Local spices give a flavor boost to pita and hummus dish at San Luis Coastal Unified School DistrictLocal spices give a flavor boost to pita and hummus dish at San Luis Coastal Unified School District

At first glance, a spice shop wouldn’t be the first place you’d think of where a K-12 nutrition director would come for ingredients, but for Erin Primer, food service director at San Luis Coastal Unified School District in San Luis Obispo, California, it’s the perfect place to go to find new ways to add flavor to school meals.  

For the past several years, she’s been visiting Spice of Life, a spice shop located in nearby Paso Robles, California. Spice of Life owner Lori Foster is very knowledgeable about different spices and herbs and helps Primer find unique ingredients to include on the district’s menu. 

“I go in and she helps me either source things that I didn't know existed, or she'll kind of plan with me and talk through what things might be fun or exciting for the kids to see,” she says. 

So, when Primer was looking for a way to kick up the flavor-profile of the district’s pita chips, she knew where to go. 

The district serves its pita chips with house-made hummus and veggies as part of a compliant meal. The menu item was introduced on its middle and high school menus after hearing requests for more plant-based options. 

While they could have served regular whole-grain pita chips and called it a day, Primer and the team wanted to find a way to transform the item into something that would better resemble the flavor-profile of chips students find on the shelves at the local convenience store. 

When Primer entered Spice of Life in search for the perfect pita chip spice, she was “immediately drawn” to a bright pink powder in a glass jar. 

Not knowing what it was, Foster shared it was red vinegar spice powder and invited her to try it.

“When we opened the jar, I immediately was just punched in the face with this very pungent, sour, vinegary smell,” says Primer. 

Excited at the idea of adding such a strong flavor-profile to the chips without the inclusion of sodium, she brought a bag of the powder back to her team at the district to play around with. They found that while the powder did provide a lot of flavor, the chips were still missing something.

They tested other ingredients on the chips, including a combination of seaweed and sesame seeds which provided a fun flavor and texture, Primer says, but using sesame would mean that the menu item would have to be listed as containing an allergen, so Primer headed back to Spice of Life to see if she and Foster could find something that was sodium and allergen-free. 

They landed on nigella seed. Commonly used in Middle Eastern, Northern African and Indian cuisine, nigella seed’s cumin flavor profile was the perfect accompaniment to the vinegar powder’s pungent blast of flavor. Visually, the nigella seed’s black coloring also provided a great contrast to the bright pink of the vinegar powder, which Primer describes as looking like “Barbie's signature spice.”

The red wine vinegar powder gives the pita chips a burst of color.

Today, the pita chips are lovingly referred to as no salt vinegar chips on the menu and are beloved by students. 

“Our secondary students really love this item,” says Primer. “It helps us get that whole grain compliance piece, but in a way that is actually really coveted.”

Along with being an easy way to boost flavor, the menu item is shockingly simple to make. The nutrition team simply cuts up pita bread, tosses it with the spices and then bakes it on sheet pans. 

“It's very easy, even if you're not scratch cooking, even if you're nowhere near doing hummus from scratch,” says Primer. “Taking pita bread, cutting it up, baking it and adding some very simple flavor is really something that anyone can do, no matter where you're at.”

Spice of Life is one of 25 local business that the district works directly with, and that doesn’t include the separate 21 farms in the area that the district sources from as well.  

When hearing the term local foods in schools, many jump straight to the idea of using ingredients from local farms and ranches, which is, of course, an essential part of the local foods in schools movement. But local can also include businesses in the area, and many of their products, like the nigella seed and red wine vinegar powder at Spice of Life, are available year-round, allowing operators located outside of California and other warm climates to include local items on their menus even in the dead of winter when not much local produce is available for harvest. 

Primer picks up bags of the spice directly from Spice of Life since she lives so close to the shop. While sourcing the spices locally comes with a higher price tag, the program makes up for the added costs due to the fact that offering flavorful dishes like the pita and hummus raises student meal participation which equates to more dollars going into the program. 

“The more meals we serve, the more money we get back in to buy some cool, funky stuff like this,” she says. 

And today’s students are into cool, funky flavor profiles as shown by  food trends on TikTok and elsewhere. 

“Kids today very much are foodies. I think they're into flavor. They're into things that are cool, funky and different. It's our job as operators to make them also compliant,” says Primer. “The kids don't necessarily have that frame like we do, but I think that's what makes it fun.”