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Enjoying Tasting Oolong Tea

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Today it’s a sunny day with a warming, clear fresh light and a blue sky.  This is great weather to look at tasting oolong teas from China and Taiwan (sometimes called Formosa by tea drinkers).  The clear light allows you to see the subtle colour differences between types of teas being cupped, while the fresh light air marries really well with the taste of oolongs.  Oolong tea is sometimes called wu long which is perhaps a better transliteration.

Oolong tea is called a semi-fermented tea, where green tea is basically unfermented (or lightly processed) while black tea is fermented (i.e. fully processed).  Oolong tea sits somewhere between a green tea and a black tea with exactly where they are in that green-to-black tea range having a lot of effect on the end tea.

Oolong tea has the smooth, light and refreshing characteristics of green tea with some of the additional depth of character provided by the firing process to give it hints of black tea – so you will hear people talk of oolong tea being “sweet” or “refreshing” or “flowery” or that it has hints of “spiciness”, “warmth” and a “light flavour of heat coming through”.

The tea leaves are picked from a special type of tea plant with large leaves, which are then withered and allowed to oxidize in carefully controlled air conditioned rooms.  When ready (and this is part of the art of the tea maker), the leaves are steamed at a high heat to stop the oxidation process.

I just love them.  For me, they have more character than green tea and white tea and are like a premier cru wine from a really small, specialist wine estate that’s been given extra love, care and attention.  Or perhaps they are like the mystery of a Rembrandt or Titian painting over the perfectly clean lines of a Raphael.  They are darker than green teas in colour but still often have silvery white tips coming through.

Some Oolong Teas

Some Oolong Teas

I have gone for the following types – an everyday Chinese Oolong Tea and a Taiwan Baihao Oolong (or Bai Hao Oolong) and two flavoured Oolong Teas . So I have chosen a classic style China Osmanthus Oolong Tea that’s been flavoured with delicate Osmanthus blossoms, and a China Milky Oolong Tea that has a silky, milky, sweet taste that’s weird – but beguiling – and has a round mouthfeel.

The Baihao Oolong tea comes from Xinhui in Northern Taiwan, which is humid and wet compared to the rest of the country.  This creates an oolong that’s really smooth and sweet, with almost no astringency, with a lovely flowery aroma of ripe peaches and sweet magnolia-flavoured honey.  Bai Hao Oolong is sometimes known as
Dong Fang Mei Ren or Oriental Beauty Oolong Tea because Queen Elizabeth II loves the special aroma and taste of Bai Hao and so she named it “Oriental Beauty”.

As you can see from the picture below it has a redder, darker and fuller colour than the green teas that I tasted a couple of days ago.  However, this does not translate into a bitter drink and it should be drunk fresh and without milk, sugar or lemon.  And while it costs a bit more than normal teas, it is really a treat for when you’re in a quiet, contemplative mood plus it brews well a second time on the same leaves – in fact I often prefer the second brew to the first as more character comes through.

Delicious Cup of Bai Hao Oolong Tea

Delicious Cup of Bai Hao Oolong Tea

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Tasting Japanese Green Tea

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

At Steenbergs, we are undergoing some changes to our loose leaf specialist teas.  Last year, we redesigned the labels to be bespoke for each tea type and with better descriptions on making tea, as well as being bright and fun looking.  Next week, we should also see the arrival of our own new bespoke tea tins – they are in a matt black with a roundel on the top with our name “Steenbergs Tea Merchants” printed in it, which is pretty exciting.

Allied to this, we are going over the specialist teas that we sell to give the Steenbergs range of teas more breadth and more interest.  So I am tasting, for my sins, green teas and oolongs over the next few weeks.

Today, it is the turn of Japan and their green teas.  I like the clean pallet of Japanese green teas without any hint of bitterness that quite often mars commercially purchased green teas from the high street – that’s not healthy and good for you, just plain disgusting tea.

I have chosen some lovely Sencha Fukujyu and Bancha teas, plus a Genmaicha, which is a weird, but traditional Japanese green tea, made by mixing Sencha with Rice Kernels (genmai) giving it a nutty flavour like drinking green tea with unflavoured popcorn mixed in – wacky but quite cool.  The popcorn-looking stuff in the Genmaicha are actually rice kernels that pop during the roasting process.  At this stage, I have not gone for a Matcha as I am not sure with the samples that I have tasted so far.

