Tarragon vs Aniseed
The short answer
Both read as anise and neither is the other. Tarragon is a green leaf whose anise comes from estragole, with a grassy base and a slight numbing tingle. Aniseed is a dry seed dominated by anethole, sweet and confectionery-like with no green character at all. The practical difference is where they go: tarragon into butter sauces, chicken and eggs at the end of cooking, aniseed into baking and long-cooked dishes where its sweetness has time to spread.
Side by side
| Tarragon | Aniseed | |
|---|---|---|
| Botanical identity | Artemisia dracunculus L. | Pimpinella anisum L. |
| Part used | leaf | seed |
| Origin | Central Asia and southern Russia, with a native range extending across Siberia into western North America. The French cultivar is a European selection from that stock. | The eastern Mediterranean and Near East, cultivated there since antiquity and spread widely around the basin. |
| Flavour notes | anise, green, sweet, faintly bitter, grassy | sweet, liquorice, warm, floral |
| Heat | Scoville does not apply | Scoville does not apply |
| Flavour | Sweet-anise and green at once, with a mild numbing tingle on the tongue that most cooks notice and few name — the same slight anaesthetic quality found in other estragole-rich plants. Russian tarragon has the green and almost none of the anise, which is why a dish made with it tastes vaguely of nothing in particular. | Distinctly sweet without containing sugar, which is unusual and is most of what makes it useful — it can make a dish read as sweeter than it is. The finish is warm and slightly cooling. It is more delicate than either of the spices it is confused with, and it is easily lost in a strongly flavoured dish. |
| Aroma | Anise, clearly, over a green grassy base with a faint bitterness behind it. The anise is not the sweet confectionery anise of aniseed but a sharper, more herbaceous version of it. | Sweet, warm and clearly liquorice-like, with a light floral edge. Cleaner and less vegetal than fennel and much less woody than star anise. |
Which should you buy?
Tarragon
Buy it fresh, or buy tarragon vinegar, or freeze it. Dried tarragon is the one dried herb in this catalogue that is hard to recommend for anything, because what drying removes is precisely the anise the herb is bought for. If a recipe calls for tarragon and only the dried jar is available, the honest options are to use tarragon vinegar in place of part of the liquid, or to accept that the dish will not taste of tarragon and season it some other way.
Aniseed
Buy whole and buy little. Aniseed is small enough to use straight from the jar without grinding, so the ground form buys almost no convenience while losing most of the useful life. It is also a spice most kitchens use rarely — a small jar bought fresh will outperform a large one bought once. If a recipe asks for anise extract rather than seed, that is usually a drinks-industry product and is not a substitute for the spice.
Full detail on tarragon and aniseed, including evidence grades and sources for every claim above.