α-Pinene
Also written alpha-pinene, a-pinene, pinene
Quick answer
The smell of pine forest and of gin — the most widely distributed terpene in the plant kingdom, and the compound that makes juniper taste like the outdoors.
What it does
α-Pinene is resinous, coniferous and dry, and it is what most people mean by the smell of pine. It is the dominant aromatic of juniper and therefore of gin, and it appears in rosemary, mastic and a great many resinous plants. Its distribution is enormous — it is among the most abundant terpenes produced by plants anywhere — which makes it a good demonstration that a compound being common is not the same as it being unimportant: it is the whole of juniper’s character and a background note in a dozen other things.
How it behaves when cooked
Four properties of the molecule, and what they mean at the stove.
- Volatility
- high
- Fat solubility
- high
- Water solubility
- low
- Heat stability
- low
Volatile, fat-soluble and readily oxidised, which is why juniper berries are crushed rather than ground and added to a braise rather than a sauce reduced at the end. Crushing is the point: an intact berry gives up very little and a crushed one gives up most of what it has within minutes, so the two produce genuinely different dishes. Its poor water solubility is the reason juniper works in a fatty game braise, in a cure and in a spirit, and does very little in a lean poaching liquid — and its readiness to oxidise is why old juniper smells like turpentine rather than like forest, which is a change of character rather than a loss of strength.
Spices that carry it
Recorded on the compound rather than on each spice, so the two cannot disagree.
Not to be confused with
Compounds a reader is likely to take for this one, and why they differ.
Sabinene
The peppery cousin. Both are pine-ish C10H16 monoterpenes and they smell distinguishably different, which is another case of formula predicting nothing.
Camphor
Travels with pinene in rosemary and in several conifer-adjacent aromatics, and is the heavier and more persistent of the two — so a long-cooked rosemary tastes camphorous where a briefly-cooked one tastes piney.
Questions this page answers
- what is alpha-pinene
- what does alpha-pinene do
- which spices contain alpha-pinene