Sana Javeri Kadri, founder of Diaspora Spice Co, wants you to stop letting the spices in your pantry languish. “I think people are really scared of their spice cabinet, or they ignore it,” she said.
A decade ago, she started a successful spice company with the goal of building a more transparent spice supply chain and putting fresher goods on grocery shelves. Now with Diaspora Co Cookbook, which came out in March, Javeri Kadri wants to share what you can do with all that turmeric, black pepper and cardamom: “This book teaches you how to use spices very intuitively,” she said.
One rule: “No raw spices ever – you don’t just sprinkle spices on top of things. You’re toasting them, you’re roasting them, you’re simmering them, you’re sizzling them,” said the Bay Area-based entrepreneur.
Javeri Kadri and her co-author, Asha Loupy, spent more than four months on the road in India interviewing dozens of spice farmers and learning how they cook with the crops they grow. “While we love giving people recipes for California-ish or American interpretations of our spices, the most beautiful food that I was eating with our spices was always what our farmers were cooking,” said Javeri Kadri, who grew up in Mumbai.
She also hopes her book dispels preconceived notions about south Asian food – “that it’s complicated, that it takes a lot of ingredients, that it’s heavy or greasy”. The Filter spoke with Javeri Kadri about cooking for toddlers, the rice cooker she uses everyday and why you probably need to replace your spice grinder.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Diaspora Co started out with turmeric but now sells dozens of spices and blends. Which are your go-to seasonings?
I have two toddlers, so this is the thing that I end up using the most. It’s pepper, fennel, garlic, a little bit of chili and oregano and salt. I use it to season my meatballs, I put it on top of potatoes. My partner was making a buttermilk roast chicken last night and we added a teaspoon of the Everything Grill seasoning to the marinade.
The other toddler life hack is our popcorn seasoning. I developed it for my stepdaughter a couple years ago, and it’s become our top seller at Whole Foods. It has chopped masala, a tangy dried mango powder, as well as nutritional yeast and garlic and turmeric. It’s cheesy umami, but a little bit of tang and a little bit of heat.
I feel very strongly about pepper mills. What you’re looking for is a metal grinding mechanism – not a plastic or a ceramic grinding mechanism. That’s the differentiator of a good pepper mill.
Plastic mechanisms are going to dull after, like, 100 cracks, max. Ceramic mechanisms just don’t do a very good job and you cannot adjust grind size very well.
Metal mechanisms are expensive and harder to clean, and therefore people avoid them. But with a metal pepper mill, I have to grind it once to get everything I need. And if you’re grinding super efficiently, you’re getting full oil content into your dish, you’re getting more flavor.
I also end up using our Roshni mortar and pestle all the time. It’s really heavy – 5lbs – but that makes it really easy to grind with. There are no sharp edges, the whole thing is smooth, so nothing gets stuck in a crevice. And I use it just as much for making guac as I do for smashing coriander seeds. I really like the flavor of lightly crushed fennel, cumin and coriander. I used to put them in an electric spice grinder, but I’ve found that roughly crushing them in a mortar and pestle is good enough.
With two toddlers, what are your easy weeknight meals that taste like they took longer?
Pozole (a traditional Mexican hominy stew) is my go-to, make-it-once, have-it-in-the-freezer-for-the-next-quarter kind of meal and I like Rancho Gordo’s prepared hominy. They nixtamalize it beautifully, and then sell it dried.
Lately I’ll take a tin of anchovies, a tin of tomatoes, pasta and whatever herbs are not half dead in my fridge, and it turns into a really good pantry pasta. Sweet Prince’s tomato tin is almost like you’re buying confit tomatoes, and their Prince Edward tomatoes are super sweet. They’re also great on toast.
What are your most-used cookware and appliances?
I basically cook out of two pans: my Lodge cast iron and my round Made In dutch oven. [The dutch oven] sits on my stove perfectly. I love the handle, and I love the way it conducts heat. I’ll make soups, stews and all my Indian curries in there. There’s very little I don’t make with it.
My Sunday night ritual is making bone broth. I get all of the scraps and bones and veggies from our freezer, and I pull them into my Instant Pot for two hours at high pressure, usually with apple cider vinegar, fish sauce, turmeric, ginger and black pepper. Sometimes I like to top it up with some aromatics, like an onion, garlic, that kind of thing.
I am also a bit of a rice obsessive. We make it using homemade bone broth, so it’s an easy way to get nutrition and calories into my whole family. I also use my rice cooker to make congee, where I just double up on the liquid, and then I used to make kitchari, where I mix the rice with the lentils. We use it every day. [Editor’s note: we have linked a staff recommendation for a Zojirushi rice cooker.]
Where do you get your rice?
I go to India every three months and usually bring back like 30lbs every time I go. Japan and India do rice better than anybody else in the world.
I usually get a mix of Indian long grain and Indian short grains, and some just like Indian sticky aromatic. If buying from Japan is hard, I love Koda farms, a fourth-generation Japanese-Californian rice purveyor from whom we buy in 15lb bags at a time.
As an adoptive Californian, do you have any favorite local brands?
I’m pretty obsessive about Seka Hills Olive Oil. They’re indigenous-owned from Yolo County in northern California, and their Nuovo Arbequina is incredible. We buy it in a 5-gallon box and decant it, so it’s currently decanted on my counter in a glass bottle.
I’m a tea girl, more than a coffee girl. Song Tea [based in San Francisco] has this beautiful tea called Shan Lin Xi Winter Sprout Oolong. It tastes like cotton candy. At night we drink an herbal tea called soba, and it’s stunning. [Owner Peter Luong] is a master of blend development.
What’s an upgrade that changed your cooking for the better?
I saved for about two years to buy our Boos cutting board. It’s much easier on your knives. Ever since we switched to the Boos I’m sharpening my knives only once a year as opposed to per quarter.
We are a fully East Fork family, and they’re also kind of our cousin company: we share a major investor and I’m best friends with [owners] Connie and Alex. I have two toddlers, and I’ve had East Fork for about eight years, and I have not had a single break yet. They just don’t break and they hold up incredibly well in the dishwasher. There’s something about the clay compound in East Fork that is hardy to the max.
We tend to get a lot of different table mats from India every time we’re there, and we’ve run through them quickly with the girls. When I don’t have the girls [at the table], I use these beautiful, woven, matte mats, but then the rest of them, there’s a block printing company in India called Anokhi, and they’re just, like, simple cotton block print table maps, and I can throw them in the washing machine after.
What are some of your favorite cookbooks?
[Fresh India] is probably one that I end up using the most in my kitchen right now. Meera Sodha is incredible, and I think that it was such a smartly written book with highly cookable recipes.
My most dog-eared cookbook is Tenderheart by Hedy McKinnon. I’m always trying to get more vegetables into the kids and these are all the vegetable centric [recipes].
Rancho Gordo has written lots of great books, but they have an OG deep cut, which is the Rancho Gordo pozole book. And since we are a pozole-making family I reference that one all the time. [Author and Rancho Gordo founder Steve Sando] has really done his research in terms of pulling in heirloom recipes from across Mexico.
I have a special shelf for my South Asian favorites and this is specifically focussed on Tamil Sri Lankan food. Shanmugalingam’s recipes are so easy to follow and cookable.
The Dishoom book is sort of the mothership. Of all my South Asian cookbooks, that’s the most dog-eared.
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