Don't rush your thyme!

One of the main reasons people urged me to start writing things down were the number of easy, practical cooking improvement techniques I've amassed over the years. "There's not really a book for these. You need to share these!"

And one of the easiest is how to sequence your herbs and spices.

Before the pandemic I belonged to a cookbook club, where a bunch of friends would vote on a specific cookbook for each meetup and then schedule a potluck where everyone brought one dish from that cookbook. One pattern we all started to notice that instantly differentiated the truly knowledgeable authors from the untrained pop star authors was which ones told you when and how to incorporate the various ingredients vs. the other authors who basically said "Gather this stuff and dump it all in." Dumping it all in together technically WORKS, but you're missing out of a lot of good flavour and aroma that way.

Cooking is chemistry, and two of the most important aspects of chemistry are solubility and volatility. Hydrophilic ingredients like salts and sugars dissolve rapidly in water. Hydrophobic compounds will never really do much in water and dissolve far more readily in lipids like fats and oils. Some other compounds do neither, and need a stronger solvent like an alcohol to pull them into solution; this is notoriously true for Italian tomato sauces, which often don't really "work" without at least just a splash of red wine or vodka to pull all the flavour out. So your fluids matter.

And then the timing also really matters: some non-volatile chemicals like salts and sugars will notoriously do just about anything they can to stay in solution and there's literally no way to boil them out, so you don't have to worry about them losing their flavour, whereas other very volatile chemicals (especially the very delicate flavour esters in some herbs and spices) can evaporate out in mere minutes and prefer to be sprinkled on at the very end just before serving. Adding these ingredients too soon means that by the time someone eats it, all the flavour has left the building and all your guests are getting is a little more dietary fibre than they would have otherwise.

Of course, when you’re doing something like baking, you don’t have much choice. But most other cooking methods, whether stovetop cooking, barbecuing, roasting, broiling, etc, at the very least give you a “before” and “after” choice, if not some “during” steps along the way. 

Putting your oily spices in early (and ensuring there’s some oil to the base, to help those flavours dissolve) while also saving your delicate herbs to just before serving time is one of the simplest and least-effort ways to take an already good recipe and really make it really pop.

See the table below for reference. If your recipe has ingredients not on the list, you should still be able to have a decent guess where it fits in based on other ingredients there.

One final addendum: There’s a technique common in Indian cooking for making your oily, seedy spices pop even more while still also preserving some of the more volatile esters they also contain: a tadka. To make a tadka, when your curry or other dish is almost ready to serve, you add a few teaspoons of cooking oil to a sauté pan, toss in your aromatic oil-soluble spices like black pepper, mustard, coriander, cinnamon, cloves, and cardamom, gently sauté until you can really smell the aromas coming out, and then pour over or mix into your main dish. It’s de rigueur for certain Indian recipes (like Tadka Dal, which is named for the technique), but also works well for non-Indian dishes like Malaysian beef rendang, peppery beef stews, and soups.