Ep 13 - Green Cardamom, The Queen of Spices

Hello fellow foodies! This is Dr. Cassandra Quave, and you’re listening to the Foodie Pharmacology podcast! This was such a fun episode to tape for a couple of reasons. First – I absolutely love green cardamom as an ingredient in sweet desserts and in flavorful chai lattes, Turkish coffee, or golden milk where I combine it with turmeric and ginger, or even in a Middle-Eastern inspired apple turnover dish I like to cook in the fall. It’s been such fun to learn more the history and pharmacology of this flavorful exotic spice! Second, I had an opportunity to tour a new icecream factory in Atlanta – the IceCream Walla Company – where I met Reza Bhiwandiwalla and had the opportunity to taste test their delicious Badam Milk ice cream, which incorporates fresh ground cardamom pods with crunchy almonds into a rich sweet cream, creating a distinctive and delicious dessert as a result! Are you hungry for more? I am! Let’s dig in. Green cardamom belongs to the ginger family and is known as true cardamom – to be distinguished from black cardamom, which actually comes from another species. It is commonly used in sweet desserts in Middle Eastern and Indian cuisine, and is the third most expensive spice in the world! If you’ve ever enjoyed a dark, rich Turkish coffee – that extra special flavor of the brew comes from the single cardamom pod included in the recipe. *** Have you ever wondered where your food comes from? Not just where it’s grown today, but where it originally popped up in the world? Have you ever bit into a delicious, red juicy ripe fruit and wondered, hey – why is it this color? What’s responsible for this amazing flavor? Or – is this good for my health? Could it even be medicinal? Foodie Pharmacology is a food podcast built for the food curious, the flavor connoisseurs, chefs, science geeks, foodies and adventurous taste experimenters out in the world! So, join me on this adventure through history, medicine, cuisine and molecules as we explore the amazing pharmacology of our foods. Dr. Cassandra Quave is an American ethnobotanist, herbarium curator, and assistant professor at Emory University. Her research focuses on analyzing wild plants used in traditional cultures for food and medicine to combat some of the greatest challenges we face today in medicine: antibiotic resistant infections and cancer.