About SpiceHQ
In one paragraph
SpiceHQ is a reference for spices, built as structured intelligence rather than as articles. Every meaningful claim carries a state — established fact, traditional practice, editorial judgement, or an explicit “we do not know” — so you can see how much weight a given answer will bear before you rely on it.
What it is
A relationship graph with pages on top, rather than a collection of articles.
Most spice writing is prose you have to mine. SpiceHQ records the underlying relationships — this spice pairs with that food, in these cuisines, for this reason; this substitution works here and fails there — so that a question like “what goes with pork?” can be answered with a ranked, explained, caveated list instead of an essay.
It currently holds 85 spice profiles, 36 blends with their regional variants, 367 pairing relationships, 251 substitutions and 20 sources. That is small for a reference work and growing every sprint.
How it is built
The evidence model is the product.
Almost every field is a claim rather than a value. Storing one requires saying what kind of knowledge it is and, for anything asserting a fact about the world, citing a source. The rules are enforced by automated checks rather than by editorial discipline, which is why the site is comfortable telling you what it does not know.
A great deal of genuine spice knowledge is customary rather than published — most flavour pairing is exactly that — and it is labelled as convention rather than dressed up with an unrelated citation. The methodology page sets out the grades and the editorial policy sets out what will not be published at all.
What it is not
The refusals are deliberate and worth stating plainly.
- Not a recipe site. Blend proportions are recorded as intelligence about how a blend is structured, with regional variants attributed. That is a different thing from publishing recipes, and the distinction is watched.
- Not a medical or veterinary reference. Safety answers are gated on evidence competent for the specific question. SpiceHQ holds no veterinary or clinical sources, so it declines those questions rather than answering them from a food-science book.
- Not a shop. There is no product catalogue and no affiliate logic. If commercial recommendations ever appear they will be disclosed and structurally excluded from safety and evidence surfaces — see the disclosure page.
- Not finished. Coverage is measured against a ranked model of real search demand and reported honestly, including where it is thin. The coverage report is public for that reason.
If something is wrong
Structured data makes errors easier to find and easier to fix.
Errors are expected, and a reference that cannot be corrected is not a reference. The corrections policy explains what happens when one is reported.