A farmer's hands peeling a long pale sheet of cinnamon bark from a cut branch, with a woven tray of green and black peppercorns drying and a basket of fresh orange turmeric roots beside it in tropical light

The Spice Harvest: How Cinnamon Bark Is Peeled, Pepper Vines Are Picked and Turmeric Roots Are Cured Before They Reach a Jar

A spice is a piece of a plant that has been dried, and almost everything that decides its flavor happens between the moment it is picked and the moment it is dry. The volatile oils that make cinnamon smell like cinnamon and pepper bite like pepper are exactly that, volatile: they evaporate, oxidize and fade from the day of harvest onward, quickly if the drying is careless and slowly if it is not, and steadily in the jar afterward. This is why a single-origin spice bought within months of harvest tastes like a different ingredient from the same spice after three years in a warehouse, and it is the whole argument of our Burlap & Barrel guide. Here is what the farm actually does, crop by crop.

Cinnamon: peeling a tree

True cinnamon is the inner bark of Cinnamomum verum, a small tree grown mainly in Sri Lanka, and its harvest is a craft that takes years to learn. The tree is coppiced, cut back so it sends up thin straight shoots, and the shoots are harvested in the rainy season when the bark slips easily. A peeler scrapes off the rough outer bark, rubs the branch with a brass rod to loosen the layer beneath, and then makes long cuts and lifts the inner bark away in thin, pale sheets. The sheets are laid inside one another, rolled by hand into the long quills, and dried in shade and then sun for several days, during which they curl tighter and turn tan. The quills are cut to length and graded by thickness; the finest are paper-thin and crumble between the fingers. Cassia, the thicker, redder, harder bark from a related tree in China, Indonesia and Vietnam, is harvested more roughly, in thick strips that dry into single curls, and it is what most supermarket "cinnamon" is. Both are cinnamon in the kitchen sense; the Sri Lankan quill is sweeter and more delicate, the cassia hotter and stronger.

Black pepper: a green berry, wrinkled in the sun

Pepper is the fruit of a climbing vine, Piper nigrum, native to the Malabar coast of southern India and grown across the tropics on posts and trees. The berries grow in long clusters and are picked by hand, often from ladders, when they are full-sized but still green, just as the first berries in a cluster begin to turn. Black pepper is made by briefly blanching the green berries in hot water, which breaks the skin and speeds browning, and then spreading them on mats in the sun for several days until they shrivel, blacken and harden. White pepper is the same berry, left to ripen red, soaked for a week until the skin rots away, and dried pale; it is hotter and less aromatic because the aromatic skin is gone. Green pepper is the unripe berry dried fast or brined before it can darken. The heat in all three is piperine, which is stable; the aroma, citrus and pine and flowers, is in oils that leave over time, which is why fresh-crop pepper smells of fruit and old pepper smells of dust.

Turmeric: boiled, cured and polished

Turmeric is a rhizome, an underground stem of a ginger relative, dug up eight to ten months after planting when the leaves die back. Fresh, it is orange, juicy and bitter-sweet. The traditional cure, developed in India, boils the rhizomes for an hour or so, which gelatinizes the starch, spreads the color evenly and kills the shoots, then dries them in the sun for a week or two until they are hard and light. The dried fingers are then polished, historically by tumbling them in a drum or under foot, to remove the rough skin and give the smooth, bright surface a buyer expects. Only then are they ground. Curcumin, the pigment, is stable; the turmeric aroma, earthy and slightly medicinal with a hint of orange, fades like every other spice, which is why a fresh single-origin turmeric tastes of something and a supermarket jar tastes mostly of color.

Cardamom: one pod at a time

Green cardamom is the seed pod of a tall plant in the ginger family from the hills of southern India and, now, Guatemala. The pods grow on runners at ground level and ripen a few at a time over months, so the plants are walked every week or two and the ripe pods picked individually by hand, before they split. They are dried slowly, traditionally over low heat in curing houses, to keep the green color that buyers pay for and the camphor-and-citrus aroma inside. Cardamom is among the most expensive spices by weight for exactly this reason: it is harvested pod by pod for a season, and a careless dry turns it brown and flat.

Vanilla, and the thumb

Vanilla is the most extreme case of harvest labor in the spice world, and we gave it its own history: every flower pollinated by hand in one morning, nine months on the vine, and months of sweating, sunning and conditioning before the bean is a bean. It is the same principle as every crop above, pushed to its limit. The spice is made on the farm; the factory only grinds it.

What freshness means on the label

Single-origin spice companies buy directly from farms and cooperatives, often within a season of harvest, pay for careful drying, and get the spice into a jar within months rather than years. The label tells you a place, sometimes a farm, sometimes a harvest date. The difference in the jar is not subtle. Fresh-crop black pepper from one estate smells of citrus; a fresh Sri Lankan quill smells of flowers and honey; fresh turmeric tastes of something. Our single-origin spice guide covers the shelf, and our cacao fermentation and salt harvesting pieces tell the same story about two other pantry staples: the craft happens before the factory, in someone's hands.

Keeping what the farm made

Buy whole where you can, cinnamon quills, peppercorns, turmeric fingers, cardamom pods, and grind as you go; a whole spice holds its oils and a ground one loses them within months. Keep jars sealed, cool and dark; heat and light are the enemies, and the shelf above the stove is the worst place in the kitchen. Smell before you use; if it smells of nothing, it is nothing. And buy small and often, which is what a fresh-crop spice shelf is for. The spices are at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com. Somewhere in Sri Lanka this week, a peeler is lifting a sheet of bark that will be in one of the jars.

Sources & Further Reading

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