Basil

• basilico

  Italian

• basilic

  French

• horapha

  Thai

  Thai basil is a different variety with a strong anise character. Horapha, kaphrao (holy basil) and maenglak (lemon basil) are three distinct Thai basils and are not interchangeable with each other or with Italian sweet basil.

• tulsi

  Hindi

  Tulsi is holy basil, Ocimum tenuiflorum — a sacred plant in Hindu practice rather than a culinary herb, and not a translation of the basil in a pesto recipe.

• húng quế

  Vietnamese

• vasilikosβασιλικός

  Greek

Sweet, slightly peppery and warm, with a clove note behind it and a cooling finish. Thai basil replaces most of that with anise; holy basil replaces it with pepper and bitterness. The dried Italian herb is a shadow of any of them.

Fresh sweet basil is sweet, faintly clove-like and unmistakably lifted, with a citric edge. Dried basil keeps a fraction of that and gains a hay-like flatness that is the absence of the top notes rather than any new flavour.

Dried basil ranges from a dull grey-green to a bright green depending almost entirely on how it was dried. Bright green usually means freeze-dried and usually means better.

Fresh leaves are soft and bruise readily — they blacken where cut with a blunt knife and where chilled. Dried basil is a light flake that softens into a sauce and disappears.

• Linalool — The dominant volatile in Italian sweet basil — floral, sweet and highly volatile. It is the first thing lost to heat and to drying, and its loss is most of what separates dried basil from fresh.(what linalool is)
• Eugenol — The clove note underneath, and considerably more stable than linalool. What survives in dried basil is disproportionately this.(what eugenol is)
• Estragole (methyl chavicol) — The anise character. Low in Genovese basil and dominant in Thai basil, which is the compound-level explanation for why the two taste unrelated.(what estragole is)
• Citral — The lemon note, dominant in lemon basil and present in traces elsewhere.(what citral is)

Keep fresh basil out of the fridge — below about 10 °C the leaves blacken — and stand a cut bunch in water like flowers. Tear rather than chop: a blunt blade bruises the leaf and turns the cut edges black, and a mortar crushes fewer cells than a knife, which is why traditional pesto is pounded. Add fresh basil off the heat or at the very end, because the linalool that carries its flavour is gone within a minute of simmering. Dried basil is the reverse — add it early to a cooked sauce, and do not bother adding it late, because there is nothing left in it that arrives quickly.

Fresh sweet basil is the defining herb of Ligurian and southern Italian cooking — pesto, caprese, tomato salads, torn onto pizza and pasta — and appears through the Mediterranean wherever tomatoes do. Thai basil goes into curries and stir-fries across Southeast Asia; holy basil is stir-fried hard in pad kaphrao; lemon basil goes into soups and salads. Dried basil has a narrower and legitimate role in long-cooked tomato sauces and in Italian seasoning blends.

• boiling — Destroys sweet basil. Linalool is driven off within minutes of simmering, leaving the eugenol and a hay note — which is why basil goes onto a tomato sauce at the end or after the heat is off, never at the start. Thai basil, dominated by heavier compounds, survives a stir-fry that would flatten the Italian herb entirely.
• grinding — Fresh basil bruises and oxidises where it is cut, turning black at the edges. Traditional pesto uses a mortar for exactly this reason: crushing tears fewer cells than a blade and the paste stays green longer.
• infusing — Steeping fresh leaves in warm oil off the heat extracts the aroma without cooking it off, and is the most reliable way to get basil into a warm dish.
• blooming — Not a basil technique. Hot fat drives off the compounds that matter within seconds.

Crush a pinch. If it smells of tea or hay rather than of anything sweet, it has nothing left to give and it is better to leave it out than to add it — flat dried basil contributes a dusty note and no flavour. This is the dried herb most worth replacing and the one most often kept longest, because it is used rarely.

• A hay or tea smell
• Grey-brown rather than green
• No sweetness at all on crushing

• Volatilisation of linalool and the remaining top notes
• Fading from green to grey-brown
• Oxidation towards a hay or tea character

The whole-versus-ground question barely applies here, because the real decision is fresh against dried and the answer is nearly always fresh. Keep a small jar of dried basil for long-cooked tomato sauces, buy freeze-dried if you can find it, and buy fresh — or better, a living plant — for anything the basil is meant to be tasted in. A pesto made with dried basil is not a compromised pesto; it is a different and unsuccessful sauce.

• For dried: green rather than grey, which usually indicates freeze-drying and a much better product.
• A sweet smell on crushing rather than a hay one.
• For fresh: firm unblackened leaves and, ideally, a living plant rather than a cut bunch.
• Named varieties where it matters — Genovese for pesto, horapha for Thai curry.

Graded on leaf-to-stem ratio, colour and volatile oil. Colour is unusually informative for basil because it tracks the drying method, and freeze-dried material is a distinct and better commercial product rather than a premium grade of the same thing.

Lamiaceae

A tender annual of the tropics, to about 60 cm, with soft broad leaves and spikes of small white or purple flowers. Frost kills it outright and cold storage blackens the leaf, which is why fresh basil is the most fragile herb in a supermarket.

Tropical Asia, most likely India, with cultivation spreading west into the Mediterranean in antiquity.

• Egypt — major producer. The dominant supplier of dried basil to world markets.
• India — major producer. Both culinary basil and, separately, tulsi.
• Italy — notable producer. Genovese basil from Liguria carries a protected designation of origin.
• United States — notable producer
• Israel — notable producer

Cut before flowering. Basil harvested after the flower spikes form is noticeably coarser and more bitter.

1. Cutting — Leafy stems cut before flowering.
2. Drying — Low-temperature air drying, and increasingly freeze-drying for premium product.Why: Basil’s aroma compounds are among the most volatile of any culinary herb, so conventional drying costs more of the flavour here than for any other leaf in this catalogue.
3. Rubbing and sieving — Leaf rubbed from stems and sieved.

Graded on leaf-to-stem ratio, colour and volatile oil. Colour matters more here than for most dried herbs because it tracks the drying method, and drying method is most of what separates a usable dried basil from a useless one.

Dried basil has appeared in retail surveys of adulterated herbs, with cheaper green leaf used as a bulking agent. The economics are the same as for oregano: a green flake among green flakes.

An annual, sown and cut repeatedly through the season. Flowering ends useful leaf production, so commercial and domestic growers both pinch out the flower spikes.

Warm and frost-free, with plenty of water — unusually among the herbs on this site, basil is not a dry-hillside plant and does badly on the treatment that suits thyme and oregano.

Basil reached the Mediterranean from tropical Asia in antiquity and had an oddly contested reputation there: some Greek and Roman writers associated it with hostility and misfortune, others with royalty — the Greek basilikos means royal, and the English name descends from it. Its modern identity as the emblematic Italian herb is comparatively recent, and pesto alla genovese in its familiar form is a nineteenth-century Ligurian dish rather than an ancient one.

The dried trade is dominated by Egypt and India. Fresh basil is a high-value horticultural crop grown close to its markets, and Genovese basil from Liguria carries a protected designation of origin.

Tulsi has a substantial role in Ayurvedic tradition. Recorded as tradition; SpiceHQ holds no clinical source on basil and makes no health claim.