But I really love the Gyokuro green teas.  I have particularly enjoyed two of these  – an organic Gyokuro and a truly exquisite Gyokuro from the Tanabe District near Kyoto.  The Tanabe Gyokuro is grown under special bamboo shades for a tea with a unique flavour and is processed only from a small first flush; this should give a delicate, round flavour with a delicate, pale yellow-green colour.

Gyokuro Tanabe Green Tea

Enjoying Cups Of Japanese Green Tea

These teas have a delicate, sweet flavour with hints of sweet damp hay coming through that’s typical of good green teas.  The tea cups a light yellow green colour.

What are your favourite Japanese green teas?

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Two Media Mentions In The Guardian

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

Steenbergs was mentioned two articles this weekend in The Guardian which was most kind of the two authors – Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Yotam Ottolenghi – so thank you both. 

Both talk about Steenbergs spices within their recipe ideas, so if you are looking for what to do with cardamom or how to use za’atar they give some excellent recipes.  I think the Savoury Aubergine Cheesecake (Eggplant Cheesecake) sounds amazing and I will have a crack at that soon.

Here are the links:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/mar/06/cardamom-recipes-hugh-fearnley-whittingstall

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/mar/06/aubergine-cheesecake-vegetarian-recipe-ottolenghi

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Recipe for Vanilla Fudge and Coconut Ice

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

Fudge and coconut ice

I know this is really quite pathetic but I have only just cracked how to make fudge in the last year.  It always seemed to burn every time I tried to make it – the problem is that most recipes don’t give the mixture long enough for the sugar to be transformed into fudge.  I would then always turn the heat up too high and it would stick to the bottom and start burning, or turning the sugar to toffee and then burn.

Vanilla fudge 

450g    Caster sugar (organic & Fairtrade)
50g      Unsalted butter, diced
170g    Can evapourated milk
150ml   Full fat milk
½ tsp    Organic Fairtrade vanilla extract (Steenbergs is of course the best!?)

  1. Lightly oil a shallow non-stick baking tray – about 18cm.
  2. Gently heat the sugar, butter and milks in a metal saucepan, stirring with a wooden spoon until all the sugar has dissolved.
  3. Bring to the boil and bubble away gently, stirring continuously (and I mean all the time with no breaks) for 25 – 30 minutes.
  4. When the mixture reaches the soft ball stage or 116oC, remove from the heat and add the vanilla extract.
  5. Beat until the mixture becomes thick and pale in colour, then pour into the baking tray and leave to cool.  When cold cut into 2.5cm squares.
  6. For a variation, you could stir in 150g of organic chocolate rather than the vanilla extract, for a rich dark chocolate fudge.   

Coconut ice

397g    Can of sweetened condensed milk
500g    Icing sugar, sieved
350g    Desiccated coconut (organic if possible)
Few drops of red/pink food colouring (optional)

  1. Line a 20cm cake tin with baking paper.
  2. In a bowl, mix together the condensed milk and the sieved icing sugar, then stir in the desiccated coconut.
  3. Now divide the mixture into 2.  Put the first half into the prepared cake tin and press it into all the edges.
  4. Add the food colouring to the second half of coconut mixture and knead until the colour is evenly through.  Put this into the tin on top of the white layer and spread out. 
  5. Leave to set in a cool place, then cut it out into 1-2 cm squares.

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How We Are Reducing Our Family Environmental Impact – Insulating the Loft

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

One of the major users of energy in a house is for heating the building.  Space and water heating in homes gives off about 20% of the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions, which is about 5 tonnes CO2 per home every year.

However, one of the key issues for old houses, and in our case very old house, is that they have not been built with the benefit of modern technology that has invested much time, effort and legislation to make housing more heat efficient and so retain much of the heat within the building rather than to radiate it out into North Yorkshire – it’s a godforsaken task to heat up Northern England.

So as a start, you need to keep as much heat in as possible.

So my theory has been simple work down from the roof to the ground floor slowly but surely insulating the house.  We will work from the top downwards, as hot air rises so you want to capture it as it tries to escape upwards first rather than worrying about the ground levels at the outset.

