When I first thought about writing about my 12 favourite ingredients, I struggled honestly to keep it to 12. There are so many ingredients I love and think I could not live without so the only way I could reduce it to 12 was to make it my 12 favourite flavour bombs. Ingredients that are so intensely full of flavour it brings any dish completely to life, changing it immeasurably.

Cardamom was the very first ingredient I thought of when I came up with my list, it is one of my absolutely favourite ingredients. The wonderful aromas never fail to make me breathe in deeply and smile.

**Middle Eastern style cardamom chicken**

A couple of years ago my gorgeous daughter Victoria bought me a bag full of spices from her travels and overnight I put them in my cupboard until I could sort through them and get them in my actual spice cupboard. The next day I opened the cupboard the day after the smell of cardamom hit me, it was just so lovely and I closed my eyes, breathed deeply and thought I LOVE cardamom. It smelt amazing and so I chose to leave a few in the cupboard just for that smile factor.

Green cardamom has a lovely heady exotic smell and is described as being warming, medicinal, floral citrusy and sweet with a top note of eucalyptus. Now I have never smelt it and thought of eucalyptus or that it has a medicinal smell but I can see how those descriptions are used. It makes me think of wonderful far flung places around the world and is featured widely in Indian, Persian, Turkish, Arabic and Scandinavian cooking. Many of the cuisines use cardamom in both savoury and sweet although in Scandinavia it tends to be mostly baking.

If you look at the countries that use cardamom, it generally follows through the old spice routes (the Silk Roads) which linked the East with the West. Historically the spice trade was the worlds biggest industry and extremely expensive coveted spices were traded and shipped from the East to West. Thankfully the price of spices has drastically reduced, even if cardamom does remain the third most expensive spice in the world. The reason it is expensive today is because harvesting the pods is very labour intensive as it needs to be done by hand, also the pods ripen at different times, even those on the same branch and, even more difficult, the look of the pod does not change when they are ripe, it therefore takes very knowledgeable pickers to determine when the pods are perfect.

The cardamom plant is part of the Zingiberaceae family, as is both ginger and turmeric and is said to grow in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. It is also featured heavily in Arabian nights and in ancient times, was used in perfume.

Green cardamom is the variety most known but there is also:

White cardamom which was actually just sun bleached green historically as on the boats transporting the spices the sun would apparently bleach the seeds on the top, leaving the pods lower down green. The white cardamom is said to have less flavour and aroma to them.

Black cardamom comes from the Himalayas and is much larger and more smoky than green or white cardamom and predominately used in Indian savoury cooking.

Chinese (red) cardamom is larger than black cardamom and has a sweeter, slightly less smoky flavour than black. Again this is mostly used in savoury cooking.

To get the the very best flavours from cardamom either bruise the whole husk or, for a much more pronounced flavour, take the tiny little black pods out of the husk and grind. Spice queen Eleanor Ford suggests grinding the seeds with a touch of sugar to soak up any released oils.

Whilst it is mysterious and exotic, use too much of it and it can be completely overwhelming and I think this is the reason for the people dislike it.

As cardamom is not water soluble, it needs to be used with diary and fat. Think of buttery Scandinavian buns, creamy kulfi and complex creamy curries. It works extremely well with dairy, chocolate, coffee, syrups, nuts and fruits such as dates - think exotic flavours, and other spices it works well with is cinnamon, allspice, cloves and nutmeg.

One of my favourite savoury dishes is cardamom chicken, now don’t let name put you off because honestly, if you did not know there was 30 cardamom pods in there, you would never know. The cardamom works so beautifully with the almond milk, almonds and dates and it really is a wonderful dish.

Try some of our savoury recipes that feature cardamom, such as the cardamom chicken mentioned above, crab lasagne which has a cardamom cheese sauce, a gorgeous dahl or a good curry. If your tooth is sweet, try our new brownies, a cherry or mango tarte tatin, baklava cheesecake or baklava which has a lemon syrup which helps to reduce the sweetness. If you like coffee, try the vanilla and cardamom syrup which you can put into coffee, it is honestly one of my very favourite things in the whole world.

My 12 favourite ingredients: Cardamom

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