Linalool
Also written linalol, linalool (floral)
Quick answer
The floral, faintly citrus terpenoid found in more spices in this catalogue than any other single aroma compound — and the reason coriander leaf and coriander seed, from one plant, smell like different ingredients.
What it does
Linalool is soft, floral and sweet, with a woody undertone — the smell most associated with lavender, and present in coriander seed, basil, bay, thyme, savory, cardamom and true cinnamon. Where it dominates, as in coriander seed and lavender, the spice reads as perfumed. Where it supports, it rounds off harder aromatics and makes a smell read as pleasant rather than merely strong. It is one of the compounds a substantial minority of people perceive quite differently, which is part of why coriander is the most divisive herb in cooking — though the notorious soapy perception is attributed to aldehydes in the leaf rather than to linalool.
How it behaves when cooked
Four properties of the molecule, and what they mean at the stove.
- Volatility
- high
- Fat solubility
- high
- Water solubility
- moderate
- Heat stability
- low
Linalool is volatile and heat-sensitive, and it oxidises readily, so it is among the first things a spice loses. In coriander seed this produces one of the most useful facts in the dataset: gentle toasting develops the seed’s warm, nutty character while driving off much of the linalool, so toasted and untoasted coriander are genuinely different spices and a recipe that specifies one is not indifferent to the other. In lavender the same volatility is why culinary lavender is added at the end or infused briefly and then removed — cooked lavender turns soapy and medicinal as the linalool goes and the camphor behind it remains. Its partial water solubility, unusual among terpenes, is why lavender and coriander seed infuse acceptably into syrups and creams where a purely fat-soluble aromatic would not.
Spices that carry it
Recorded on the compound rather than on each spice, so the two cannot disagree.
- Coriander seedPrincipal component
- LavenderPrincipal component
- BasilMajor component
- Bay leafContributing component
- Green cardamomContributing component
- Cinnamon (Ceylon)Contributing component
- Coriander leafContributing component
The leaf and the seed come from one plant and share little of their aromatic profile: the seed is linalool-led and warm, the leaf is dominated by aldehydes and reads as green and pungent. This is why they are not substitutes in either direction.
- Makrut lime leafContributing component
- MasticContributing component
- SanshoContributing component
- SavoryContributing component
- Sichuan pepperContributing component
- ThymeContributing component
Not to be confused with
Compounds a reader is likely to take for this one, and why they differ.
1,8-Cineole
The same molecular formula — C10H18O — and one smells floral while the other smells of eucalyptus lozenges. The pair is the standard demonstration that a molecular formula predicts nothing about aroma.
Questions this page answers
- what is linalool
- what does linalool do
- which spices contain linalool
- what is linalol