Spice merchant says 'follow your nose to flavor'

Ask spice merchant Amanda Bevill how to amp up a favorite chicken dish and she’ll reply, “just follow your nose.”

“We tell people to decide on flavors by their sense of smell,” said Bevill, owner of World Spice Merchants at Seattle’s Pike’s Place Market. “Go around and smell different spices. If you like the way it smells, you will like the way it tastes.”

Bevill, who lives part-time in Whitefish, is co-author of the new cookbook “World Spice at Home.” The book features 75 recipes crafted around 13 spices that will take an ordinary meal to new places.

“The concept of the book is how to use spices in everyday cooking,” Bevill explained. “You don’t have to learn a new recipe to use an exotic spice. Take these new flavors and use them in your tried and true recipes.”

This idea resonated with Bevill when she first started experimenting with spices more than a decade ago.

“When I started in the spice trade, I wasn’t coming from cooking,” she said. “One of the ways I learned about spices was adapting my grandmother’s recipes to using new flavors.”

The first recipe she adapted was her grandmother’s chocolate cinnamon cake.

“I added Kashmiri garam masala and put it in the cake instead of cinnamon,” she said. “All of a sudden I had two recipes instead of one.”

“There are 10 to 12 alternatives to cinnamon to jazz things up — from Kashmiri garam masala to Chinese five spice. The mission [of the cookbook] is to get people cooking outside the box and trying to get people to enjoy that exploration.”

Bevill’s roots are planted in botany and organic chemistry, which she studied at Evergreen State College in Washington.

“I’ve always been interested in plants and have been an outdoors person,” she said.

After years of operating a medicinal herbs shop in Seattle, she stumbled upon her new passion and career path as a spice merchant.

“I was down at the Pike’s Place Market and turned right instead of left on the sidewalk and ended up in World Spice,” she explained. “As a lover of plants, I came into the store and it was filled with hundreds of jars of spice samples. It was the perfect blend of my botanical passion and my scientific passion.”

The former owner was looking to sell and Bevill was in search of a new place to focus her entrepreneurial spirit.

“World Spice was one of the great happy accidents of my life,” she said.

Whitefish is the other.

Originally from south central Tennessee, Bevill was living in Seattle in 1990 when her father, Dick Bevill, was on his way across the country to visit.

“He came through Whitefish, fell in love, and was living here six months later,” she said. “Whitefish has been my second home since.”

With a reliable crew running the spice market back in Seattle, she now is able to spend more time here with her horses at the Walking Lightly Ranch near Tally Lake.

Bevill still tries to travel as much as possible to research new spices. Her favorite destination is India — or more specifically, the Malabar Coast.

“It’s the origin of pepper, cardamom, vanilla, and so many of the cornerstones of the spice world,” Bevill said. “All of our supply pipelines are well established at World Spice, so I don’t need to go to India for pepper. It really is about research.”

Her go-to spice is an original blend called Voodoo, a Cajun-inspired flavor with a little touch of heat.

“It’s just good on everything,” she said. “It adds that little bit of voodoo.”

She admits that newcomers to the spice world can be overwhelmed with options. It’s one reason why her cookbook narrowed the recipes to 13 spices.

“It can be intimidating,” she said of exploring new flavors. “So often we go buy one exotic spice for a special recipe, then it sits there sad on the shelf. That’s our spice mission, to pull those spices from the back of the cabinet to the front and get people using them in all kinds of things.”

Bevill will be signing copies of “World Spice at Home” at Cana Market on Baker Avenue in Whitefish on Thursday, Nov. 5 from 6-8 p.m. For the signing, she will be preparing and offering samples of Kashmiri garam masala carrot cake.

To learn more about her cookbook visit online at www.silkroaddiary.com/world-spice-home or visit www.worldspice.com to learn more about World Spice Merchants.