Avocado leaf vs Bay leaf
The short answer
Another pair of large leaves used the same way. Avocado leaf is toasted before use and tastes of anise and hazelnut — estragole plus the products of toasting — and it goes into Oaxacan bean pots and under barbacoa. Bay is resinous and camphorous and needs no toasting. Using bay in a pot of Oaxacan black beans produces perfectly good beans that taste European.
Side by side
| Avocado leaf | Bay leaf | |
|---|---|---|
| Botanical identity | Persea americana Mill. var. drymifolia (Schltdl. & Cham.) S.F.Blake | Laurus nobilis L. |
| Part used | leaf | leaf |
| Origin | Mexico, and the Mexican race of avocado is the highland one — native to the central and southern highlands, where the culinary use of the leaf is concentrated. | The Mediterranean basin, where it has been cultivated and gathered since antiquity. |
| Flavour notes | anise, toasted, nutty, green, faintly astringent | resinous, camphorous, herbal, faintly bitter |
| Heat | Scoville does not apply | Scoville does not apply |
| Flavour | Anise and toasted nut, with a mild astringency from the tannins in the leaf. It is subtler in the dish than the crushed leaf suggests, and it works as a background — a pot of black beans cooked with it tastes rounder and does not taste of anise. | On its own, bay is bitter, medicinal and frankly unpleasant — chewing a leaf is the fastest way to conclude it does nothing good. In a long simmer it does something quite different: it lifts and lengthens a savoury background without contributing anything identifiable as itself. It is a spice that is noticed by its absence, which is a rare and useful property. |
| Aroma | Strongly of anise when crushed, with a green, faintly tannic base. Toasting brings out a nutty, hazelnut-adjacent warmth over the anise, and toasted avocado leaf is one of the more distinctive smells in Mexican cooking. | Resinous and faintly camphorous when a leaf is torn — eucalyptus and pine with a warm background. Whole and undisturbed it smells of very little, which is part of why bay is so often assumed to be inert. |
Which should you buy?
Avocado leaf
Whole, and toast them yourself. The toasting is the step that makes the ingredient and it takes seconds, and a whole leaf can be lifted out of a bean pot where ground leaf commits everything at the start.
Bay leaf
Buy whole leaf, in the smallest quantity sold, and replace it far sooner than you think. Bay is the spice most likely to be sitting in a cupboard doing nothing: it looks the same at six years as at six months, and because nobody can taste it directly nobody notices it has stopped working. Ground bay solves nothing — it fades faster and cannot be removed. If you have a garden, a bay tree is the one entry in this dataset you can realistically grow, and fresh leaf is both better and free.
Full detail on avocado leaf and bay leaf, including evidence grades and sources for every claim above.