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Although cardamom is little valued in Western countries, it is among the oldest spices, very popular in Sri Lanka, India and Iran and an essential ingredient to Arab coffee (60% of the world production is exported in Arab countries). To prepare coffee flavoured with cardamom, the freshly ground seeds may be added to the ground coffee or a few pods may be put in the coffee pot. Bedouins (Arabic nomades) sometimes own coffee pots that can keep several cardamom capsules in their spouts; the coffee gets in contact with the spice only during being poured into the glass. Yet not all cardamom is consumed for coffee in Arab countries; it is also used for cookery. The spicy mixture baharat from Yemen, which is, by the way, the probable home country of the coffee plant. Arabs also like cardamom to their meat-and-rice dishes (e.g., kabsah), which may contain a multitude of spices similar to Indian biryanis. Furthermore, cardamom is a popular spice in Northern Africa and Eastern Africa, where population is predominantly Arabic: It appears in the Moroccan mixture ras el hanout or the famous Ethiopian spice berebere . In Europe, cardamom is rather unknown, but may appear in some cookie recipes (for example, German Lebkuchen). Nevertheless, usage is low, except in Scandinavian countries, where cardamom is popular not only for cookies and sweet breads but also for pastries and sausages. In the Moghul cuisine , cardamom is abundantly used in the delicious rice dishes called biriyanis , but it is also found in several mild meat dishes from the same region. In Sri Lanka, the pods are added to fiery beef or chicken curries, together with cinnamon Cardamom-flavoured sweets are found all over the Indian subcontinent. Sometimes, curry powders contain small amounts of cardamom; cardamom is also frequently added to the Northern Indian garam masala , especially in Kashmir, where the Moghul influence is particularly strong. Kashmiri people like sweet green tea flavoured with cardamom pods; no-one who has ever visited Kashmir and lived in one of the famous house boats of Srinagar will ever forget its taste, but for the rest of his life associate this tea with Kashmiri family life and endless talks and discussion in front of the fuming water pipe (hookah). In the rest of India, black tea is much more common than green tea; spiced tea is, however, not so common in India as its popularity among Westeners in Indian restaurants might suggest. Spiced tea (chai masala) is, in India, a luxury one cannot afford every day; the most common flavourings are cardamom, cinnamon, cloves . The seeds lose their flavour quickly when ground; even left entire, the seed show a loss of about 40% of the essential oil per year. Therefore, only whole cardamom pods should bought; before usage, the pods should be crushed. Green pods are significantly superior in fragrance to the yellow or white bleached ones. courtesy of Gernot Katzer's spice pages
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