What’s your favorite spice and herb?
Spice - Cinnamon. I love it BUT not in savory dishes, only sweets. I love cinnamon & sugar on my toast, I love cinnamon bread, rolls, donuts, etc. But I do not like Red Hots or any other so-called cinnamon candy.
Herb - Basil. The scent alone is so wonderful. I even buy a basil scented cleaner. I grow a basil plant every summer to use in spaghetti and various other dishes. Every time I walk by it, I grab a leaf and crush it in my hands so I can smell it.
Big fan of nutmeg, it goes in a lot of my Italian and mexican cooking. It is nearly cinnamon, not so in-your-face but you miss it if it isn’t there.
I feel that way about rosemary.
Cayenne is my favorite spice… I even put it in mashed potatoes (it’s excellent).
As for herbs, I’ve always like sage.
yes, but like cloves and turmeric it is one of the herbs with which I have a very conservative hand
For spice, I really really like cumin, and I’ll put it anywhere I can get away with it. Grilled cheese, grits, pimento cheese–it’s so warming and savory.
For herbs, it’s a toss-up between dried thyme and fresh rosemary. One of my all-time favorite recipes is salmon fillets baked on a bed of rosemary sprigs and chopped onions and topped with thinly sliced lemons and olive oil.
Unless you count garlic as a spice, I’m most fond of basil. It finds its way into most of my cooking. A few years ago I discovered Basil herbalea “Wild Magic”, which is both highly ornamental and good-tasting. I carry over cuttings from it every year.
I love everything about thyme and cardamom. Rosemary too.
Wow, that’s like asking “who’s your favorite kid?” but I’ll give it a try:
Spice - Cayenne pepper probably, at least judging by how much I use it. Even in things that aren’t traditionally spicy, like say a standard tomato-based spaghetti sauce, a little bit adds some ‘bite’ and interest to it.
Herb - Agree with the OP, can’t beat fresh basil. Has to be the fresh stuff. I can’t think of any other herb that is so much different between fresh form vs. dried form. Dried oregano? Dried thyme? almost as good as their fresh versions. Dried basil? A sad, virtually tasteless pale shade of the fresh stuff.
When it does come to strictly dried herbs, thyme for sure. I love thyme in most everything.
Indeed. But giving it a try:
Spice - White pepper. It goes in just about every savory dish I make.
Fresh herb - basil.
Dried herb - thyme. It’s a close call with rosemary, but while the scent of rosemary is wonderful, the texture can be annoying, so thyme wins.
By usage:
Herb: Coriander/Cilantro
Spice: Hungarian paprika
My goto herb is thyme. It seems to enhance all meats and is almost necessary for vegetables. Now that I’m typing this, I wonder what thyme would do to my mashed potatoes
And can overpower some dishes if not used with a deft hand.
Uh, just make them awesome. One of my go-to sides is garlic smashed potatoes (think mashed, but without cream, with lots of roasted garlic, and chunkier) and I would not think to serve them without thyme and sometimes also rosemary.
ETA: Now that I think of it, is garlic an herb. or a vegetable? If herb, it would be a close call between garlic and fresh basil as my favorite herb.
My least favorite Herb:
I make those for guests and as simple as it is it gets the best reviews of anything I cook. My base is small red or golden potatoes roasted until done, use my potato masher until chunky, add a ton of butter and rebake like 15 minutes. Next time we all get together on our summer weekend I’m going to make them as the base of a baked potato bar.
Have you tried them with roasted garlic? Easy method: Take a whole head of garlic, cut the top off to just expose the cloves, put garlic in a very small bowl or ramekin, drizzle olive oil over, and microwave for 1 to 1-1/2 minutes (careful- it’s very easy to nuke it to death; have backup garlic on hand).
Then pop the roasted cloves out of their skins and smush them up well into the potatoes.
My favorite herb is probably thyme. And I don’t know how anything but black pepper could ever be my favorite spice. It’s indispensable.
Thyme and cumin are getting lots of love in this thread (I wavered between cumin and white pepper myself, as a favorite spice) so let me suggest a spice blends that permit syou to enjoy them in combination. It’s are available from Penzey’s, or make your own:
Za’atar (Penzey’s spells it “Zatar”). There’s lots of ways to make it, but along with sumac and sesame seeds, I always include thyme, cumin, and white pepper.
I love cumin. We go through a good bit of it.
Herbs? We have many basil, oregano, thyme, and rosemary plants and use them all when appropriate.
LOL. How embarrassing. No, I wasn’t having a stroke; I was in the middle of editing from plural to singular (I thought I had two blends to recommend, then I realized one doesn’t contain thyme) when my phone beeped. I was expecting an important text, so I thoughtlessly hit “send” so I could concentrate on that.
No but sounds awesome. Maybe for the potato bar ill make roasted garlic butter so that people can use that if they want because adding more butter never hurt anything.