Newsletters

Visit to the Greek Island of Chios Our visit to the mastic producers on the Greek island of Chios was a great learning experience. Although, naturally, our interest is in mastic’s use as a food, it is also valued for its use in varnish for musical instruments, as a paint stabilizer, and an ingredient in cosmetics, soaps and insecticides, amongst other things. Also hailed

Vanilla Products As winter fades into memory, we are reminded that life is sweet. Now sweet things, like salty things, are both good guys and bad guys in the dietary world, so the line we’re walking on this is moderation. As our grandparents would have said, a bit of what you fancy does you good. We have three new products for when you are

Food Quality in Australia Have you been finding pantry moths a pest at your house? These pesky little creatures seem to appear like magic: what is perfectly silky-smooth flour one day transforms into a webby moth habitat in the blink of an eye, even when totally airtight! We all ask ourselves how this can happen, and as it turns out, we have only ourselves

Travel We’ve been busy during the summer months, firstly with a visit to the Spice Islands within the Banda Sea of Indonesia. Tiny islands, such as Run, Ternate, Tidore, Saparua and Ai, were once the only places in the world to have clove and nutmeg trees, and spice-growing is still the major industry of there. In this active volcanic area, most of the islands

Travel As this newsletter reaches you, we are visiting the Spice Islands aboard a 12- cabin ketch, exploring the islands that have been at the heart of the spice trade between Europe and the East since 1522. On the tiny Indonesian island of Ternate, native home to nutmeg and cloves, the sultan gave a plot of land to the Portuguese in 1522. For the

Winter Foods What a pleasure to have the prospect of winter, and relief from the sticky humidity that so many of us have experienced during summer. At last we can indulge in comfort foods, slow-cooked treats, and hearty soups. Taking a slightly sub-continental slant, the Delhi Dhal recipe on the back of our new and very popular Lentil and Dhal Spice certainly rates as a comfort food, and

Type Casting your Spices During the summer holidays, we were pondering on the dangers of type casting. We can all bring to mind actors who have played a certain part to such an extent that they have become that character and we can’t accept that they are capable of playing different roles. It occurred to us that the same pre-conceptions can be applied to

Spice up your Christmas Cooking     The summer newsletter reminds us that Christmas is upon us once again, the time that we ponder over menus for The Day. This year we’ll fire up the brick oven to roast our galantine of turkey, and keep the heat out of the kitchen. The traditional pudding will take a break this year, as we’ll nod to the

Most Outstanding Providore We were delighted and proud to receive the delicious. Magazine 2011 Produce Award for “Most Outstanding Providore” recently. It is largely thanks to our staff, for their dedication and attention to detail, that we were in a position to deserve this prestigious award. Herbie’s has just had its fourteenth birthday. It really came home to us recently when a customer, who missed our

Slow Cooked Shoulder of Lamb After such a tumultuous, tragic and dramatic start to the year in so many parts of Australia, we’re happy to finally welcome winter and a drop in humidity. We hope that we’re in for a season of relative calm and serenity in which to indulge our taste buds with the wonderful warm spicy flavours of true comfort food. And

Some Thoughts On & From India We were chatting with a taxi driver (as you do) the other day. He was from Delhi, and we talked about food – spices in particular – and quality. His view is this: cheap spices give you pleasure once – when you pay for them – but only disappointment in the cooking and eating; good spices give you

Paprika Festival We’ve been in search of Hungary’s best paprika, and recently spent five rainy days in the Hungarian countryside visiting farms and factories. We were treated to generous Hungarian hospitality and were privileged to attend the Kolosca Paprika Festival, where groups of locals cooked up wonderful paprika-spiced specialties. Our favourite was this simple but fabulous catfish soup. It’s a good fish, firm fleshed

Archived Newsletters & Facebook Did you know all of our newsletters are archived on the website? In order to summarize the contents of each one, we’ve just been re-reading them, and re-living our history. We’ve relished the book awards, agonized over price rises and the highs and lows of the Aussie dollar, reviewed many Spice Discovery Tours and anticipated just as many, introduced new