Vadouvan, and other Mourad spices

So, when I bought the Mourad cookbook, and read through it, it soon hit me that I could hardly cook anything in the book because frequently he calls for specific local ingredients. Like his recommendation that you take a "dry farmed early girl tomato" and slow roast it for hours so it looks kind of like a fresh tomato, but really it's a balloon full of exquisitely flavored tomato sauce.

And even a recipe like sauteed scallops has spices exotic enough that I hadn't heard of them.

So I ordered $50 worth of spices including Vadouvan, Berbere, Chermoula, powdered Harissa, Ras al Hanout, etc. and yesterday the Vadouvan arrived.

We have enough people here that are intrigued by Mourad that I imagine some people have tried his interesting approach to spicing?? He often uses spices that have nothing to do with Morocco -- Berbere, despite the name, is Ethiopian. And Vadouvan is from the part of India which was colonized by the French, really a sort of cooked curry with shallots etc. and then powdered.

I'm looking forward to experimenting now that I have Vadouvan. He says you can simply sprinkle it on eggs or salad and get a wonderful result. But he likes it best in a brown butter sauce, which goes with several kinds of meat as well as being good for breads.

What's your experience with these spices??

[Jenise]

I love LOVE LOVE berbere. Used to share a house with an Armenian guy who grew up in Kenya; his parents grew up in Ethiopia, both were orphans adopted by Haile Salassi (sp?), so the house cuisine prepared by his mother and her two sisters who lived in their same neighborhood for these huge Sunday family dinners was a wonderful mix of Turkish/Armenian classics and Ethiopian foods. God, I loved eating over there! Berbere was essential. In addition to the dry powder in the pantry (always brought over from Ethiopia by some relative), there was a jar of berbere paste in the refrigerator. The paste included fresh lemon juice and oil, and Vic (and I) would spread it on slabs of cheese and crackers. I've since tried to buy berbere that duplicates what Vic's family had. One small packet purchased 8-9 years ago at a Whole Foods Market achieved that. It was EXACT. But nothing else since has been; the jar of paste I have in the fridge that I bought from an Ethiopian woman who has a food stand at our local farmers market isn't quite right. I've made Paul Winalski's berbere recipe and though his is very good and I would love it if I didn't have this other flavor in my head, it's not quite the match I was hoping for either.

This never-ending search led me to recently order some from an online source called Whole Spice. I was blown away when it arrived--it's gray. A depressing ash-y grayish brown to be more exact. No paprika-chile component in it at all!

A good friend of mine made a heavenly fresh Vaudouvan. That's got to be the ultimate. He shared and it's all I've ever used for Vaudouvan.

Bought ras el hanout from Whole Spice in the same order as the berbere. Can't say I'm captivated with their version of it, though I have nothing to compare it to.

Well, Mourad gives recipes for all of his spice mixtures, and clearly that is the way to make them taste best. But they looked complex and challenging, so I wanted to jump over that step and be ready to cook. But in your case, with an image of what you want the end result to taste like, it might be interesting to look at the recipe and see how you can manipulate it to match your memories. You make me want to taste "real" Vaudouvan... altho this green powder that came in the mail tastes pretty good.