Cloves
- Origin
As many spices clove has a very distinctive smell and taste. Cloves are small flower dried flower buds. It is easy to check the quality of cloves. If you put them into water, the good cloves will drown or float vertically. If they float horizontally, it means that they do not contain enough oil. Another feature of good cloves is elasticity. The buds should bend and not beak even when they are dry and leave an oily print when pressed against paper.

- Varieties
The buds are not the only parts of the cloves tree that can be sued as a spice. It fruits have the same delicate scent as its buds. It is easy to confuse ground fruits with ground flower buds. They differ only in the content of starch. There is much more of it the fruits and that is why one drop of iodine will help to find out which is which. The powder that contain more starch will turn blue.

- Usage
Cloves are often used for marinades and sauces. They go great with cabbage dishes. Cloves give away their taste and smell when put into water, both cold and hot. Increased temperatures remove the smell of cloves and make the taste unpleasantly bitter. It is especially undesirable in sweet dishes. This means that the later cloves are added to the dish, the nicer and subtler taste and smell they will provide. Cloves should be added to meat 10-15 before it is ready, to stocks and soups – 3-5 minutes, to dough and mince – while they are cold.

- Amount
The greatest amount of cloves is usually put into marinade, for examples for mushroom marinades 1-2g of cloves are used per 10kg of mushrooms. When combined with other spices cloves should make up 1/5-1/7 part of the mix. When cooking soups and stocks 1 bud is enough for 2-3.5 glasses of liquid, while 2 buds are enough for each portion of meat.

- Combinations/substitutions
When combined with cinnamon cloves can be used in sweet puddings and bakery, whereas combined with black pepper they are great for fried or roast meat, mince meat and sauces for poultry.
It is best not to combine large doses of clove with vinegar, wine and products that contain alcohol. Alcohol dilutes bitter components much better than water and they do not only have unpleasant taste, they can be harmful as well.

- Storage
Ground cloves should be bought in the smallest possible amount, because it gets spoiled very fast and acquires unpleasant smell no matter how you store it.

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