The first thing, we felt, was to get insulation laid in the roof between the joists.  This had been done using old fashioned roof insulation over 10 years ago, insulating to 100mm in depth.  But we decided to insulate again with a cross layer of 200mm recycled glass mineral wool blankets.  For the first attempt at this, we bought recycled mineral wool – each pack of this Knauf Insulation Space Blanket contains 2.4 wine bottles (it was a 200mm thick roll of 1.48m2) and has a R value of 4.50m2K/W.   Government advice is to get insulation to about 300mm.

I liked this because it comes in a roll and encased in fire retardant polyethylene film, so does not need all that cutting and special equipment that normal loft insulation needs, and even more important it’s currently subsidised by e.on under some Government scheme to mitigate climate change so it was half price at Homebase, costing just £5.74 per roll. 

It has got a metallic coating which Knauf Insulation claims reflects heat and so keeps more heat in – I think this sounds a bit spurious! 

That means that the 35 rolls that I bought cost £143.50; this should mean that we recoup the energy savings within 2 – 3 years (assuming that we will save 10% of our fuel bills and that we had covered the whole roof void with the same insulation, i.e. multiply cost by 3/2; 25% of heat loss in total is through the loft and we already had 100mm in place, so I reckon 10% would be a good estimate for additional savings). 

It was pretty easy to lay it and took me about 5 hours over the other weekend to buy the kit and lay it over two-thirds of the roof void. 

Typically, however, when I got into the roof, I discovered that the heating engineers (or plumbers as I would have known them) never completed the lagging of the pipes nor the insulation of the water tanks, which was okay as they never relaid the insulation so the heat from the house kept the area around the tank warm – so muggins here had to finish that off as well.

Now feeling a bit good about myself, I bought something last week that’s a bit less simple to lay but definitely a greener alternative. 

There are two main alternatives: one from newspapers (Warmcel) and the other from British sheep’s wool and recycled polyester (Thermafleece).  These both have the same levels of insulation capability as mineral wool, but I chose Warmcel and bought 15 bags of this from £165.27, costing £11.02 per bag inclusive of transport to us.  The Thermafleece is roughly double Warmcel again for the same price per m2 for the same depth, i.e. four times as expensive roughly as the recycled mineral wool insulation and so tripling the payback period.

So going back to my payback calculations – Warmcel has a payback of 4 – 6 years, which I am happy about, but Thermafleece has a payback of 8 – 12 years, which is too long for me.  Basically, I think for the cost-reward, it’s probably best to go with either the Space Blanket or (to give you a greener feeling about life) go with the Warmcel.  I cannot see the point with going for Thermafleece unless you feel romantically attached to lining your house in a woolly jumper. 

But you do need to put the insulation down yourself as it’s pretty simple, and if you get a builder to do the work, you will blow any meaningful chance at getting a payback.

To buy these greener insulation materials, try these to web sites:

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Recipe – Pancakes Stuffed With Mixed Mushrooms In A Cheese Sauce

Monday, February 15th, 2010

Following on from making pancakes per Sunday’s post, we used the 8 pancakes, or crêpes, that this made by stuffing them with a mushroom filling, covering them in a cheese sauce and baking them in the oven.  This is how we made it. 

Selection Of Mushrooms - Chanterelle, Shiitake and Chestnut

Selection Of Mushrooms - Chanterelle, Shiitake and Chestnut

How to make the mixed mushroom stuffing

75g / 3oz butter
1tbsp sunflower oil
1 medium onion, chopped finely
1 clove of garlic, chopped finely
500g / 1lb mushrooms, wiped, stalks removed and chopped
25g / 1oz fresh breadcrumbs
Pinch of mutmeg powder
Pinch of paprika
Pinch of ground white pepper
1tbsp chopped fesh parsley
1tbsp crème fraiche

You can use any mushrooms for the mushrooms.  I actually used 100g of shiitake, 100g of chanterelle and 300g of chestnut mushrooms for an extra woody and earthy flavour.  Champignons from the shops can be a bit flavourless.

Melt the butter and heat the oil together in a saucepan and then add the finely chopped onion and garlic.  I whizzed them up quickly in a food processor.  Cook these gently until translucent which will take about 5 minutes.

Now add the chopped mushrooms and fry at a high heat until cooked through but not burnt.  Stir in the breadcrumbs, add the seasoning and the crème fraiche together with the chopped parsley.

