Recipes
Homemade Pumpkin Spice Blend
Five ground spices, a set of scales and about five minutes. It keeps for six months and it is the warm note running through my keto granola.
It is mostly cinnamon
That is the thing to understand about pumpkin spice. It is not a mystery blend. It is cinnamon, with four other spices doing quiet work behind it.
Cinnamon is about sixty per cent of this. Nutmeg and ginger are the next layer, cloves are there in a much smaller amount because they will take over if you let them, and the cardamom is optional.
Once you know the ratio you can adjust it to your own taste, which is the real reason to make it rather than buy it.
You can see it in the photo above. The cinnamon pile is larger than everything else put together.
Weigh it, do not spoon it
Ground spices are not all the same density, so a teaspoon of cinnamon and a teaspoon of cloves are not the same amount of anything.
Weighing takes the guesswork out, and more importantly it means the jar you make in November tastes like the jar you made in September. Tare the scale, add one spice at a time, and you are done in five minutes.
If you do not have scales, the rough spoon version is four parts cinnamon to one part nutmeg, one part ginger and half a part cloves.
Whisk it properly
Ground nutmeg and ginger clump. If you tip everything into a jar and shake it, you get pockets of one spice and pockets of another, and the first teaspoon will not taste like the last.
Whisk it in a bowl with a fork until the colour is completely even, then funnel it in.
Six months, and then it fades
It does not spoil. It just stops tasting of much.
Ground spices lose their volatile oils over time, which is where all the smell and most of the flavour live. Six months in a sealed jar in a dark cupboard is about right. After that it is still perfectly safe, it is just quieter.
Make a small jar often rather than a big jar once.
Where I use it
A teaspoon of it goes into my keto cluster granola, which is the thing I make most often with it.
Otherwise: in baking, stirred into morning coffee, which is the version everybody already knows about and is still the best one, or with a spoonful of homemade pumpkin puree.
The recipe
- Prep
- 5 minutes
- Serves
- About 60g, roughly 25 teaspoons
Ingredients
The blend
- 36g ground cinnamon
- 9g ground nutmeg
- 9g ground ginger
- 4.5g ground cloves
- 1g ground cardamom, optional. It adds a subtle fragrant warmth
Method
Weigh it
- Put a small bowl or a clean glass spice jar on a digital scale and tare it to zero.
- Weigh out the cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and cloves, and the cardamom if you are using it.
Mix it
- Whisk thoroughly with a mini whisk or a fork, breaking up any clumps in the nutmeg and ginger, until the colour and texture are completely uniform.
Store it
- Funnel it into an airtight glass spice jar.
- Keep it sealed in a cool dark cupboard for up to 6 months.
Thanks for reading.
More on PCOS, real food and faith, written from the middle of it.
One email a month. Unsubscribe any time.