I've seen on various cooking shows that (particularly ground) spices lose their potency after a few months and that if you have old jars of spices in your cabinet that you should just throw them out. I finally did that today. I took a trip to Penzeys, which has a store in Arlington and stocked up on the basics. They have a lot of blends but I figured I'd start with things that recipes actually call for. Also I remember seeing a comparison done by America's Test Kitchen of some particular spice and Penzeys didn't win and are usually more expensive. I got a lot of small containers so I could try them and they were typically $1.19 or $1.49. All in all I spent only about $35, so it's no great investment. It seemed much more economical to pick what I wanted rather than getting one of their $100+ gift boxes.
The store conveniently had the spices in glass canisters you could smell (or I assume taste) which helped and was organized with similar spices together. So all the varieties of peppercorns were together and you could compare. Their descriptions were also helpful, explaining how one cinnamon is what you grew up with and this other one is sweeter with less of a bite.
So I got home and cleaned out the spice shelf. I kept some things, mostly to compare with the new stuff when I pull it out to use. I also dumped a lot. As I was throwing out some containers the recycling logo stared up at me, so I was good and opened up the plastic jar and dumped the spice into the trash and collected the jars to wash and recycle. Then I noticed some of the larger jars (it doesn't seem right to use that word for plastic) were old. Very old. They were apparently older than the recycling logo. I'm guessing about 20 years old. Yep, time to get rid of those.
My garbage smells very good though.
2 comments:
I would have taken your red pepper to sprinkle in with the flower bulbs I am planting to keep the squirrels from eating them. I am not sure if there are other spices I could use for that purpose.
We are going to use our old red pepper flakes to do just that and then get new fresher stuff. This is not quite the spice-alyptic turnover that you describe. How much did all of the spices cost to toss, some spices can be pretty expensive (saffron for instance.
As I said, I spent about $35 and got the small (half height) jars of most spices and the standard size jar of a couple. Based on past experience, some of those could last quite some time :) I have a good farmer's type market near me and get fresh cilantro and parsley and similar so I didn't count those.
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