The Brief
DK Books came to us in February 2018 with a commission for a new reference and recipe book, The Science of Spice. The idea: demystify spices for home cooks, and they’ll be more confident digging into the spice rack when they’re cooking. The publisher needed detailed chapters on spice palettes and stories from around the world, as well as recipes with unusual spice combinations.
Our Approach
After digging deep into the spice stories and palettes of South-East Asia and the Middle East for the chapters on each region, we moved on to traditional spice blends and twisting up the flavours for the recipes. Each recipe had to be inspired by its region, but with a revamped spice blend, so an Asian larb salad with curried duck for the SE Asian chapter, and a Lebanese ejjeh omelette with a chipotle and black lime harissa representing the Middle East.
What We Delivered
Two chapters, 32 spice blends and four original recipes were delivered in February, and returned to us in glorious hardback form when The Science of Spice was published in October 2018. It rocketed straight to the top of the Amazon bestseller list (Organic Chemistry category).