One of the issues with cooking with spices is that if you're cooking something that takes a while, or requires high heat, it can kill most of the delicate flavors of spices. Sometimes that's what you want; garlic is very assertive right out of the gate, but if you cook it in a sauce for a while, it becomes mild and recedes into the background of the flavor. Other times, though, the delicate flavor is all you have, and after an hour of simmering you might as well not have added any spices at all.
Some herbs in particular are delicate, like basil or cilantro, and should only be added toward the end of the cooking period, and that works for them, but there are spices which have a lovely taste when they've been cooked a little that lose that taste if they're cooked a lot. If you add them to the end of a dish, they come on too strong, but if you add them at the beginning they may become too subtle. Sometimes spices are almost inedible without blooming them in oil, but if you bloom them at a beginning you miss out on some of their subtler flavors in the finished product.
Indian cooks have had this problem solved for millennia, but it's a technique that people either don't know about or only associate with curry: tempering. It's often called tadka or tarka in Indian recipes, but in English "tempering" is a useful word because it describes something of what this technique does. It tempers the harsh flavor of dried spices (and fresh things like garlic or curry leaves too) but leaves their flavor mostly untouched.
It's also simple: heat fat in a small pan over fairly high heat, then add dried spices and other flavorings which will sizzle and sputter, then almost immediately pour the whole thing into the dish. You don't have to do it in quite such a spectacular manner either; you can heat the fat to a slightly lower point and cook the spices a little longer without the danger of hot oil splattering all over things, but the sizzle really is worth attempting, and you can remove the pan from the heat quickly if things get out of hand. Then when you pour the oil and spices over your dish, you get more sizzle. It's like a minor magic trick and you can impress yourself with how fancy you are.
The thing is, you may already be using tempering techniques, just at the beginning of a recipe, and that's absolutely a thing you should be doing. Blooming spices in oil at the start of cooking helps their flavor get into the dish more evenly. Heck, you're sort of tempering onions or garlic when you sauté them to start a pasta sauce. It's a slower temper, certainly, but it still tempers the harsh flavors of the onion and garlic.
But give adding a tempering at the end a try. The simplest way to do it might be to jazz up a bottle of pasta sauce. Heat up your bottle of sauce in a saucepan, then in a small pot or pan (say, your smallest, something which will hold a cup of liquid or less if you've got it) heat up a few tablespoons of olive oil until it shimmers. Smash a couple of garlic cloves under your knife until they're pretty flat; you want surface area but not dice. Add them to the oil, plus 1/4 teaspoon of fennel seed, and let them sizzle until the garlic turns slightly golden (probably 15-30 seconds if your oil is hot enough; do not let it burn), then pour the oil and spices into your pot of sauce. Savor the aromas and the fireworks, then stir everything together and serve how you normally would serve pasta.
That's just the start. A whole world of tempering awaits you. Anything which you wish you tasted more of in the final dish but which is too powerful if you just add it can be tempered. You've got this. This is cookable.
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