To stuff the pancakes, put about 1 tablespoon of the mixed mushrooms in the centre of the pancakes and then spread along its length and about 3cm wide.  Now fold over half the pancake and roll up the pancake.  Place the stuffed pancake in a baking tray.  Repeat this for the other pancakes.

Putting Mushroom Stuffing Into Savoury Pancake

Putting Mushroom Stuffing Into Savoury Pancake

 

One Pancake Well Stuffed With Mushrooms

One Pancake Well Stuffed With Mushrooms

How to make the cheese sauce

50g / 2oz butter
50g / 2oz plain flour
500ml / 1pt milk
A pinch of ground nutmeg
A pinch of paprika
A pinch of ground white pepper
125g / 5oz greated cheddar cheese
50g / 2oz grated cheddar cheese (for sprinkling over the final dish)

To make the cheese sauce first melt the butter in a heavy pan, then add the flour.  Stir this well.  Let the mixture cook gently for about one minute then add the milk little by little, stirring continuously after each addition.  When all the milk has been used, add the first lot of grated cheese and the seasonings and stir in thoroughly.

To finish off the stuffed pancakes

Pre-heat the oven to 180oC / 350oF.

Pour the cheese sauce over the stuffed crêpes and then sprinkle the last cheese over the top.

Bake in the oven for 15 – 20 minutes until the sauce is bubbling.

Mushroom Stuffed Pancakes In Cheese Sauce

Mushroom Stuffed Pancakes In Cheese Sauce

Serve immediately.  We served ours with new potatoes, peas and a salad.

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Classic Pancake Recipe

Sunday, February 14th, 2010
Shrove Tuesday is the traditional start of Lent.  It has become associated with pancakes in Britain and so everyone spends the day making pancakes.  We regularly make pancakes for breakfast which the kids then top with cinnamon sugar or lemon and sugar, so I have decided instead to try a savoury pancake recipe, but more of that later.

First, let’s start with a classic pancake recipe.  This is the type of recipe that everyone needs to be able to bang out without really thinking about; it’s a staple, basic meal.  We make it without measuring anything – a bit of flour, a couple of eggs, some salt and add milk until the consistency is about right.  So while the recipe is a simple pan cake recipe, it was actually pretty difficult to work back to a workable recipe.

Ingredients – for 8 – 10

110g / 4oz plain flour
1 free range egg
1 free range egg yolk
Pinch of salt
275ml / 10fl oz full fat milk (traditionally you should use 50:50 water-milk mixture, but I like to give it a good, rich flavour)
1tbsp sunflower oil
1tsp sunflower oil or butter or lard – for the frying

Eggs and Flour For Pancake Batter

Eggs and Flour For Pancake Batter

Sieve the flour into a mixing bowl.  Mix in the salt.  Make a dent in the flour and drop the egg into this.  Add a small amount of milk, roughly 2 tablespoons and with a metal hand whisk, thoroughly mix the egg and milk into the flour.  Now add some more milk and whisk thoroughly again.  Carry on doing this a little bit at a time until the batter is becoming runny.  Now add the rest of the milk, the 1tbsp of sunflower oil and whisk again.

Whisking Pancake Batter

Whisking Pancake Batter

 
You need to slowly add the milk at the beginning as this ensures that the pancake batter is thoroughly mixed through and there are no lumps.  Now leave the pancake batter to prove for about 30 minutes; it really is worth leaving the pancake batter to prove as this makes the final pancake rise to a fuller height.

We often tweak the recipe in the morning by adding a pinch of cinnamon powder as this really makes for a nice, warming and homely flavour.

To make the pancakes, add a teaspoon of sunflower oil and spread it evenly over the skillet using perhaps a piece of kitchen paper.  You can use a similar amount of either butter or lard, but we like sunflower oil.

Leave it to heat through throughly until sizzling hot – be a bit patient as the reason why many people say that the first pancake just doesn’t work is that they don’t wait for the pan to get hot enough.  Add about half a soup spoon (2 tablespoons) full of pancake batter to the frying pan and spread it over the pan. 

Heat through until the top is just dried through and then flip over using a spatula and heat the other side.  You can lift the edge up to check that it is getting a nice light brown if you are worried that it is going to burn.

Frying Pancakes

Frying Pancake

Serve straight away or keep warm in an oven at about 125oC/ 300oF.

You can then top it with a teaspoon of sugar or flavoured sugar, or sugar and lemon, or (for the kids) spread with Nutella or another chocolate spread.

