Epazote

• epazote

  Spanish — Mexico

• paico

  Spanish — the Andes

• epazotl

  Nahuatl

• erva-de-santa-maria

  Portuguese

Sharp, medicinal and slightly numbing, with a bitterness underneath. Used at the quantity Mexican cooking uses it — a sprig in a pot, not a handful — it does not taste of any of that in the finished dish. It reads instead as a savoury depth that makes beans taste cooked rather than merely boiled.

Powerful, resinous and camphorous, with a note people variously describe as petrol, turpentine, creosote or savory-gone-wrong. It is genuinely unlike anything else in this catalogue, and the Nahuatl name is not being polite about it.

Fresh leaves are a mid green, sometimes with a purplish tinge on the stem. Dried epazote is a dull olive.

Soft leaves that wilt immediately in a hot liquid and are usually left in the pot.

• Ascaridole — The dominant volatile and the source of the resinous, medicinal character. It is also the compound behind the plant’s historical use as an anthelmintic drug, and the reason the distilled oil is a different proposition from the leaf.(what ascaridole is)
• p-Cymene — Woody and slightly citric, and a precursor of the phenols in the thyme and oregano family.(what p-cymene is)
• α-Terpinene and limonene — Sharp citric and turpentine notes over the base.(what limonene is)

A sprig, into the pot, at the start. Epazote is one of the few herbs that genuinely improves with twenty minutes of simmering — the harsh camphorous top notes cook off and a savoury resin is left — so the usual instruction to add soft herbs at the end is exactly wrong here. Where it is not being simmered, in a quesadilla or a salsa, use it in much smaller quantity and expect the sharpness to be present. And do not double it: this is a herb whose failure mode at twice the dose is medicinal rather than merely strong.

The defining herb of the central Mexican bean pot, and used with mushrooms, in quesadillas with squash blossom or huitlacoche, in soups and in some green salsas. Its quantity is always small — a sprig rather than a handful — and its job is to give a savoury resinous depth rather than to be identifiable in the finished dish.

• boiling — The characteristic use, and the one that transforms it. A sprig simmered in a pot of beans for twenty minutes loses the harsh camphorous top notes entirely and leaves a savoury resinous depth. Raw epazote and simmered epazote are barely recognisable as the same herb.
• frying — Chopped into hot fat for quesadillas or with mushrooms, the aroma stays much closer to its raw character — sharper, more medicinal, and used in far smaller quantity as a result.
• grinding — Pounded into a salsa verde or a green sauce raw, where its harshness is the point and is balanced by acid.
• infusing — Steeped as a tea in its traditional medicinal use, which is a preparation and a purpose SpiceHQ records as history rather than recommending.

Crush a leaf. Fresh epazote is unmistakable and slightly unpleasant from a hand’s distance; dried epazote that smells of hay has nothing left to give.

• No resinous smell on crushing
• Yellowing or blackening of fresh leaves
• Brown rather than olive in the dried herb

• Volatilisation of ascaridole and the terpene fraction
• Fading from green to olive-brown
• Spoilage of the fresh herb

Grow it if you can and buy it fresh if you cannot. Epazote is among the easiest plants in this catalogue to raise — it is genuinely a weed — and the gap between fresh and dried is large enough that a windowsill plant is a better investment than a jar. Dried epazote earns a place in a bean pot and nowhere else.

• Fresh if at all possible — a Latin American grocer, or a plant, since it grows like the weed it is.
• A powerful resinous smell from the bunch. Epazote that does not announce itself is old.
• Young leaf rather than flowering stems, which are harsher.
• For dried: green rather than brown, and bought in small quantity.

Amaranthaceae

An annual or short-lived perennial to about a metre, with toothed, pointed leaves and dense spikes of tiny green flowers. It is a vigorous weed across much of the warm world, which is the practical reason it has never been an expensive spice anywhere.

Central and southern Mexico, with a range extending through Central America and into South America before European contact.

• Mexico — origin. The centre of both origin and culinary use.
• Guatemala — notable producer
• United States — notable producer. Grown commercially for the Mexican-American market, and naturalised as a weed across much of the country.

Leaves and soft stems picked young, before flowering, when the aroma is at its most resinous and least harsh.

1. Cutting young — Sprigs are cut from young plants before flowering. Epazote is a vigorous weed and a plant left to itself becomes woody and increasingly harsh.Why: Ascaridole, the compound responsible for both the flavour and the toxicity concerns, is more concentrated in older plants and in the seed than in young leaf.
2. Using fresh and local — The great majority of epazote is used within a day of cutting, from a garden or a local market, and it is one of the few herbs in this catalogue with essentially no international fresh trade.
3. Air-drying in bunches — Where it is dried, bunches are hung in shade rather than sun-dried, and the dried herb is used in bean pots where its remaining flavour is enough.Why: Shade rather than sun because ascaridole is unstable to heat and light. Even so the dried product keeps a fraction of the aroma and gains a hay-like flatness.

Grown as an annual and cut through the season. Much of what is used domestically in Mexico is gathered rather than sown.

Warm and tolerant of poor ground. Epazote naturalises readily and is treated as an invasive weed in several countries that do not eat it.

Epazote is one of the seasonings of Mesoamerica that survived the Columbian Exchange in place rather than travelling: it was in use in central Mexico long before contact, it is named in the Nahuatl record, and it never became a European spice despite being a vigorous weed across Europe within a century. The reason is straightforward — it does not dry well, and a herb that cannot be dried could not be traded in the sixteenth century.

Essentially untraded internationally. Epazote reaches markets outside Mexico and Central America chiefly through diaspora supply chains and specialist growers.

Epazote has a substantial medicinal record across Mesoamerica and the Andes, chiefly as an anthelmintic — the distilled oil was a commercial worming drug into the twentieth century, sold as chenopodium oil, before safer synthetics replaced it. That is a fact about a concentrated distillate, and SpiceHQ makes no health claim about the herb.