3 New Spice Blends to Make While We're All Isolating at Home

The coronavirus outbreak has rattled our daily lives, and things seem to change minute by minute. But there’s one constant: we have to eat. How do we cook among the chaos? What recipes do we lean on? How can we use cooking to stay calm? That’s what we’re exploring in this series, The Way We’re Cooking Now.

A couple of months ago, I was merrily making up spice mixes in the Epicurious Test Kitchen, no anxieties about social isolation and global pandemics on my mind. My goal was three new jars to tuck into the pantry, each a new kind of magic potion to make baking and cooking more fun. One would be tangy. One would be spicy. And the third would swing from savory to sweet.

Now that I, like much of the world, am staying in and cooking every meal at home, those spice mixes are coming in handy. I will always appreciate pre-made flavor enhancers I can draw on to cut down on meal prep and add a little sparkle to my plate, and right now, I need that sparkle more than ever.

It helps that spice blends are immensely practical for this particular cooking moment. You may have many of these spices already in your cupboards, just waiting to be put to use. And spice blends perform many of the the same functions of herbs (flavor that can be incorporated into a dish, as well as sprinkled on top to finish it), but unlike herbs, they will keep in the pantry for months.

Below, you'll find all three of my modern spice blends, and a recipe in which to use each. Spend a little time today mixing together one or all of them, and pull them out anytime in the months ahead that you're feeling uninspired. Having lived with them myself for a few weeks, I can promise you they'll help.

1. Tangy: Pickle Brine Spice Rub

This spice mix allows you to imbue the powerful punch of a good pickle into chicken, fish, or root vegetables. Dried dill, coriander seeds, mustard powder, and celery seeds all nod to that classic pickle brine flavor, and you probably have at least some of those hidden in your pantry right now.

The one ingredient in this mix you probably don't have? Vinegar powder. Here's why you should order it: it's the only way to get that true pickle tang in a dry rub, and it has the added bonus of containing modified food starch, which helps everything it coats form a crispy crust. (This is the same logic that applies to velveting chicken in cornstarch before frying it.) The first time I tried my Pickle Spice Rub on chicken thighs, they turned out to be the crispiest skinned chicken thighs I've ever made. Then I tried the mix with peeled and cubed potatoes, and they were—and I don't use this word lightly—sublime.

Pickle Potato Salad

For a double-the-pickle, double-the-fun dinner, I roast potatoes and carrots in my tangy spice mix, then toss them, still warm, into a salad of raw celery and onion, some shredded leftover roast chicken, and of course, sliced dill pickles.

2. Spicy: Crunchy Spice Oil

Adding fiery heat to a dish is not always something I want to do before cooking. Sometimes it's better to finish with heat, and that's what my Crunchy Spice Oil is for. The whole spices and seeds in it add not only flavor, but crispy pops of texture. It's sort of like chile crisp, but the mixture of sesame seeds, pink peppercorns, garlic, cumin seeds, mustard seeds, crushed red pepper flakes, and smoked paprika give it a flavor profile unattached to any particular cuisine. That means it can play well with a wide range of foods and flavors: Keep a jar in your fridge and drizzle it over simply-cooked rice, greens, eggs, fish, and anything else you think could use a pop of heat and a layer of crunch.

Scallop Rice Bowls With Crunchy Spice Oil

I'm especially fond of this oil on rice bowls. My current rice bowl of choice involves sea scallops, which I love for how quickly they cook, how sweet they are, and how it's usually very easy to find a good sustainable option to buy. To round out the bowl, I wilt some kale with a little ginger, slice some avocado, and generously drizzle my Crunchy Spice Oil on top. (And I keep drizzling more as I eat.)

3: Savory to Sweet: Coffee Spice Mix

Cookbook author and Epi contributor Tara O'Brady is a much better baker than I am, and she's always coming up with fun new sweets. So for a savory spice mix that can also be added to sweets, I passed the reins to her. Tara loves to put ground coffee in her baked goods—she put some in this cookie recipe we still can't get enough of—so it's no surprise that her new spice rub contains finely ground coffee. (Note: This is not to be confused with instant coffee—you want the texture of the coffee bean in there!) That coffee is paired with bee pollen for earthy tang, dried orange peel, cardamon, fennel, and cinnamon. Sounds fun, right? It is.

Rub this mix all over pork chops before throwing them on the grill. Or try it on carrots and chicken before roasting. Or add a teaspoon or two to your favorite chocolate chip cookie or brownie recipe. Or pound cake! Or coffee cake, which is what Tara did for us.

Swirl Spice Cake

Tara's new coffee cake recipe is all about the streusel swirl, which is huge (you will think it's too much streusel; it's not) and, of course, the spices—it takes a whole 1/3 cup of spice mix. I made sure the recipe for the spice mix makes enough for exactly two cakes, but still—you may want to double the recipe. Same goes for all of these spice blends. After all, you can use them in so many different ways—we have a lot of cooking ahead of us.

Originally Appeared on Epicurious