How do you like yours?

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How We Are Reducing Our Family Environmental Impact – Getting Started

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

I thought we could share how we have tried to reduce our carbon footprint and what we are still looking at doing.

To start with, I need to give some background about us. 

We live in an old three bedroom cottage in a rural location.  The house is built of brick and the core of the house was built between 300 and 400 years ago, so (to repeat what was unhelpfully said in the survey when we bought the house) the house does not meet modern building standards, which (of course) was one of its key attractions to us.  It is also grade 2 listed which creates additional problems.  We are a family of four – two adults and two children who are not yet teenagers.  Both Sophie and I work together in our own small business 9 miles away.  Also, I absolutely hate doing DIY so we were never going to cleverly improve our house all by ourselves.

As a household, we now have total estimated greenhouse gas emissions as 9.2 tonnes CO2e per year, compared to the UK average of a total of 12.4 tonnes CO2e per year,  based on a carbon calculator provided by The Open University and stats that they use – different methods give different answers. 

The first thing we did was tackle all the easy things that we were terrible at.  Here are some of our howlers and some of those things that we have improved on very quickly:

  1. Changed the timing on the central heating from all day to 2 hours in the morning and the evening;
  2. Reduced temperature on thermostat by 3oC from 18oC to 15oC;
  3. Putting curtains up in every room and started closing the curtains at night or (in this cold winter) upstairs during the daytime;
  4. Changed all our light bulbs from old fashioned incandescent bulbs to low energy lamps;
  5. Switched off electrical appliances at the plug when not in use, especially computers, TVs and radios, i.e. no standby and computers and TVs are not on when no-one is around;
  6. Reduced, reused and recycled more of the packaging we get and unwanted  stuff like clothes, toys and books – friends and our local Oxfam have been very happy about this;
  7. Halved the number of fridges and freezers we had – we used to have two of each and have reduced that down to one of each.  Both were given to friends of friends rather than being chucked;
  8. Put low energy plugs onto the fridges and freezers reducing the general levels of electricity being used by the remaining appliances – not sure that these really work but they sounded neat;
  9. Share car journeys whenever possible, which as we work together means five days out of seven can be done in the same car – this reduced our car movements by ten every week.

And that’s about all we did.  We do not have a tumble drier and only iron rarely (a karate gi and my shirts but only so very rarely); we do not use mobile phones (I don’t actually have one, but Sophie does have one for emergencies) or similar things like Blackberries.  We already cooked most of our food from scratch, buying organic & Fairtrade, as well as local where possible.

For more on saving the world, there’s good information at:

What have other people done when getting started on being green?

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Follow the frankincense trail

Sunday, February 7th, 2010
A Bedouin checks a frankincense tree

A Bedouin checks a frankincense tree

With deft strokes, a Bedouin chips away the grey, papery bark, then smoothes a green patch the size of your hand on the tree; it’s a scrubby, scraggly and unpretentious tree.  As if by magic, milky white tears of gum-resin start welling up in the freshly made green wound.

The Bedouin moves to another tree continuing his harvest.  At some of the trees, the Bedouin man finds trees that he has recently tapped and from these he removes handfuls of precious sap that has now hardened to a golden hue – this is frankincense, one of the world’s most precious substances that is now so rarely used in the developed world.

The trees that the Bedouin would have tapped are Boswellia sacra and we were in an imaginary walk through the fabled frankincense groves of Oman’s desert plateau that borders the green mountains of Dhofar.  This is where the best frankincense is grown as this is where the ideal conditions are – a steady tropical sun, pale limestone soil and an heavy dew from the monsoon.

Omani frankincense has a subtle aroma of balsam that recalls distant shrines or northern pine forests.  The trade in frankincense struggles like many of the ancient spice and ingredients trades as they are hard work for the money that you can make – in the Middle East, young men would rather work in the oil fields rather than the frankincense fields, while in Sri Lanka, young men would rather work in a bank than learn to prepare cinnamon bark.

Chunks of frankincense

Chunks of frankincense

From these chunks of golden resin, a whole economy flourished along the frankincense trail, from ancient Arabia to distant Greece and Rome.  On the back of the camel, this river of incense built up fabled kingdoms with names that have a haunting romantic quality and litter the texts of the Bible – Main, Hadramawt, Nabataea, Saba (of the fabled Queen of Sheba) and Qataban.

