Roasting.

This process involves warming the whole species up which leads to releasing and intensifying their flavor and aroma. You need to place frying pan on medium heat, warm it up and pour the spices in. Depending on spices size, the warm-up process lasts from one to three, and in some cases up to 5-10 minutes. Do not forget to stir the spices and shake the frying pan constantly to prevent burning the spices. When spices become a bit darker and get to smoking point and you sense a pleasant aroma, that means that spices warmed up enough and essential oils came into effect. After that you should lay the spices out into a plate or a bowl and let them cool down. Once they are cool, you should put them into a mortar or a coffee grinder and bring them to the desired grinding. In most cases, spices are warmed up in a dry frying pan. However, some recipes require roasting spices in hot oil. Usually, this should be done before adding fresh ingredients or for flavoring the oil.

Crushing in a mortar or blender.

Most cooks store their spices as whole spices as this is how they retain their flavour and aroma for a long time, unlike ground spices. When adding spices to a spice blend you certainly need to grind them. Soft spices should be ground in stone mortars while being added little by little – 2 tablespoons per grind. For effective grinding, move the pistil along the seeds in a circular motion. A coffee grinder or blender in turn is very useful for grinding more solid types of spices and giving a powder thickness to the mix. Fresh ingredients such as ginger, garlic, chili and herbs can easily ground in the same mortar. For a more homogeneous paste, use a blender when grinding fresh ingredients. The smaller the pieces you put in the device, the more uniform the paste will be. To combine all the ingredients into a homogeneous paste, you need to add a little of vegetable oil.

Grating.

Sometimes, fresh ingredients such as garlic, ginger, galangal and chili pepper are grated in a grater before being added to the paste. Grater is also very useful for grinding nutmeg and removing the peel from citrus fruits.

Pounding.

Fresh ingredients with a soft texture, such as lemongrass, ginger, galangal and some others are often pounded with the back of the knife (spine) before cooking to release their aroma. Such a technique is used saturate a certain spicy combination with the aroma and flavors of the ingredients listed above just before removing them.

Cutting fresh ingredients.

This method is used for preparing fresh ingredients for making paste out of them. It consists in slicing spices into sticks or small cubes to intensify an aroma of fresh spices such as lime leaves, ginger, chili and lemongrass. Lime leaves are cut into small strips; the chili pepper is cut along into two parts and, after removing the seeds, it can be cut in any form; the white part of the lemongrass after, cutting the outer layer, is cut into rings. A large root of ginger or galangal is cut in following way: cut off a piece of necessary size, peel and cut across the fibers (in a form of thin slices, strips or small cubes). In addition to these ingredients, this method is used to prepare various herbs for paste preparation.

Fresh herbs processing.

After purchase, fresh herbs should be thoroughly rinsed off dust and dirt under running cold water and then dried. Then it’s time for their further processing. Usually, only leaves and small stalks of herbs are used for pastes and sauces. Large stalks are usually removed but not disposed as they can be used for aromatization of various other dishes to avoid a great deal of waste in kitchen. These large stalks can be added to salads or cold dishes and snacks. Wood stalks of rosemary, thyme, tarragon, oregano or marjoram can be used as skewers or for flavoring, for example, they can be added into a stew, soup, on grill coal or barbecue.