The ready-made clove spice is dried flower buds with a characteristic burning taste and a deep strong aroma. They can be sold both whole and ground. In cooking, cloves have found the widest application. Its extract is used for the production of spirits in the alcoholic beverage industry.
Ground cloves are often one of the main components in masala spices, the popularity of which has recently spread far beyond Asian countries.
The most famous among them is “garam masala”, which is a mixture of spices, which is usually added at the end of cooking to give the latter a fresh aroma.
Cloves are put in meat, fish, mushroom soups, main dishes, including vegetable ones. When preparing fried or stewed meat, poultry, minced meats, strong meat broths and sauces, cloves are most often used in combination with black pepper.
It serves as an excellent addition to cereal dishes (porridge, pilaf, etc.).
The spice is often added to marinades when canning berries, fruits, vegetables, mushrooms, and fish. In Russian cooking, it is put into jam and dough intended for baking bakery and confectionery products.
Cloves are used alone or in combination with other spices in sweet dishes such as punches, mousses, etc.
Cloves are included in many sauces, including mayonnaise. It is especially good in dishes prepared from meat offal – jelly, jelly, brawn, pates.
Dried clove flowers are added to compotes, sbitni, mulled wines and punches to improve the taste and aroma.
Clove is a very strong spice, so its use in home cooking requires special care and attention. When cooking, it should be used in very small quantities. Otherwise, it can not only overpower the aroma of any other spice, but also clog the natural taste of the products used.
It must be used with caution also because with prolonged heating, the pungency of the taste increases, and the smell weakens. Therefore, cloves are not recommended to be added to dishes that require long-term heat treatment. For cooking, it is better to use a whole clove, and for sauces – ground. For products where bitterness is not needed (for example, in sweet dishes or confectionery), experts advise using cloves (caps).
In meat dishes and marinades, to give them a touch of bitterness, on the contrary, it is preferable to add petioles. In meat, rice dishes, fruits prepared for baking, it is best to stick a few whole clove buds.
Cloves in cooking are best used as part of various spices.
For example, for the preparation of sauces, black pepper is best suited as an additive, in confectionery – cinnamon.
Depending on the dish and the method of its preparation, the norms and time for laying cloves vary significantly. For example, it is added to broths, soups, compotes 3-5 minutes before readiness, to meat dishes – 10-15 minutes before the end of cooking, to dough and minced meat – in the process of kneading, before the start of heat treatment.
The norms for laying cloves for soups, broths and compotes are 1 – 2 buds per 1 liter of liquid. When cooking meat, you can use up to 2 buds. Moreover, if the product is supposed to be stewed, the cloves are used as a whole, if fried – in a hammer. Most often, 4-5 cloves are put into the dough per 1 kg of dough mass.
Curd pastes should contain no more than 2 – 4 ground cloves per 1 kg of curd. The content of cloves in berry, fruit and vegetable marinades is 3-4 g per 10 liters of filling, in mushroom marinades – 2 g per 10 kg of product. If other spices are used along with cloves, its rate should be reduced by about half.