Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on February 5, 2022

New York Jewish Week via JTA Try to come up with the most Jewish spice out there and you might have some trouble answering. But ask Ori Zohar and Ethan Frisch, the founders of the single-origin spice company Burlap & Barrel, and youll quickly get a list of spices with a robust claim to the title.

Jewish food uses so much cinnamon, baking sweet and savory, Frisch, a native New Yorker, said, noting that cinnamon is used in babka, rugelach, sweet noodle kugel and tzimmes.

Zohar, whose family moved to Baltimore from Israel when he was 5 years old, offered up nigella seeds, which are often used in Middle Eastern baking, and cumin, a staple of Middle Eastern savory dishes. But, ultimately, he went with poppy seeds. Obviously bagels and hamentaschen and all the other wonderful pastries that use either poppy seeds or poppy seed paste, he said. I think poppy seed has a deep history there.

Since starting their Queens-based company in October 2016, Zohar and Frisch have traveled to Tanzania to visit cinnamon and black peppercorn farms, to Guatemala to find cardamom and chili producers, and to India to source turmeric, among many other countries.

Along the way, they said, they found a commodity that they say was ready for the kind of supply chain revolutions that happened to the coffee and chocolate industries. The New York Jewish Week spoke to Zohar and Frisch about how they first learned about the spice industry, what makes for a higher quality spice and why you should find out where your spices come from.

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This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Illustrative snapshot of spices in the market. (Carlos Bocai/Instagram)

How did you first become interested in spices and the way theyre sourced?

Ethan Frisch: Im the culinary half of our business and Ori is the business half of our business. My background is half in restaurant kitchens I worked at a high-end Indian restaurant here in New York City called Tabla under a chef named Floyd Cardoz, a kind of iconic Indian American chef, so I learned a lot about spices. And then I left kitchens to go to grad school to work in international development, got a masters degree, moved to Afghanistan. I lived there for about two and a half years and was working for a big nonprofit, spending a lot of time in this pretty remote mountainous area of the country in the northeast, a province called Badakhshan, which is famous within Afghanistan for this amazing wild cumin that grows in the mountains. Id never tasted anything like it so I started bringing it home to share with friends in the restaurant industry and they got really excited about it. And as these things sometimes go, they started to ask if they could buy some, or could they get it into the restaurants. And so I called Ori and said, There isnt a business here, right? And he said, Maybe there is.

What are the social issues involved with the spice industry? What do people not know about their spices that they should know?

Frisch: What we realized pretty quickly was that there had been these sort of supply chain revolutions in coffee and tea, in cacao, even in veggies, right? People go to the farmers market, they want to know where their food is coming from, and that had not extended into spices at all. But spices are traded in similar ways to other agricultural commodities farmers are pushed to grow for volume, not for quality. When an individual farmer is doing something different, like growing an heirloom variety or using regenerative techniques, kind of taking a more holistic approach, it all gets lost, because that special thing that they grew is just getting mixed with everybody elses. So most people are accustomed to cooking with pretty low-quality, stale spices that have been sitting around forever, [that] have no sense of terroir, no origin, no farmer behind them who created something special.

Ori Zohar: Id say spices are the food in your pantry that people know the least about about where it comes from, about what it is. Whats been really cool is weve been able to kind of demystify that and go back to origin and create a connection directly from the cinnamon that youre kind of sprinkling over your oatmeal or floating in your coffee and the farmer that got that cinnamon tree when they were a kid from their parents and watched it grow for 20 years as the bark matured and became more fragrant and more flavorful.

Frisch: That was exactly my experience working in high-end restaurants in New York City, where we would list the name of the farm that grew the lamb, but the spices were totally generic, big brands.

Illustrative photo of cumin fields. (Wikimedia commons/CC SA 3.0/ Photo By Raju Odedra)

Where do you go to find the producers of these spices?

Frisch: Thats the fun part. Weve been in the business five years and so we built a really strong network. We now source from 20 different countries and close to 300 farmers. We meet them through NGOs thats how we met the farmer in Guatemala. We meet them through the local government offices. Thats how we met our partner star anise farmers in Vietnam, and a few others [through the] ministry of foreign affairs or ministers of agriculture, people [who] know who the best farmers are in a particular region. And then, more and more, were meeting farmers online, or theyre finding us on social media. We work with a nutmeg farm in Grenada where the niece, who is in her late 20s, is taking over the business from her aunt and uncle, and found us on Instagram and reached out. We went to visit in July, and now I have four shipments from them.

Do any of your spices come from Israel or the West Bank? Are there any other spices that youre thinking about bringing in from that area?

Frisch: We just got a shipment of Palestinian zaatar from Ein Sabiya, right outside of Ramallah. And its all Palestinian-grown ingredients the zaatar herb itself, the sumac, the sesame. But there really is not that much grown in Israel or in the West Bank. Weve looked at a few other things. Theres some interesting things happening around seaweed and Oris father has connected us with some seaweed producers.

Zohar: My dad is a marine biologist, so he works with kelp and seaweed and all that. Im Israeli, we go back every year, my parents spend a fair amount of time there. So it has been really nice to be able to come back and have some business there, too. Were always trying to find ways to sneak flavor into peoples foods in better and more interesting ways. And thats the general story around spices and how people should be cooking with them more often. You know, people often build flavor with salt and fat and sugar, which we love. But theres a much broader palette to paint with. And we think that seaweed should be part of that palette.

The great synagogue of Szeged, Hungary, July 2020. (Yaakov Schwartz/Times of Israel)

Is there any Jewish history of the spice trade that youve thought about or that motivates you?

Frisch: We were just in Hungary in October to meet a paprika farmer who we are starting to work with, and we went to visit the Szeged synagogue. Szeged is a famous Hungarian paprika-producing region. Oris family went to that synagogue many, many decades ago. We were both really struck by, in this stained glass [in the] synagogue, there were all of these spice plants there was ginger, there were peppercorns on the vine, there were fresh cloves. I mean, things that most people wouldnt even recognize; most people dont know what fresh cloves look like, and there they are etched into the stained glass. So that was pretty incredible to see that.

Zohar: You know, the spices that you smell after Havdalah, its cloves. And so there is this big connection between Judaism and spices and also in the foods that we eat.

A paprika market at Szeged, Hungary in July 1938. (AP Photo/James A. Mills)

Why is cinnamon so iconic in Jewish cooking?

Frisch: I think its a connection to the Middle East, a trading hub for spices going all the way back. There were stories that cinnamon sticks were from the nest of a giant eagle, and you had to lure the eagle away with meat so that you could steal the sticks from the nest. And it was Jewish and Arab traders, going all the way back, who were transporting spices around the world, ultimately to and through the Mediterranean. So we picked up some interesting flavors.

Zohar: I also think that its worth mentioning that the creator of Old Bay Seasoning was a Jewish immigrant who came to Baltimore, got a job at McCormick, and was fired almost immediately. McCormick, years later, acquired the brand, so I think thats a really fun connection between Jews and trading and spices. Theres always been a deep connection, historically, in this area, and Im very happy that the crab seasoning that is so famous was started by a Jew. It feels like, you know, we did it.

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These modern-day Jewish spice merchants want to revolutionize the industry - The Times of Israel

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