Annatto

• achiote

  Spanish

  Sold as whole seed, as a paste and as a ground powder, and the three are not interchangeable by volume.

• urucum

  Portuguese

Mild, faintly peppery and earthy, with a slight bitterness at high doses and essentially none at culinary ones. It contributes far more colour than taste, which is the correct way round for what it is used for.

Faint, slightly peppery and earthy, with a note some describe as iodine-like. A quiet spice by any aromatic standard.

Small hard angular seeds with a brick-red waxy surface, staining the fingers immediately. Ground annatto is a deep orange-red powder.

Hard, angular seeds that never soften and are always removed or strained out. Ground annatto disperses evenly and adds no texture.

• Bixin — The principal carotenoid and the source of the orange-red colour. It is fat-soluble, which is why annatto is traditionally warmed in oil or lard rather than added to water.
• Norbixin — The water-soluble derivative produced when bixin is treated with alkali, and the form used in most industrial applications including cheese colouring.

Warm it in fat and strain. The pigment is fat-soluble and superficial, so a tablespoon of seed in oil over a low heat gives a deep orange within two or three minutes, and the seeds — which are rock hard and never soften — come straight back out. Keep the heat low: overheated annatto browns and turns bitter, and there is nothing to be gained by hurrying it. Ground annatto skips the straining and behaves the same way. Use less than you expect; a quarter teaspoon colours a large pot, and the commonest error is a dish that tastes faintly medicinal because someone tried to make the colour stronger. And do not reach for turmeric as a substitute expecting the same result: it is yellow where this is orange-red, and it brings a bitterness annatto does not have.

Colouring above all: achiote oil, Puerto Rican rice, sazón, Filipino kare-kare and pancit. As a genuine flavouring it belongs to Yucatecan cooking, in recado rojo and cochinita pibil, where it is ground with vinegar, garlic and bitter orange into a marinade. It works with rice, pork, chicken, fish, plantain, beans and squash, and alongside cumin, coriander seed, oregano, garlic and citrus.

• infusing — The classic preparation: seeds warmed gently in oil or lard until the fat turns deep orange, then strained out. The pigment is fat-soluble and this extracts it efficiently without any of the seed reaching the plate.
• blooming — Ground annatto stirred into hot fat at the start of a dish, which is faster and gives the same colour with a little more earthiness.
• grinding — Difficult. The seeds are extremely hard and resist a domestic grinder, which is much of why the ground form and the infused oil both exist.
• boiling — Simmered in a wet dish it gives colour more slowly and less completely than fat does, and the seeds are strained out afterwards.

Test the colour rather than the smell, and test it the way you will use it: warm a few seeds or a pinch of powder in a spoonful of oil. Fresh annatto turns the fat a clear deep orange within a minute or two; a faded one gives a weak yellow-brown. This is the same operation as using it, so nothing is wasted.

• Weak or brownish colour when warmed in oil
• Dull brown-red rather than bright brick-red seed
• Clumping in the ground form

• Photo-bleaching of bixin, which is the failure that matters for a colouring spice
• Slow oxidation of the pigment towards brown
• Moisture uptake and clumping in the ground form

Whole if you want the traditional oil, ground if you want convenience, and the difference is smaller here than for most spices because there is so little aroma to lose. What actually matters is light: annatto is bought for a colour that photo-bleaches, so an opaque jar in a dark cupboard is worth more than a choice of form. Buy it from a Latin American or Filipino grocer where it costs very little; the small supermarket jars sold as a saffron alternative are poor value for something used a quarter teaspoon at a time.

• Bright brick-red rather than dull brown seed, and colour that transfers to the fingers.
• Free of pod fragment and dust.
• A clear deep orange when a few seeds are warmed in oil — the only test that measures what the spice is for.
• Whole seed rather than ground if you use it rarely, since the pigment keeps far better in the dark inside an intact coating.

Commercial grading is on bixin content, which never reaches a retail packet. Spent seed with the pigment extracted is dull rather than bright, making this one of the few adulterations visible through a jar.

Bixaceae

A small tropical tree or shrub of the Americas with pink or white flowers and spiny red-brown seed pods, each holding several dozen small seeds coated in a bright red waxy layer.

Tropical Central and South America, where the tree is native and where its use as a colourant and body paint long predates the Columbian exchange.

• Peru — major producer
• Brazil — major producer
• Kenya — notable producer
• India — notable producer
• Mexico — origin. Where the culinary tradition around it is deepest, particularly in Yucatecan cooking.

Pods picked when fully coloured and beginning to dry, before they split and shed the seed.

1. Pod harvesting — Ripe pods cut from the tree by hand.
2. Seed extraction and drying — Pods opened and seeds separated, then dried, leaving the waxy pigment layer intact on the surface.Why: The pigment is superficial, so handling that abrades it costs colour directly.
3. Grading and cleaning — Graded by colour intensity and cleaned of pod fragment. Bixin content is the commercial measure.
4. Pigment extraction, as a separate stream — Much of the crop is solvent- or oil-extracted to produce the food colourant sold as E160b, which is a different product from the culinary seed.Why: Recorded because it explains why annatto is familiar to people who have never seen the spice.

Graded commercially on bixin content, colour and cleanliness. No consumer grade reaches a retail packet.

Recorded risks are pod fragment and dust bulking, and spent seed from which the pigment has already been extracted — which looks dull rather than normal, making this one of the easier adulterations to spot.

Grown as a small tree crop, bearing within a few years of planting and continuing for decades. A substantial share of world production goes to industrial pigment extraction rather than to the spice trade.

Humid tropical lowland, frost-intolerant, with year-round warmth. It crops readily and is often grown on smallholdings and field margins.

An American plant with a long pre-Columbian record as a body paint, textile dye and food colourant, carried across the world by Spanish and Portuguese trade and absorbed into cooking wherever it went — the Caribbean, the Philippines, West Africa and India all use it. Its second career as an industrial colourant is more recent and considerably larger by volume than its culinary one.

Traded chiefly as an industrial pigment rather than as a spice. Most annatto grown is extracted for E160b, which colours cheese, butter, smoked fish and snack foods, and the culinary seed trade is a minor stream beside it.