Not just a seasoning. The secret of the aromatic table Inspice builds in Kanazawa

Spice is not a seasoning but a world of its own. Inspice’s flavour design and blending philosophy

Inspice’s spice blends share one trait.
They rise like a perfume, run deep, and leave a scent behind that stays with you.

Just as the naming and the packaging carry a story, the construction of the blend itself is designed to speak to feeling and to memory.

Take the DISH SYMPHONY series.

This line of seasonings is not made simply to bring a dish’s taste into order. It is made to install a landscape of aroma into the cooking.

The first thing we do in development is to imagine where we are standing and what air we are breathing.

Humidity, season, morning or night.
The conversation running through that space, and the sounds that reach it.
Are we beside a fire, in a forest, or in the noise of an old market?
Those details, stacked one on another, make the scene of an aroma.

And then that air is drawn out in spices.
The warmth of fenugreek, the quiet bitterness of mace, the grain note of roasted chana.
On their own these are only materials; combined under a design intent, they become a single world of scent and flavour.

What matters here is what we know of the flavour compounds each spice holds.
The piperine and dihydropiperine of long pepper. The citral and geranial of magao.
We read the order in which those compounds lift, how long they hold, how well they take to one another, much as a perfumer does, and set the blend by the hundredth of a gram.

To put it plainly, our spices are blueprints of flavour.
They belong to the category of seasoning, yet carry no recipe constraints on how they are used. They exist, rather, so you can enjoy the space left open.

The same philosophy shows in the SPICE CURRY SYMPHONY series.
People sometimes say the blends do not taste like curry. That is exactly the intent.
Curry as a dish is allowed to be freer than that. More creative than that.

No.3, for instance, has no turmeric in it, deliberately.
No.4 has no paprika powder.
Because rather than staging the look of curry through colour, we hold to calling up, through aroma, the feeling that lies beneath it.

By taking the idea of curry more broadly and more softly, you, the one cooking, can draw the outline of a curry that is entirely new.
It is with that wish that we design our spices.

Continues >> Part three: Aroma loosens the heart. A spice hideout in a back lane of the Higashi Chaya District

Part one: Under the spell of spice. A new seasoning experience born from a home cook’s spark