Spices

People imagine that dried spices keep indefinitely. Not true! There is nothing more sinister in a kitchen than one of those dusty wooden racks with little bottles of colourless flakes strapped to the wall, because it screams ‘old and stale, and completely missing the point’. Indeed, as spices are best stored away from light and heat, nothing could be worse for them. When you do an audit of your spice store, be particularly ruthless with ground spices as these rapidly lose their potency and the sooner you use them the better, so throw away anything in small opened containers that is more than six months old, and really three months is a better deadline (particularly in the case of ready-ground spices).