What if seasoning started with food?
Trimilpa is built from blue corn, black beans and butternut squash, then layered with smoke, ferment, chile and acid. One jar does the work of a short recipe.
Smoky · Savory · Bright
Your spice rack is full and dinner still tastes flat.
Most seasoning blends are the same short list rearranged — salt, garlic, onion, paprika, a little sugar. They add salt and a hint of aroma, and then you are still building flavor by hand. Smoke from somewhere. Depth from somewhere else. Acid at the end so it does not taste dull. That is three or four steps you do not have time for on a Tuesday.
We started somewhere else entirely.
Trimilpa begins with the milpa — corn, beans and squash, the three crops that have been grown together for centuries because they do better in relationship than alone. Blue corn masa, black bean powder and freeze-dried butternut squash carry the body of this blend. In the current formula those crop ingredients together outweigh the smoked salt. That is a real difference in what is in the jar, not a difference in how it is described.
Then, on top of that base: smoked salt, fermented chickpea miso, chiltepin chile, sumac, maple, lime and Mexican oregano.
Other seasonings begin in the spice rack. Trimilpa begins in the field.
What it tastes like.
Opening — Cedar smoke, toasted corn, garlic.
Middle — Fermented umami, black bean earthiness, squash sweetness.
Finish — Chiltepin warmth, sumac brightness, lime and Mexican oregano.
Mild to medium heat. Aromatic, not punishing.
Start here, then use it on everything.
Roasted potatoes — Toss before roasting. This is the one that sells it.
Scrambled eggs — Half a shake while they are still wet.
Chicken thighs — Rub it on dry, thirty minutes ahead if you have it.
Popcorn — Shake over hot butter so it sticks.
Rice and beans — Stir in at the end, off the heat.
Avocado toast — Straight over the top instead of salt.
Yes, it is $14.99 for two ounces.
Line it up against the shaker next to it and it looks expensive. It is not really the same kind of object. A seasoning adds salt and aroma. This is a flavor system, and the honest comparison is to the four or five things it replaces in one step.
The cost is in the jar. Blue corn masa, black bean powder, freeze-dried butternut squash and pumpkin seed protein are food ingredients, and they cost several times what the dried aromatics filling a standard shaker cost. Fermented chickpea miso and cedar-smoked salt are not cheap either. Two ounces is small because the blend is concentrated — you use less of it than you would of a salt-forward seasoning.
If a jar saves you from buying a smoked salt, a miso, a chile, a souring agent and an herb you would otherwise use three times a year, it has already paid for itself.
One person, small batches, Hopkins, Minnesota.
I have a Culinology degree — food science and culinary technique in the same program — and before that I worked alongside smallholder farmers in Tanzania, spent a stretch on a regenerative farm in Maui, and cooked in fine dining kitchens. That is where this formula comes from. Food science on one side, kitchens on the other.
Every jar is mixed, filled and labeled by hand under Vitu Foods in a licensed Minnesota facility. There is one product, because the product has to be right before there are two.
One jar, or enough to stop thinking about it.
One jar — $14.99
Discovery Duo, two jars — $27.99, $14.00 each
Pantry Trio, three jars — $40.99, $13.66 each
Six-Jar Cooks Case — $75.00, $12.50 each
Shipping is free over $25, so two jars travel for the same cost as one.
One jar. Start with the potatoes.
If it does not change how a tray of roasted potatoes tastes, it is not for you. It usually does.