Marshall Creek Spices

So many spices to choose from! I was really impressed with how knowledgeable the staff is. Haven’t been able to find a place with a variety of spices for a good price. They have all important the weight lose spices! They also have a lot of sprinkles and extracts to choose from. Picked up a bunch for holiday baking!

I took a different route out of Long Beach (where I go to surf) and spotted a sign on the side of the road that said «spices». Since I am an avid cook and collector/​grower of herbs, I always stop at a spice market.
This was a great store with a wide selection of fresh, fragrant herbs and spices along with local raw honey available for purchase.
I bought several large jars of various herbs and some whole, fresh nutmeg, cardamom pods, ancho chili pods, etc.
The prices here are unbelievably low and everything is high-​quality. Forget that sawdust in the supermarket — if you truly love cooking, go to a real spice market like this one and see how using good spices will step up your cooking game.
They also sell a wide variety of blends, rubs, seasonings, and other pre-​made spice combos.

Same as the gentlemen before us, we have ordered the Dr. Oz’s 3 Seed Tea Mix and all the seeds are bone dry and sad looking. The seeds have very little fragrance and just not super fresh like they are when you purchase at them at the grocery store. The shipping was almost as much as the seed mix, crazy.
We tried the mix as a tea and it tastes ok but very, very weak which means you have to use much much more to get the same flavor as the supermarket seeds that are much fresher seeds. Strange how the owner says he has one shipping price for everything, but if you order something small for $ 5.00 you’re still paying the same high $ 7.95 shipping fees.
All in all this company has very good prices on all of the Spices… but if they are not really super fresh like this mix we purchased then its not worth it. We do love the large bottles of spices that you usually cant find anywhere else. This company should get fresher ingredients. Also, Dr. Oz does’nt want people to use his name for selling merchandise, so you may want to change the name to Triphala Tea or 3 seed weight loss tea.

These spices are the freshest spices I have had. GREAT quality and GREAT value!

I have ordered Marshall Creek Spices for years. I originally was looking for the ice cream sprinkles, also known as «jimmies» for ice cream and cake toppings. I have ordered many different kinds of spices. I really do like the one for the rotisserie chicken. The rosemary is great as well. I’m not so big on the mama dash, but it’s ok. The bottom line is there are great spices here that you will like better than the originals. There will be others that you may not like as much as the originals. You just have to try a variety and see what you like and re-​order what you love and don’t reorder the ones that you don’t like. It’s kinda like different brands of ice cream. Some you like better than others.

I feel entitled to write this review, since I paid $ 17.95 to do so. More about this later.
I purchased the three pack of Pickling Spice from Marshall Creek Spices through Amazon. I read their review and went to their website and they seemed to be a good place to get quality spices.
I am making homemade Pickles, all natural without vinegar etc and needed some quality Pickling Spice.
Let me give a quick description of Pickling Spice. Have you ever opened a package of corned beef brisket to cook at home and seen that little packet of round spices in the bag? When you cut it open you are bowled over by the fragrant aroma that truly gives Corned Beef its flavor.
Or that wonderful smell from a true Jewish Deli: ie Canters Deli in Los Angeles. The smell that smacks you in the face upon entering IS PICKLING SPICE! You should be able to open a jar of this, and in a split second, smell it from across the room.
Imagine my surprise when these very well packaged spices arrived. I was SO excited to open it, that I opened them in my car before I even got home. These were the largest bottles of Pickling Spice I had ever seen. They were Gy-​normous! I didn’t know if I should roll the windows down for fear of every deli lover racing to my car in the parking lot.
I slowly peeled the safety seal off and prepared myself for a whiff of a lifetime. I closed my eyes and took a whiff. And then another. I opened my eyes to see if there was a second safety seal that I had missed. NOPE. There was NO smell. The brownish grayish seeds in the container looked like they were carefully picked and laid to dry in the sun… in 1926! And have been there ever since until they were bottled and sent to me.
What the heck? Really? They had no color except for the few whole chilies which should be crushed in my opinion.
So I went home very disappointed and compared the ingredients to those from Schilling and McCormicks Brand. These have great flavors but I couldn’t find them in larger bottles and they were really expensive for the smaller bottles.
What makes Pickling Spice SO SO fragrant and wonderful are the following ingredients. The bolded ingredients are the most important.
Schilling and McCormicks
Cinnamon, Allspice, Mustard Seed, Coriander, Bay Leaves, Ginger, Chillies, Cloves, Black Pepper, Mace, Cardamom, and Sulfiting Agents.
Marshall Creek Spices:
MUSTARD SEED, BAY LEAVES, CORIANDER SEED, ALLSPICE, DILL SEED, PEPPERCORN, CHILI PEPPER. WEIGHT: 16 OUNCES
Notice NONE of the important ingredients that make Pickling Spice, PICKLING SPICE are in Marshall Creek. WTF?
So I called, and spoke to Hope. She was nice but a little defensive as if she picked the spices herself in 1926 and laid them out to dry… and dry… and dry…
I am sure their other spices with a single SPICE are quality. But this is a mixture of spices and they left ALL the important ones out. What the F$%#?
She tried to say that they have no MSG or preservatives like Schilling and McCormick’s. Well that is good and fine but MSG isn’t what makes Pickling Spice taste good. It’s the other stuff! I don’t particularly care if there is MSG. And if there wasn’t MSG in the other brands, it really wouldn’t change the Fragrant aroma.
Hope said to return the 3 bottles and pay for the return shipping and she would refund me the cost of the spices only. I didn’t think this was fair and asked for a credit for the shipping as well since this is NOT what I ordered and they were falsely advertising Pickling Spice. But she refused.
So I paid $ 7.95 to ship this $#!t to me and $ 10.00 to ship this $#!t back, for a total of $ 17.95. In the package I returned I sent a nice letter to Hope with the «Hope» of getting refunded at least half of the shipping I incurred as a Good Faith Measure, to at least split the difference. No «Hope»… it was a «Hopeless» attempt.
3 days later I received only the cost of the spices and nothing more.
Granted they were inexpensive. I wished it would have worked out. Maybe their Pickling Spice would be more expensive if it had Pickling Spice ingredients. But how would I know this ahead of time?
I would give a NO STAR rating if I could but that is impossible. I would walk away from this transaction feeling better if I were given a refund for the shipping. In fact I would order single ingredient spices from Marshall Creek if that were the case. But it is bad business to treat your customers like this.
I have since found McCormick’s Pickling Spice on Amazon in the jumbo bottles for just a little more. At least I know what I am getting and I won’t have to keep USPS in business shipping it back. I have all receipts for these transactions with my name as proof.