Throughout my thirty years working in kitchens, in places such as London, Orlando, LA and Vegas, I experienced many cultures and cuisines. Two of those cuisines have stuck with me for many years and I find myself going back to them on certain occasions, either by cooking a special meal for friends and family or just putting those dishes in my next cookbook. Those two cuisines are American barbecue and Mexican, they have cemented themselves into my chef brain so to speak! I was fortunate enough to learn both cooking styles, for BBQ, I have a good friend who taught me proper “redneck” barbecue and smoking. Not only was I lucky enough to work with him for quite a few years but we became good friends. We would have a good ole fashioned cook off at his or my house on our days off, barbecuing and smoking all day long keeping hydrated with some ice-cold beers such as Mexican Modelo or a nice Samuel Adams, and on some special occasions the old Jim Beam bourbon came out.
I cannot put a finger on it, but hanging out with your mate, drinking a few beers, contemplating what life has thrown at you throughout the week whilst stoking a fire and smoking a chunk of pig or cow for a few hours are golden times! Watching the flames flickering along as we both thought about the decisions we made in life and ponder what lay ahead in our lives. I am glad to say that even though I now live 3000 miles away, we still keep in touch. Also, I was fortunate to work with many Mexicans in my line of work in Vegas, coming into the states from the UK, I experienced proper authentic Mexican foods of which I never tasted before in the UK. Such a versatile cuisine from cooking tamales traditionally on New Year’s Eve to making the ultimate tacos and salsas. It was intriguing hearing Mexicans argue over their recipes, some of which were from their family roots or just a recipe that was “their creation”. And if your reading this and have any form of Tabasco in your kitchen or any plastic del taco tacos, please chuck em out and research how to make your own, you wont regret it. Salsas are all about tasting the “char” of the ingredients then the certain chilli flavour what was used, it’s not a mouthful of vinegary sharp tasting cat piss, and to note – vinegar doesn’t belong in salsas/hot sauces like tabasco. It doesn’t even deserve to be called a hot sauce, it’s what the Mexicans call a (dam white boy) sauce (pinche gringo’s).
Since we had the sunshine everyday, our main way of cooking at home was a bbq 2-3 times a week! It was common nature after a couple of years living in vegas for me to pop into the mercado Mexican market on a weekend and buy some bits for our weekly dinners. It was a normal routine cooking dinner from the bbq, and when the dinner was served, we used to put a few chillies onto the grill and take them off a couple of hours later, and use them in tomorrow’s dish weather that be in the main dish or as a salsa.
During these years, my love for Mexican food grew and I guess this is why I have a couple of those chillies in my spices! As with my spare time I decided to open a spice business this year called Broes seasonings “B for Brad and my last name Roe”. I have started with three seasonings and just taking it easy and seeing how it goes. The three flavours are smoked Jalapeno salt, smoked habanero curry powder and a smoked garlic & rosemary salt. The cooking side of it was quite straight forward, but I had to smoke the chillies for more than five hours to get the smoky flavour to punch through the salt. Jalapeños are mild so the chilli salt is a nice mellow taste and not a burn your mouth out sensation, so a mellow taste of jalapeño then the backdrop of smokiness comes in. The habanero chillies are charred first then smoked, this gives them a slight sweetness, they are then mixed with some curry spice, you taste the curry powder first, then the habanero chilli kicks in at the end. The garlic is simply smoked, then blended into sea salt with fresh rosemary. For all of the seasonings, after smoking, I then dehydrate them all overnight then grind in a vitamix blender. (Fell in love with these blenders after using them in the states for years, amazing for refined sauces too!) They are then mixed with sea salt and packaged, labelled up and ready for sales on my Shopify website - https://broesseasonings.com/
Smoked Jalapeno salt £5.42
Smoked Garlic salt £5.42
Smoked Habanero curry powder £7.25
(All 200g packets).
The cooking part of it came easy, then after researching it all, mainly on good old Google or YouTube, I realised that the overheads just kept coming! Things like Shopify website monthly payments, business insurance, label design, trading standards label guidelines, packaging, and the lovely nutritics monthly subscription £ (nutritional info) even on chilli salt! Yea I’m sure someone out there wants to know how many tablespoons of chilli salt they can consume in one sitting lol!! Then the added nightmare of international shipping came along.
I found this one out the hard way as sending my mate Mark in NewYork some packets, they got to his destination, but customs threw away the packets and sent him the empty envelope! At the post office when I was sending, I was assured that everything was in order!
I wonder what sniffer dog in New York’s JFK airport turned his nose up to my three seasonings (literally)! Maybe the dog was just having a bad day and sniffed too much coke the day before and had a hangover!
Or it was a lazy customs official that couldn’t be bothered to check the customs form and just threw it into the nearest trash can.
I then found out after researching it, that the postal worker was wrong and that you have to include a form with all the commodity codes of each ingredient in the package. This way, each ingredient can be easily recognised by customs to see what’s in the package and conclude that it is not a class A drug like, cocaine.
And to add to all of that, new custom tariffs arrived from Donald Trump. So, businesses from the UK, sending products entering the USA, pay more! Basically, meaning my package would have cost £16 if I sent it in January, but as of now with the new tariffs from Trump, I paid £29. That’s nucking futs Trump!
During my first month of opening the business, I guess the funniest part of it all was having a health inspection of my house (as that is where I make the seasonings). It felt a bit weird to me as normally; I would be in a professional kitchen somewhere walking behind the inspector with a clipboard lol. Anyways, we had a coffee, and he gave me some good information on the business. I told my partner that I was going to stick the 5 health rating sticker on our kitchen window lol, she wasn’t amused. I did however scrub my oven until it looked brand spanking new and also caulked a part of the kitchen sink, to make it proper ready. All areas of inspection were solid and had a bit of advice which helped, for example, for the year on the best before date, I had 26, the inspector said to write 2026 to avoid any confusion. After completing all the paperwork, the last piece of the jigsaw was doing the math for the recipes, working out wholesaler costs and checking price points for example, if 5 kilo of chillies would yield 8 kilo of sea salt, I would then calculate how much it costs to make one packet of spice in grams, by dividing kilos into grams etc yep, tons of fun! I then added in all the overheads and came up with a retail price and a wholesalers recommended retail price. I am lower than the normal average market price, the reason being is that I just want to gain exposure. I also offer my digital cookbook for free, with over 90 recipes, with every purchase of spices made.
