By Amanda Koehn
Within Van Aken District’s Market Hall is a new spice and cooking shop, Adun Spice Company, founded and owned by chef Ramat Wiley.
Adun is a curated shop of single spices, artisanal pantry items and spice blends developed by Wiley and based on her own cooking.
The concept for Adun came to Wiley during the COVID-19 pandemic, when her culinary work paused and she had free time to explore an area she’d been interested in – spices. She graduated from Cuyahoga Community College’s culinary program in 2016 and has worked in non-traditional culinary jobs, such as food styling and cooking for private events.
“I’ve always loved spice shops,” she says. “Everywhere I travel, I look for different spice shops just to see what people in different areas are gravitating toward (and) cooking. Every region is different in what their everyday staples are.”
She decided to start Adun based on nine blends, herbs and salts “curated based on how I cook,” she explains. Beginning as a pop-up and online shop in early 2021, she opened the store at Van Aken in February of this year.
“I literally cook all different types of ways, and I think having that knowledge helped me be able to talk to different people about things that they want to cook,” Wiley says.
Adun’s citrus garlic is its bestseller – “That’s kind of like the blend that started it all,” says Wiley, noting it’s good on nearly everything, including chicken, vegetables and seafood. Its golden milk is a drink blend of warm spices centering on turmeric as well as cinnamon, ginger, black pepper and cardamom. It can be blended warm with plant-based milk and a sweetener, or as a cold drink over ice or blended. The flavors also go well with ice cream, oatmeal and cereal.
Adun’s single spices can also fill in pantry holes. Wiley says, “We have a variety of things you can’t normally find in traditional grocery stores – things you find in cookbooks that you are like, ‘where the heck do I get that at?’”