Three Seasons of Curio Spice Co.
The 3 Seasons of Curio Spice Collection explores aromatic flavors from master blender, Claire Cheney (Curio Spice Co. founder) and honey jam maker V Smiley.
These 3 preserves use beautiful, fresh aromatics from Curio to celebrate fruit at peak character.
NEW jam flavor: Nectarine Lemon Yuzu Rose
Cherry Rosehip Hibiscus
Lavender Blackberry Rhubarb
VSP x Curio: Nectarine Lemon Yuzu Rose
This NEW VSP jam flavor is made possible by Curio Spice Co.!
Lemon pops fruit flavors while nectarines provide sweetness and body. Together they lay the foundation for this preserve’s star ingredient, Curio Spice Co.’s Yuzu Rose Green Tea, a tea blend inspired by the pure scent of yuzu fruit, which Claire first encountered in Japan while sourcing spices in the Wakayama prefecture.
Claire writes - “The intense aroma from this citrus fruit is unlike anything I’ve encountered - citrusy, yes, but floral and beguiling, like the smell of a glass-house botanical garden in winter. I tried to capture that in a green tea, since green tea is so iconic to Japan, and used rose to further emphasize the floral characteristics inherent to yuzu.”
As a jam maker, this was my first time working with green tea as an ingredient so we started by working through some questions on when to introduce the ingredient into the cooking process, in what form (ground or whole) and whether to steep it or physically mix it into the jam.
Marmalades, even super delicate ones like this flavor, pair well with hard, aged cheeses, but this flower and citrus-forward flavor lights up an unctuous and soft triple cream.
VSP x Curio: Cherry Rosehip Hibiscus
Our Cherry Rosehip Hibiscus Jam gets a jolt of fresh flavor with tart, uplifting hibiscus that comes directly from Curio Spice Co.'s farming partners in Zimbabwe. It's organically grown and boasts a beautiful color alongside its tropical flavor. Hibiscus is an edible flower in the Mallow family and can also be called 'Flor de Jamaica.'
Curio Spice Co.'s rose hips are grown organically on small farms in Chile from flowers of the Rosa canina family. Rose hips are the fruit of flowering roses, which are in the apple family.
When fresh they look like bright red berries, and dried they turn a deep burgundy and maintain a tart, fruity flavor without floral notes. They are packed with vitamin C.
VSP x Curio: Lavender Blackberry Rhubarb
Crowd favorite Lavender Blackberry Rhubarb featuring Curio Spice’s lavender flowers, directly sourced from a small, woman-owned farm in Applegate, Oregon. This culinary lavender is a brilliant periwinkle color and has distinct floral notes complimented by piney, rosemary-like flavors.
Check out this Bon Appetit piece to learn more about lavender—and how to cook with it—with Curio’s Claire Cheney.
Orchestrating sense of place into evocative blends…
Over several months of working with spices from Curio and visiting their production facility, it dawned on me that Curio and VSP shared more than just a love for spices. Not just that, spending time at Curio helped me better understand our work at V Smiley Preserves.
Claire starts with spices, the people that grow them, the history of them. She shares that. Those are the stories in Claire’s journal, the descriptions on the Curio product pages and the conversations you have when you visit their Cambridge store. If you want fabulous rose hips for making jam, Curio provides that, but there’s more! The spice blending. The sourcing side of Claire’s work is incredibly personal and packed with moments she’s subtly passing onto us—a rattling train ride from Goa to Mysuru in India, the encompassing colors of Ethiopian open markets. These qualities inform the blending process, the colors of the labels, the naming. It’s exciting and I realized as I drove home a day at Curio that this is what V Smiley Preserves aspires to do…with fruit!
In the ascendant spice category shaken up by a small handful of brands in the last ten years, Curio Spice Co. is singular in what they do. They start with direct sourcing work—which means fewer middle folks and brokers with product languishing in warehouses, tied up in complex supply chains. Direct sourcing also translates to better pay rates for farmers.
But Curio does more than deliver spices that are on average 4 years fresher than what you’ll find at the grocery store. Each Curio blend tells a story whether it’s re-telling a classic 5-Spice or Claire Cheney’s (Curio’s founder) experience of traveling through verdant Ethiopia and re-orchestrating sensory memory into evocative blends.
Our 3 Seasons of Curio Spice Co. shares both Claire’s sourcing connections (stunning lavender from a farm in Applegate, Oregon) and her blending gifts via an all-new V Smiley Preserves flavor Nectarine Lemon Marmalade made with Curio’s Yuzu Rose Green Tea with coriander and timut pepper.
Curio Spice Co.
Curio Spice Co. is an independent company on a mission to improve the livelihoods of spice farmers by sourcing directly from small sustainable farms, and to inspire culinary creativity by crafting blends that celebrate unique flavors from around the world.
About Claire
Claire Cheney founded Curio Spice in 2015. A career in coffee brought Claire in contact with commodity supply chains. Already a forager for wild foods, an avid collector and explorer of culinary history, Claire has built a business around direct sourcing and blending spices in a way that highlights spice origins and history. As Curio’s Founder and Blender-in-Chief, she travels extensively to research local spice traditions and forge farmer relationships to share those traditions with us.
