Top Chef Finalist Beverly Kim Inspired by Black Cardamom.

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If you go into the spice section of any grocery store looking for cardamom, green cardamom is what you'll find. Black cardamom, less popular and stronger in flavor, is a different genus of the same family—the ginger family, to be precise. It's dried over an open flame, which gives it a smoky aroma. Beverly Kim also noted a menthol-like, medicinal flavor. "It's almost completely different from green cardamom; I was really surprised," she said. "It's very powerful. It needs to be balanced with other spices to round out the flavor."

Kim read that you're not supposed to eat black cardamom raw. She tried it anyway: "I ate it raw, and it's fine. But I don't think you're going to get the beauty of it eating it raw. You have to let it cook out."

Green cardamom has a light, citrusy quality to it that makes it useful in both sweet and savory dishes; black cardamom is used almost exclusively in savory preparations. Nevertheless, Kim decided to make a dessert with her ingredient. Inspired by the smokiness and blackness of black cardamom, she made a black cardamom molasses cake, paired with a chai ice cream infused with black tea, cardamom, and other spices. Other elements of the dish included raisins pickled in dark rum and lemon juice, baby carrots poached in simple syrup with ginger, a "soil" of walnuts and cake crumbles, and "ginger hay"—fresh ginger sliced into thin sticks and then deep-fried.

Black cardamom molasses cake, black cardamom chai ice cream, ginger hay, and buttermilk puree

JULIA THIEL

"It's all really dark, and I'm thinking it's going to look kind of like a wicked, stark black landscape," she said. "Like black hills of the cake, and the curly weeds of the carrots coming out, kind of like a dark forest. And then painted buttermilk puree on the bottom, because you need to balance those dark flavors with something light and acidic and kind of ghostly looking. . . . I was also thinking it's perfect before Halloween. I want something creepy."

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