Aniseed

• anís

  Spanish

• yansoon

  Arabic

• saunf

  Hindi

  Saunf usually means fennel seed in India. Aniseed is a different plant with a similar flavour, and the shared name is a persistent source of confusion.

• anason

  Turkish

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.

Sweet, warm and clearly liquorice-like, with a light floral edge. Cleaner and less vegetal than fennel and much less woody than star anise.

Small greyish-brown fruits, faintly downy and ribbed, noticeably smaller than fennel seed and much less green.

Small, light and slightly downy. Fine enough that it is often used whole in baking without being intrusive, unlike caraway.

• trans-Anethole — Overwhelmingly dominant — typically the great majority of the volatile oil — and the source of the sweet liquorice character. The same compound dominates fennel and star anise, which is why three unrelated plants taste alike.
• Estragole (methyl chavicol) — A minor constituent contributing to the aroma, and the compound behind the regulatory attention this family of spices receives.

Use it whole in baking, where it needs no preparation at all, or crush it lightly to release more aroma. Toast it only briefly if at all — it is small and burns much faster than fennel. For an infusion, remember that anethole barely dissolves in water and dissolves readily in alcohol: a spirit infusion will be strong and a water one weak, and that is chemistry rather than technique. Be sparing. Aniseed is delicate but insistent, and it is easier to make something taste of aniseed than to make it taste faintly of aniseed.

Baking above all — anise biscuits, sweet breads, pizzelle, springerle and a long list of regional European biscuits — where its sweetness works without sugar. Beyond that: fish and seafood in Mediterranean cooking, some sausage and charcuterie, syrups, poached fruit, and the anise spirits that are its most visible legacy. It goes with apple, pear, fig, orange, fennel, honey, almond, pork and oily fish, and alongside cinnamon, fennel seed, coriander seed and black pepper.

• toasting — A very brief toast lifts the aroma. Aniseed is small and burns fast — considerably faster than fennel — and burnt anethole is acrid.
• baking — The classic use. Whole or lightly crushed seed in biscuits, breads and cakes releases its aroma slowly through the bake and holds up well.
• infusing — Anethole is poorly soluble in water and readily soluble in alcohol, which is the entire basis of the anise drinks. It is also why they turn cloudy when water is added: the anethole comes out of solution. This is a physical fact with a visible demonstration, and it is the same in every one of them.
• grinding — Ground aniseed fades quickly. Grind from whole when a recipe wants it ground.

Crush a pinch and smell. Fresh aniseed is immediately and obviously sweet. If it smells vaguely herbal rather than sweet, the anethole has largely gone and what is left will not do the job — the sweetness is the entire reason for using it.

• No sweet liquorice smell when crushed
• A stale oily note
• Clumping when ground

• Volatilisation of anethole, taking the sweetness with it
• Oxidation of the seed oil towards a stale note
• Moisture uptake and clumping in the ground form

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.

• Whole seed rather than ground.
• Uniform small greyish-brown fruits with little stalk or chaff.
• An immediately sweet smell when a pinch is crushed.
• Check what you are buying: aniseed, fennel seed and star anise sit near each other and are three different plants.

Commercial grading turns on volatile oil content and cleanliness. Retail packets rarely state either, so appearance and the crush test do the work.

Apiaceae

A small annual of the eastern Mediterranean with feathery lower leaves, umbels of tiny white flowers and small downy fruit.

The eastern Mediterranean and Near East, cultivated there since antiquity and spread widely around the basin.

• Turkey — major producer. The dominant supplier, and the largest domestic consumer through rakı.
• Spain — notable producer
• Syria — notable producer
• Egypt — notable producer
• India — notable producer

Cut when the earliest fruits have turned greyish and before the umbels shatter, then cured in stook or swath to finish.

1. Cutting — Plants cut as the first fruits colour.Why: Ripe umbels shatter and the seed is small enough to be lost easily.
2. Curing — Stooked or swathed to dry down before threshing.
3. Threshing and cleaning — Threshed and winnowed. The fruit is downy, which makes cleaning harder than for a smooth seed.
4. Grading or distillation — Graded on volatile oil content and cleanliness, or distilled for anise oil.Why: A large share of the crop is destined for the drinks industry rather than the spice rack, and the two markets want the same attribute.

Volatile oil content is the meaningful commercial measure, alongside cleanliness and freedom from stalk and foreign seed. Much of the trade is in oil rather than in whole seed.

The recorded risks are admixture with other Apiaceae seed and with stalk, and — for the ground product — extension with cheaper material. Because star anise is cheaper per unit of anethole, substitution towards it happens in flavouring rather than in whole seed, where the two look nothing alike.

An annual, sown in spring and harvested after roughly four months. Yields are modest and the crop is labour-intensive relative to its value, which is part of why so much of it goes to distillation rather than to the spice trade.

Warm temperate with a long, dry, sunny ripening period. Aniseed needs a longer settled season than caraway and will not ripen reliably in a cool wet summer.

Aniseed is among the anciently cultivated spices of the Mediterranean, documented in Egyptian, Greek and Roman use, and grown around the basin rather than imported from the tropics. Its most durable legacy is liquid: the anise-flavoured spirits — rakı, ouzo, pastis, arak, anisette, sambuca — form a continuous belt around the Mediterranean and are among the most geographically coherent drinking traditions in the world.

Never a long-distance luxury in the way the tropical spices were, since it grew around the Mediterranean. Turkey dominates modern production, much of it for domestic rakı manufacture, and a large share of world trade is in distilled oil rather than seed.

Aniseed has a long documented traditional use as a digestive and in preparations for coughs across Mediterranean and Middle Eastern traditions. Recorded as documented tradition. SpiceHQ holds no clinical source for aniseed and makes no health claim about it.