Want to elevate your cooking? Use great spices.

“It would be very sad for me to cook without spices,” says Spice King Lior Lev Sercarz, owner of La Boîte, author of A Middle Eastern Pantry, and co-founder of the Galilee Culinary Institute. “They bring a third dimension to your food.”

Spices are ingredients. Just as you would buy good produce and proteins, you need to seek out quality spices to incorporate into your cooking.

Debra Eckerling speaks with Lior Lev Sercarz, owner of La Boîte, co-founder of the Galilee Culinary Institute (GCI), and author of A Middle Eastern Pantry about spices, Middle Eastern Food, and how GCI is changing culinary education. He also shares his recipes for Sumac Onion Salad and Hummus Tahina.

When shopping, Lev Sercarz suggests:

• Look at the color of the spice. If it’s uniform and there are no specks of other colors, it’s good.
• If a package says that it’s a whole spice, it should be whole and not part powder and part whole.
• Buy small packages to begin with, so you can taste the product, get familiar with it and know if you like it
• Try a couple of different suppliers until you find ones you like.

“Then when you bring that spice into your kitchen, open it up, taste it, smell it,” Lev Sercarz suggests. “It needs to have a good scent and a great flavor. If it’s kind of mild and tasteless or odorless, then don’t buy it again from that particular producer or company.”

Be sure to try out the spices you already own. “You are going to add them to your food; it’s important to know what they’re going to do to your dish,” he says.

Read the full article on Lior Lev Sercarz, listen to the podcast, and get the recipes.