spice if you… I'm going to move you toward… We were talking about ras el hanout.
Caroline Saunders: Oh, yeah.
Victoria Riskin: Do you remember that? And that's a mix of lovely spices: cinnamon, nutmeg, and other things. And I throw that in my granola because I like a lot of flavor in my granola, but I don't want to saturate it with sugar. I love the honey that I add, but there are all those wonderful Middle Eastern kinds of flavoring things.
Caroline Saunders: Oh, yeah. So one that comes to mind is sumac. We were talking about that, too. So sumac, a classic Middle Eastern flavor, but also there's a sumac plant that's culinarily similar that is native to the eastern half of the U.S. and Canada, if I'm remembering my geography right, and that has been a big part of Indigenous cuisines for ages.
And what's interesting about sumac from an environmental perspective is, you know, it's this native plant. It's really hardy as a perennial. And I got familiar with it when I was foraging in Central Park with a forager that I've written about also in Bluedot Living who does these awesome foraging classes all over urban New York, which is just so fun.
And anyway, so, it's very visually striking is what I learned. It has these big red clusters of berries. And what's fun culinarily is that it tastes a whole lot like lemon, but dehydrated. And so it's this delicious spice sprinkled onto, you know, fish, veggies, whatever. And then it's especially compelling to pastry chefs.
I learned this from Natasha Pickowicz, who's the author of the cookbooks More Than Cake and a recent cookbook on hot pot. It's valuable to pastry chefs because it adds lemon flavor without adding liquid, and often that is a challenge where you want more acidity in, say, a jam filling for a layer cake without creating so much liquid that it gets all slidey, dangerous for the cake structure. So it's a great lemon flavor hack that I'm now obsessed with.
Victoria Riskin: Very interesting. I get that. So tell me, it comes as a little leaf, right? Does it… How does it come? I mean, I've never used sumac, so…
Caroline Saunders: It comes, interestingly … so the spice itself that you want is the berries, and they're these clusters of tiny berries about the size of a peppercorn. And those are dried, and the form that I am familiar with is that it comes with those berries ground up into a rough powder. But I bet you can get the whole berries and do something with that, too.
Victoria Riskin: So I can go to the grocery store and they probably have sumac, and I just haven't learned how to use it. I'm gonna try, because lemon… my husband always says, “Vicki, you love lemon so much that when I die, you're gonna lean over and kiss me in the casket and say, ‘Needs more lemon.'” So that's not…
Caroline Saunders: That's incredible.
Victoria Riskin: It's true, but lemon on everything. Lemon always sparkles things up for me. So this is a great discovery. I'd like to move into the cumin department.
Caroline Saunders: Mm-hmm.
Victoria Riskin: I was doing a saag paneer last night and I didn't have enough cumin. And cumin has both sorts of richness…It's kind of rich, but it's a little spicy. It has a little pique, piquante, I don't know, is the French word. So do you spend time with cumin?
Caroline Saunders: So it's so funny that you bring up cumin because I was just having a cumin debate with my boyfriend.
Victoria Riskin: Not so many people could say that.
Caroline Saunders: So I will admit to not being a huge cumin fan on its own, but what I was saying to him was, I always end up loving it when it is a component of a dish, and I think I just don't like the smell on its own.
Victoria Riskin: Yeah, it's a little musty, isn't it? I get what you're saying and I don't leap at the smell because it's a little musty.
Caroline Saunders: Right. But to tie it back to something we were talking about in another episode about beans, I realized when I was making Cuban black beans twice in a week, which is one of my absolute favorite dishes in the world, that it is a critical spice in that recipe. And so I was like, “OK, I must open my mind.”
Victoria Riskin: Yeah, so you've succumbed. So let's review a little bit. So we want to have cumin, we want to have sumac, we want to have cardamom, we want to have… what else did we say that we wanted to have in our pantry?
Caroline Saunders: Oh, maybe vanilla.
Victoria Riskin: And then in the herb department, we'd like them to be fresh. I'm just not so sure. Do you agree with me about that, or am I being a snob?
Caroline Saunders: Well, I think it depends on the herb or spice, because thyme is an example where it's fine dried. I mean, no, I think you're probably right, like, better fresh. Yeah.
Victoria Riskin: Better fresh, but herbs don't last as long. Mine are gone in a month. The last thing I would say in our spice conversation, and then throw out some recipes, is I got a collection of spices that were mixed, that people are really doing interesting things mixing different spices.
Caroline Saunders: Oh, cool. Yeah.
Victoria Riskin: Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin, who is famous, and he has a whole little collection of things that he mixes together. I don't know if they're any better, but they're interesting.
Caroline Saunders: I'm interested in that trend. There's another chef, Greg Baxtrom in Brooklyn, who has restaurants like Olmsted. I saw an Instagram video of him where he was showing his spice mix that he has on hand that he tosses. He has it in a salt shaker, and he tosses it into everything.
And I forget what was in it, but I was sort of just like, “This is so cool that chefs have that, and I wish I had that for my favorite spice blend.”
Victoria Riskin: All right. Well, it's up to you to put it together, and then we'll sell it in the Bluedot store.
Caroline Saunders: Perfect.
Victoria Riskin: Final recommendation maybe of a recipe that uses cardamom or whatever you want. Whatever you want.
Caroline Saunders: Yeah. Two come to mind. In that article we talked about where I wrote about cardamom, I had a recipe at the end for a cardamom cookie with a little cardamom glaze, and it's a very simple sugar cookie, and that's intentional because I wanted it to just be a canvas for cardamom's flavor to come through.
I learned this tip when I lived with a pastry chef in Paris for a while, that she uses cardamom, just a pinch of it, as a secret ingredient in her vanilla cupcakes without advertising that cardamom is in the recipe to just add this slightly floral note to it. And so anyway, I would totally recommend trying those cookies because it's kind of the same intended effect.
And then there's also a recipe on Bluedot that I'm very excited to try myself that is for a vanilla date hemp shake that just is exactly what I want to eat in the morning.
Victoria Riskin: OK, I think that's a good place for us to say thank you so much for, again, having a wonderful conversation about spices and spice herbs. I'm going to go get some honey and put it on my face.
Caroline Saunders: Yep. No, for sure.
Victoria Riskin: Although your face looks great to me, but…
Caroline Saunders: Only because of all the honey.
Victoria Riskin: And so I think we'll sign off, and see you next time for Pantry to Dinner.
