Why your cardamom tastes like nothing
It was probably ground in a different calendar year. Here is the shelf-life problem nobody mentions.
· 3 min read
Buy a jar of ground cardamom from a supermarket, open it, and smell it. Now crack a green pod and smell that. Those are two different substances and only one of them is cardamom.
It is the oil, and the oil leaves
Almost everything you like about cardamom lives in a volatile oil that sits inside the seed. The pod is a lid. Grind it and you open every seed at once, and from that moment the oil starts going into the air instead of into your chai. Give it a month in a warm cupboard and most of it is gone. Give it a year on a shelf under supermarket lighting and you are essentially seasoning your tea with sawdust.
The pod is a lid. Grinding it takes the lid off.
Husk and all
When you do grind, use the whole pod rather than picking the seeds out. The husk carries less oil but it brings a green, slightly grassy note that goes missing without it — and picking seeds out of pods is twenty minutes of your life you are not getting back.
If you are blending your own
Buy pods. Keep them whole and in the dark. Grind what you need for a week in a cheap coffee grinder you have decided is now a spice grinder, because it is, forever, and your coffee will taste of clove if you pretend otherwise.
The rest of the tin follows the same logic. Anything that smells of something in one piece will smell of less in a hundred pieces, and the clock starts the moment you break it.