How we source and grade
Quick answer
Most writing about spices mixes botany, food chemistry, cultural tradition and personal preference without saying which is which. SpiceHQ keeps them apart. Every meaningful value on this site carries a grade, and the grade is visible wherever the value appears.
The grades
| Grade | What it means | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Established fact | Settled in the relevant field, with a citation. Botanical identity, plant family, part used. | Cumin is Cuminum cyminum, in the Apiaceae. |
| Strong evidence | Well supported by good sources, though not beyond argument. | Cumin’s characteristic aroma is dominated by cuminaldehyde. |
| Reasonable evidence | Supported, but the evidence is thinner, partly indirect, or drawn from a single source. | Typical gram weights for a level teaspoon of a given spice. |
| Traditional practice | Long-standing practice within a named tradition. Not a scientific finding, and labelled as such. | Whole cumin bloomed in ghee at the start of a North Indian dish. |
| Culinary convention | Widely observed cooking convention with no single authority behind it. | Store ground spices in a cool, dark, airtight container. |
| Editorial judgement | Our own considered view, reasoned from evidence recorded elsewhere on the page. Always labelled. | Buy cumin whole rather than ground. |
| Uncertain | Recorded, but we are not confident in it. | Reserved for values we hold provisionally. |
The first three require a citation and cannot be saved without one. The middle three are honest about being human judgement and require a stated rationale instead.
When we do not know
A missing value is not the same as an unknown one, and there are three different reasons a field can be empty. We record which:
- Not yet established
- Genuinely unknown, or not yet researched to a citable standard.
- Not applicable
- The field is meaningless here. Black pepper has no Scoville rating because Scoville measures capsaicinoids and pepper contains none.
- Not covered by our sources
- Our sources exist and are silent on the point.
When sources disagree
Disputes are kept as disputes. Where scholars differ on whether classical “cinnamon” was the species we now call by that name, both positions are recorded with their evidence rather than one being chosen for tidiness. Popular claims the evidence does not support — medieval spices masking rotten meat, for instance — are recorded and corrected rather than silently omitted.
What we will not publish
- Health claims. Traditional medicinal context is recorded as tradition. Where the clinical literature is contested, we say so and stop there.
- Safety statements without evidence. A safety claim cannot be saved on editorial judgement or without a citation. This is enforced in the data checks, not left to discipline.
- One recipe presented as authentic. Culturally variable blends are published as attributed versions.
- Invented precision. Where a proportion or a conversion figure is not known, the field stays empty and says so rather than carrying a plausible number.
- Pages written to rank rather than to answer. Several genuinely high-volume queries are recorded in our intent registry as deliberately excluded.
Corrections
Each profile publishes what it does not know, in a section of its own. That list is an invitation: if you can point us at a source for something on it, or think something on the site is wrong, the grade and citation on every claim should make it straightforward to say exactly what and why.