Mastering Spice

A recipe-driven guide to spice blending from the owner of La Boite, New York City’s celebrated spice shop. Lior Lev Sercarz has spent his career creating custom spice blends for some of the world’s best chefs, and this book distills that expertise into 250 recipes organized around master techniques.

Why Start Here

Sercarz has two books: The Spice Companion (2016), an encyclopedic reference to individual spices, and Mastering Spice (2019), a practical cookbook that teaches you to use them. For most readers, Mastering Spice is the better starting point because it is built around cooking rather than reading.

Every section opens with a master recipe and a core technique, then shows you how swapping spices or adjusting proportions produces an entirely different dish. A basic vinaigrette becomes four distinct dressings. A simple roast chicken transforms depending on whether you reach for urfa biber, sumac, or Aleppo pepper. This approach trains your palate rather than just filling your recipe box.

Sercarz includes his own signature blends alongside traditional ones, and the headnotes share the thinking behind each combination. You learn not just what to blend, but how a professional spice blender thinks about flavor architecture.

What to Expect

A substantial 272-page cookbook with beautiful photography, organized by meal type (breakfast, vegetables, grains, meat, fish, desserts). The recipes are mostly straightforward, but some blends call for specialty spices you may need to source online. The New York Times Book Review named it one of the best cookbooks of 2019. It works both as a cover-to-cover read and as a book you cook from regularly.