Spice kitchens aren't that unusual, to us Americans they tend to be but in other parts of the world they're 'normal'. Asian and Indian cultures both have uses for them.

I hope that good ventilation and a good hood would address this. I love to cook spicy food and I love curry but hate smelling it throughout the house. That's why i replaced our crappy base level Broan hood with a higher power Kobe hood, and set out a bowl of white vinegar when cooking spicy food. Then we open all the windows, and no odors linger.

Tinan ... does the vinegar really help?

I think we have a few Wok kitchens in our neighborhood - same idea with a mega fan to whoosh the smells out of the house.

In Asia and India this is a common (and needed!) feature. Highrise apartments are usually tiny, and the cooking grease and odors would overwhelm without a dedicated frying room. The ones I have seen were part of the balcony area, sort of half-enclosed, with high-powered fans. They weren't just fancy extra spaces for rich people.

For an immigrant family, this might be a highly desirable kitchen feature that allows them to cook the way they're used to.

Maybe those Love it or List it clients were of Asian or Indian heritage. If I cooked that way very often, and could afford it, I'd love to have a space like that for fishy/greasy/spicy/smelly stuff.

Yeah, well, Asian spice kitchens are usually not located off a 2500 sf marble and Shaker kitchen with a Wolf and a Subzero off a two- story great room.

Thats what I use the huge bbq with the side burners for. Its on our covered deck and gets used off and on all year.

I live in Richmond, British Columbia just a suburb from Vancouver. All new builds have a spice or wok kitchen for resale value. It's a cultural cooking space just off the main kitchen.

I saw that episode too and it reminded me of my grandparent's kitchens in their basements. They were Italian and we had a produce farm with lots of tomatoes! A lot of canning and making sauce in the basement. Same concept I guess. I only remember my great grandma serving tea and cookies in her upstair kitchen.

But not just a spice kitchen.

Due to the main kitchen becoming a place for family gathering and entertaining, having a butler's pantry or a "back-kitchen", whatever you want to call it, is becoming a necessity. Not very many people can clean as they cook.

It's funny what Americans decide are a necessity. And how we keep getting sucked into more, more, more...

I see many Asian families here in SoCal have an outdoor kitchen as the "spice kitchen." Usually a wok burner plus old appliances/cabinets from remodeling the indoor kitchen under some kind of porch.

Tamko3 wrote:
I live in Richmond, British Columbia just a suburb from Vancouver. All new builds have a spice or wok kitchen for resale value. It's a cultural cooking space just off the main kitchen.

This makes sense because I think Love It or List It is in Vancouver now which is 40% East or South Asian.

The advantage of having a sister in Toronto is she knows a few people who have been on home shows. Someone she works with was on Love It or List It. I like hearing about all the fakery behind the scenes. What is with us Canadians and home tv?

This post was edited by robotropolis on Tue, Mar 19, 13 at 10:21

wi-sailorgirl, yes - if you place a bowl of white vinegar near the stove when cooking the spicy food and leave it out for an hour afterwards, it helps reduce the odors.

Apparently it works even better if you simmer it in a bowl on the stove - I guess it volatilizes faster that way.

Thanks! I will have to try this

I am watching the HGTV show about the family with the spice kitchen. I think it's a great idea! I don't understand why people commenting on this thread are having a hard time with it. Most people have two living areas and two dining areas, yet I don't see anyone complaining about that. If you like to cook, no matter what your heritage, I think you would love having a secondary small kitchen. Now that kitchens have become so open, it would be nice to have an area to cook smelly foods.

I'm doing a whole home right now with a secondary kitchen termed a "grease" kitchen. It's 14x16. The formal kitchen is 18x24. The customer's ethnicity comes into play for this, plus it's a multi-generational home. They also entertain large crowds a lot with help brought in for those occasions. But, on a 11,000 square foot build, it's not as disproportionate compared to some 18x24 kitchens and 8x10 butler's pantries being done in homes with less than half of the square footage of this one.

I would think the opposite. That is, that if you like to cook you would hate doing it in a secondary tiny enclosed and smelly room.

I could see it if there was inadequate ventilation in the nice big kitchen with all the amenities and accoutrements at hand. But given the choice, I think most people would choose not to cook in a tiny enclosed secondary space.

Now, if we could afford *servants* then yeah bring on the spice kitchen. :-) But for me personally, not so much.

This was not an American more is more thing, it is an Asian request. In New York the Chinese buying up expensive real estate want wok kitchens. Big in CA too in new builds. Coming to a neighborhood near you.......

There was a thread on this not too long ago that was very interesting on GW.

2 kitchens in a house are not new and not isolated to asians...friend's old colonial had a kitchen in the main house and then a series of rooms which connected it directly to the barn including a summer kitchen and a wood shed. Without a/c and a need to keep fires burning to cook, a summer kitchen was a very good thing to have in colonial times....they also used it for smelly things like cheese making and rendering lard.

Our old house was built by an italian family and it had a stove and fridge in the basement off the "party room" which was used like a secondary kitchen.

Folks up the street built their home and they are portugese with the "dress" kitchen upstairs and the "working" kitchen downstairs.

Some jewish homes maintain a separate kosher kitchen.

As I recall, Thomas Edison's home in Ft. Myers had the kitchen in a separate building as he couldn't stand the smell of food cooking....go figure.

This is why we chose to keep our kitchen enclosed and buy a strong hood fan--no room for a spice kitchen but I definitely couldn't see opening up the rest of the house to strong cooking odors!

I have a closed off kitchen now and we're working on the second kitchen/pantry/processing room. It's not that I mind making a mess in the main kitchen, it certainly gets abused, but there are some things that I'd really rather not do in my main kitchen. It also allows me to keep larger processing equipment plus many of my canning supplies in one area that doesn't crowd on daily use kitchen storage. I could survive without it, but considering the amount of time I spend canning and how much meat processing we do, it just made sense to use a now unused room for convenience.