I’m making a Biryani sauce that calls for ground mace. I’ve never used it before, so I had to go buy some. It was fairly expensive—about $6 for a small 0.9 ounce jar. On the side of the jar it says “1/4 teaspoon mace = 1 teaspoon nutmeg.” Do they really both impart the same flavor to cooked dishes? I realize that both spices are derived from the same plant, but it stands to reason they must have distinct flavor profiles, otherwise there wouldn’t be any reason for paying a premium price for mace as opposed to nutmeg. What’s the straight dope on this?
There’s just less mace on a plant then nutmeg. Mace is a flimsy skin around a solid (nutmeg) kernel. Cookbooks say that the taste of mace is “more refined” then nutmeg. But I use nutmeg when the recipe calls for mace. It makes more difference, IMHO, to use freshly ground nutmeg instead of the dried out ready ground stuff. So I keep my nutmeg nuts in a little jar with salt (to prevent humidity) and scrape the nuts with a knife when I need fresh nutmeg. The nuts will keep for two years this way.
I think not. Ever try to bash someone’s head in with a kernel of nutmeg?
I’ll have to try that. There’s an ethnic supermarket next to where I work that has every conceivable spice you can think off. Black sesame, black caraway, pink salt; you name it, they got it. I was looking at the whole nutmeg kernels when I was there today. I love having a bunch of weird looking stuff in jars on my spice shelf and using them in cooking. Makes me feel kinda like Harry Potter. Do you do the same thing with cardamom? I always have pods around, but this recipe call for a full teaspoon of cardamom, so I broke down and bought ground powder, thinking that it would take too long to scrape enough out of the pods to amass a teaspoon. However, I hear that cardamom looses most of it’s flavor after it’s ground. Should I have gone with the pods and done it the hard way? I really want to learn how to make a killer Biryani.
Oh, I have dried cardamom pods, and a little grounding device like this. very potteresque, no ? 
With one of those, grounding up a teaspoon of (coarsely) ground cardamom is fun to do and takes about a minute. There is nothing like freshly ground cardamom, and the dried pods keep for years.
Although, to be fair, when I want to make an indian dish, I usually just buy a mix of preground mixed spice paste. Those are usually delicious, and very handy.
I picked up some fresh nutmeg in Bali last year and it was incredibly strong. I grated about a quarter of one of the nuts into a coffee filter with a half-cup of grounds and couldn’t drink the coffee. It made my lips numb.
The same nuts have lost more than half their flavor sitting in my spice cabinet for eleven months and I’m wondering if I should have frozen them.
I did try spraying someone with nutmeg once. Didn’t do a thing.
And seriously…would YOU be intimidated by a Jedi named Nutmeg Windu?
A quarter of one of the nuts? Are you…nuts? A teaspoon would have been too much.
That much nutmeg would be psychoactive.
Grinding is the act of making ground spice. It’s a grinding device. This is not a criticism, just a heads up.
While a quarter of a nutmeg is quite a bit for a coffee, how big are your nutmegs? A quarter nutmeg should be about half a teaspoon of ground nutmeg. People take in the one to three tablespoon range to get high off the stuff, from my understanding.
No, whole nutmegs stay fresh for quite a while, possibly years. Keep them in a cool, dark place in an airtight container. A nut that is partly grated may lose flavor more quickly than a whole one, but they are not that expensive.
Mace is fairly similar to nutmeg, but is sweeter and more mild to my taste. It’s one of the ingredients in hot dogs, believe it or not. Blade macewill last longer and is good to put in sauces as you can pull it out later. Many Indian dishes call for whole spices, so blade mace may be appropriate. Ground soices in general lose flavor much more quickly than whole. In addition, spices at grocery stores start out much older than than those from a specialty store like Spice House or Penzeys.
You can buy caramom seeds that are whole, not ground. This is easier to grind than trying to extract the seeds from a pod. But Indian cooking often call for whole caradamom pods, so check your recipe again. Please be aware that there are three kinds of cardamom pods: white - used in European baking (and what I would be more likely to use in coffee, green - what are typically used in Indian cooking, and black - which are african in origin and have a stonger, smokier flavor. These are less expensive and were sometimes used as a substitute for green, but have now acquired a place in some Indian recipes.
I’ve only ever had mace as prepared in a sweet potato pie, and to be totally honest, I didn’t much care for the intensity and “meatieness” of the flavor… it kind of reminded me of Hot Dogs. I think a dash of nutmeg would have been much better in that pie, simply to match my idea of the classic flavor profile of a “spice pie”.