Why coriander is the first spice to go quiet
Coriander carries much of its aroma in linalool, which is unusually volatile. We measured a 2 oz tin every fortnight for six months and wrote down what happened.
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Notes from the mill room.
Short, practical writing about freshness, sourcing and technique — mostly answers to questions customers asked first.
Milling & freshness
What actually happens to aroma over time.
Sourcing
Origins, grades and honest labelling.
Technique
Bench tests and kitchen method.
Buying
How not to overpay for old spice.
Tellicherry is a size, not a place you should trust blindly
The grade means a berry over 4.75mm from the Malabar coast. Plenty of pepper sold under the name is neither. Here is how we screen it at intake.
What a 34% premium actually buys at the farm
Three picking passes instead of one, raised drying racks, and a family that does not have to sell forward at a bad price in February.
Aleppo pepper after 2016
Almost no Aleppo pepper now comes from Aleppo. What that means for labelling, and why we name the village on the lot sheet.
Stop toasting your ground spice
Toasting whole seed and grinding is a different operation from heating powder. One builds aroma, the other mostly destroys it.
A working method for tasting two lots blind
The 20-gram bench test we run before any lot is accepted, written out so you can run it in a home kitchen.
Humidity, clumping, and why we refuse anti-caking agents
Our blends clump in July. Here is the trade-off and three ways to store around it.
Colorado thyme: what changes when drying happens 90 minutes away
Cut in the morning, in the dryer by two o'clock. The difference in leaf colour is visible before you smell anything.
Want these by email? Write to hostmaster@origin.roozspices.com with “notes” in the subject line. Roughly one message a month, no promotions.