Potlatch? MT is throwing a big party and is giving away all his fishing gear? Awesome !!

No, wait. This is about a canned spice mixture from Williams Sonoma. Never mind.

I've never tried W-S Potlatch, so I can't comment there. But instead I tried praying to the great god Google, and one of his subordinates responded with the following recipe for homemade potlatch seasoning:

4 parts kosher salt
3 parts each chili powder and black pepper
1 part each ground cumin, crushed red pepper flakes, celery salt, garlic powder, onion powder, dried oregano

I mixed this up, and it wasn't bad, but not great either (a bit salty). So checking MT's W-S link (after I'd made up the spice mixture - Doh!), I discover real Potlatch has paprika, basil and coriander, while ersatz Potlatch has cumin, celery salt, onion powder and garlic powder. So it's probably not even close. So much for foodnetwork.com and every other site that refers to the same recipe.

But the W-S ingredient list looks a bit like the blackening seasoning recipe that I already use:

1 tbsp paprika
1 tsp salt
1 tsp onion powder
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp cayenne
1 1/2 tsp pepper (orig recipe was half white, half black, but I use all black)
1/2 tsp thyme
1/2 tsp oregano
1/4 tsp sage

Triple recipe to get one spice islands spice jar full.

Maybe a bit of fiddling with the two recipes might get me closer to the store-bought stuff, or maybe even beyond. I liked the hint of cumin in the fake potlatch.

I will keep you posted, but in the meantime would welcome hearing the results from anyone else experimenting in this area.

I'm probably too late for mt's party anyway, given the date of his post, and besides, Ely's a long way to drive for expert-level fishing gear that I likely wouldn't have a clue how to use. Oh well.

Puckster wrote on May 11^th, 2010 at 6:55pm:


Mike, do what you want but from what I've been able to gather around here it seems best to stay off the water during the humpers breeding season.

BTW, with the potlatch just remember the old brylcream commercial......"a little dab will do ya".........

Imitation potlatch seasonng continued:

Tried adding the missing ingredients to the recipe posted earlier. Maybe it was a bit better, but the previous recipe was just too salty (for my taste, anyway), and the cumin needs to be cut back too. Time to restart from scratch, using only the W-S ingredients.

As a way of using up the rest of the fake potlatch I made, I tried it on chicken (pretty obvious, seems to show up the seasoning flaws more) and potatoes. The latter worked pretty well, so those of you with real potlatch might want to try this:

Peel & cut potatoes into large dice. Boil or nuke til nearly done but still firm. Drain, sprinkle with seasoning and mix well. Then fry - I used butter, but veg. oil would probably work just as well.

Yeah, too many pots and too involved for canoe trip cooking, but otherwise it's easy, and different from "plain old boiled potatoes".

More to come (eventually).