Cooking with Cardamom

I love the way cardamom smells. If I didn’t think it odd, I would buy the perfume from Demeter and wear it fairly often. Some people hate it, but I love cooking with it just so the kitchen smells of cardamom. So you can imagine how thrilled I was when I discovered a 2017 gallery of cardamom recipes on Epicurious while working on my Summer Spritz experiment. The 27 different cardamom recipes in the gallery ranged from soups and savory main dishes to desserts, such as ice creams and cookies. Given the restrictions of my weight management plan, I decided to focus on the healthier options in the list.

Three Ingredient Maple-Cardamom Salmon

With a snowstorm forecasted in the near future and Chocolate Dinner scheduled for the weekend, I was very interested in planning a healthy entrée that could last a few meals. But it had to be something simple enough to prepare after a day of errands and appointments, yet substantial enough to hold up as leftovers that could be fixed quickly. It would absolutely be the kiss of death to be hungry while cooking for Chocolate Dinner: nothing would make it to the table! With those parameters in mind, the Three Ingredient Maple-Cardamom Salmon leapt off the page at me.

I will admit that I was a little nervous about trying this recipe. The five reviews on the website were split between “Great and simple recipe” and “waste of a good salmon.” But the three positive reviews had better grammar than the two negative reviews, so I decided it was worth a try. And of course, I put my own little spin on it! I used blood orange oil from the boutique downtown instead of than plain olive oil. Otherwise, it is a very simple recipe: olive oil, maple syrup, and ground cardamom whisked together and painted on a skin-on salmon filet. I didn’t so much paint my marinade on as dump it on, but that just happens to be my style. The painted salmon filet is then allowed to sit at room temperature for 30 minutes to absorb the marinade and, finally, is cooked at a low temperature for 25-30 minutes, depending on desired degree of doneness. That’s it. Or at least that’s all I did. The recipe had a step about seasoning with salt prior to cooking, a step about flaking the salmon after cooking, and a step about garnishing with dill sprigs after flaking, but I ignored all of those.

Of course, I was really happy that I attempted the recipe. Just baking the salmon made the kitchen – and my nearby workspace – smell like cardamom. That definitely made me happy. I might have baked the salmon a touch too long, but that wasn’t a deal breaker. The marinade came out very well. The recipe headnote touted a “sweet, herbaceous flavor;” I definitely got the sweet from the maple syrup and I definitely got the cardamom, but I’m not sure what they meant by “herbaceous.” The blood orange oil was undoubtedly the right choice, as it complemented the cardamom. Even as leftovers, the cold salmon was lovely – sweet from the maple and savory from the cardamom. Which was good, because I had several meals of leftovers.

Turkish Coffee Brownies

I’m such a sucker for both coffee and chocolate that, weight management plan be damned, I had to try the gallery recipe for Turkish Coffee Brownies, which proposed to marry cardamom with my two favorite flavors. My Second Annual Chocolate Dinner in mid-February provided just that excuse.

Because the reviews complained that the cardamom flavor was too strong, I followed the advice of our favorite instructor at the local cooking school: start small because you can always add more. The recipe called for one teaspoon of ground cardamom, so I added one-quarter teaspoon of cardamom with the other ingredients to the egg mixture. After I added the chocolate-butter mixture and dumped in the flour, I tasted the batter to see if I liked the balance between the coffee and the cardamom. I did, and I didn’t want to risk throwing off that balance with another quarter teaspoon of cardamom, so I left it as is.

It turns out that I made the right decision. The brownies received high marks at Chocolate Dinner, and the comment was made that they had just the right amount of cardamom in them. But I was definitely advised to keep the recipe because the brownies themselves were very good – just the right balance of fudgy and cakey. My girl friend from DC who visited the following weekend agreed. She rationed herself to one brownie per day for breakfast because there were only three left. As much as she wanted to gobble up all three at once, she said she would be sad that there would be no more left to enjoy on the other days of her visit.

Masala Chai

The day after St. Valentine’s Day, I was feeling a little feisty. So I decided to try masala chai as an alternative to my morning coffee before I used up all my whole milk. It was only supposed to take fifteen minutes, which was about the same amount of time it takes me to make a pot of espresso, so I figured that I had nothing to lose.

Cardamom was the first ingredient on the list for the masala chai. There were three options: 10 green cardamom pods, cracked, seeds removed, and pods discarded; or ½ teaspoon cardamom seeds; or ½ teaspoon ground cardamom. I opted for ½ teaspoon ground cardamom because I felt too lazy to do the work with the cardamom pods and I thought that the ground powder would be more concentrated flavor than the seed. I used four black peppercorns rather than four white peppercorns because I didn’t have any white peppercorns.

I had a minor equipment challenge with the masala chai. The time before last that I used my coffee grinder to grind spices, I touched my cast iron skillet to the plastic rim of the grinder and melted it enough to slightly disrupt the perfect seal. When I ground the spices, some of them leaked into the space between the lid and the grinder; so I had to open the lid carefully over the pot to ensure all the spices were captured. Otherwise boiling the milk with spices was extremely straightforward.

I also had a minor hiccup in making the tea. I didn’t have five teaspoons of loose orange pekoe tea, or any loose black tea for that matter. So I substituted five tea bags of English Breakfast tea, and let that steep to a nice strong black tea before pressing out the tea bags and adding it to the milk mixture. Somehow in all the excitement, I missed the step about simmering the milk and the tea together for one minute to blend the flavors.

The masala chai was excellent. Sweetness was the most immediate taste, followed by cardamom and the other spices. I drank it from my largest coffee mug, so I only had a mug and a half of it. I most definitely wished for more!

The Verdict

Each of the three recipes that I attempted from the Epicurious cardamom gallery was a solid winner. The salmon was very simple, yet had a clear fragrance and taste of cardamom. The brownies were also fairly simple; however, I am very happy that I read the reader reviews and only used one-quarter of the cardamom called for in the recipe. Otherwise, it would have been too much of a good thing. The masala chai was by far the most involved recipe, even though it really wasn’t all that complex. The results were well worth the effort.

Having met with such success with these three recipes from the gallery has inspired me to pick out three more complex recipes from the gallery to attempt at a later date. So stay tuned for Cooking with Cardamom Part Two!