These ancient city states had their own languages, their own histories, their own law and religions, their own art and architecture and they created dams and irrigation to develop agriculture to feed their peoples and water systems to provide pure, luscious water for their people.  Then their kingdoms collapsed before slipping into the dust of ancient history, becoming forgotten tales and monuments (like at Petra) for tourists to gawp at.

The Egyptians used the “perfume of the gods” for temple rites and as a base for perfumes; frankincense is first recorded on the tomb of Queen Hatshepsut from the 15th century BC, where it says that she had sent an expedition to the land of Punt (perhaps in Somalia) to go and get some frankincense.  In 450BC, Herodotus, the Greek Father of History, mentioned the aromatics of Arabia – “The whole country is scented with them and exhales an odour marvellously sweet.”  In the Roman world, incense perfumed cremation rites and Nero lavished a whole year’s production of frankincense on the funeral of his consort, Poppaea.

The trade in frankincense nowadays is obscure and a very small niche, but in 100 – 200AD, Southern Arabia sent over 3,000 tons every year along the frankincense trail to Greece and Rome.

The Hadramawat city of Shibam

The Hadramawat city of Shibam

This 2400 mile trail began in Hadramawt in South Yemen around the ancient of Sabota.  Pliny the Elder wrote “Frankincense…is conveyed to Sabota on camels…The Kings have made it a capital offence for camels so laden to turn aside from the high road”.  The camels would have collected the frankincense from the valley of Wadi Hadramawt with its cities, Shibam, Sayun and Tarim.  From Sabota, the camel trains would go to Qana for shipment overseas and trading with India for spices or north to Timna and then through Saba, the ancient kingdom of Sheba.  After Marib, they would travel to Main and then to Mecca, al Medina and finally to Petra, where the ancient Nabatean Kingdom traded incense and spices with the Roman Empire.

Was it from one or more of these ancient frankincense kingdoms, that the magi brought their wisdom and their gifts worthy of a prince.  Along the trail, the caravans would collect myrrh, salt and indigo.  For the Magi, frankincense symbolised divinity, an offering equal in importance to gold and myrrh.

Today, the best frankincense comes from Oman, with Hadramawt long gone as the centre of the trade.  Frankincense is also grown in India, Somalia and the Yemen.

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Steenbergs Launches New Design For Spice Tins

Friday, February 5th, 2010

At Steenbergs, we have been doing a lot of work trying to refresh parts of our organic spices and seasonings range.  Now we have relaunched our spice tins into a bright new label and an elegant rolled tin.

Steenbergs new spice tins

Steenbergs new spice tins

Part of what we have been seeking to do is to pull out parts of our long list of spices and seasonings that can either sit as a standalone range, such as our Home Bakery products (which we relaunched in August 2009), or added value blends that differentiate Steenbergs in the spices and seasonings world. 

We have a range of over 200 blends that we make in small batches by hand which is way more than industrial spice blenders and packers can hope to do – they just don’t have the ability to work on small batch runs nor the inclination.

So during 2009 we redesigned the spice tin, which was originally a spice dabbah made for us in Mumbai in India, to a rolled tin that is now being made for us in China.  This new tin was launched in mid 2009 and looks much smarter and more elegant than the old tin that we felt was a bit shiny and the shapes of the actual dabbahs were inconsistent.

In the latter part of 2009 and through to early 2010, we have created a new look label for a few of our most popular blends – Steenbergs Signature Blends.  These labels are brightly coloured, individual for each seasoning and now include a recipe idea.

The labels were printed last week and are now launched on the web site and will be officially launched at the forthcoming Organic & Natural Products Show at Olympia in April 2010. 

They have great shelf presence and we expect to add maybe another 5 – 10 more over the next 2 years.  The blends that are currently available are:

Organic Fairtrade 4 colour pepper
Organic Fairtrade curry powder (a new blend!)
Organic Fairtrade garam masala
Organic Harissa with Rose Petals
Organic Herbes de Provence
Organic Italian Herbs
Organic Mixed Herbs
Ras al hanut
Zaatar

Tell us what you think, and what other Steenbergs products we should add to this range of Signature Blends – I am thinking China 5 Spice, Dukkah, Jamaican Jerk and Mexican Chile Powder.

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