When making soups and stews, sometimes you don't want to have to mess around with fishing things out like bay leaves, allspice berries, bunches of thyme and rosemary, and lemon peel. The classic French way of dealing with this is to make a bouquet garni, a little packet of herbs and spices all bundled up in a leek leaf and tied up with cotton string. You can easily fish the packet out of the cooking liquid and voilà !If, however, you're in no mood to make up a bouquet garni, someone has invented this thing. I call it a spice ball. It looks like a sea mine, but on a much smaller scale. It opens up and in go the spices and herbs, then you submerge it in your liquid and hang the chain on the side of the pot. Works great and easy to retrieve !
We have another that's made of a fine screen mesh because this one will let the occasional pepper corn through.
I would have said this was for tea ;)
ReplyDeleteOne can see what I am interested in!
;)
I have a bunch of those too, but like Claude said, I use them for loose-leaf tea. Now you've got me wondering if I'm using them the right way or not....*S*
ReplyDeleteWhether it's for tea (which is what I would have said, too) or for spices, it looks like a nice sturdy one.
ReplyDeleteI have one for tea but will HAVE to get another one for spices. Good idea...
ReplyDeleteAs I recall, my grandmother had one that was much larger than those used for tea. It was the size of a small bowl, and she used it, at the turn of last century, to cook rice in some sort of stock. I still have it somewhere. It is an antique! CHM
ReplyDeleteThis one is bigger than the kind you'd use for tea. It's too big to fit inside a standard mug, and the tea would leak out of the holes !
ReplyDeleteWe do have the tea kind, too, but hardly use it since we don't buy much loose tea.