Lavender

• lavande

  French

• lavanda

  Spanish

• lavanda

  Italian

• Lavendel

  German

Floral, faintly sweet and quickly bitter. Lavender has the narrowest usable window of anything on this site: a scant quarter-teaspoon in a batch of shortbread is fragrant, and a full teaspoon is soap. The failure is not a matter of taste but of quantity, and it is why lavender has a bad reputation among people who have only met it once.

Intensely floral, with a honeyed sweetness and a camphorous edge that becomes dominant in the wrong species or at the wrong quantity. It is closer in character to a perfume than to any other entry in this catalogue, which is exactly the difficulty of cooking with it.

Dried buds are grey-purple. Vivid purple usually means the product has been dyed for the craft trade rather than dried for the kitchen.

Small hard buds that stay intact and gritty. Lavender is usually infused and strained, or ground very fine with sugar, rather than left whole in a finished dish.

• Linalool — The dominant volatile and the source of the floral sweetness. High linalool is what makes a lavender culinary.(what linalool is)
• Linalyl acetate — Fruity and sweet, and the compound perfumers prize. Highest in Lavandula angustifolia grown at altitude.
• Camphor — The medicinal edge, and the compound that separates lavandin from culinary lavender. Lavandin carries substantially more of it, which is the entire reason it tastes wrong in food.(what camphor is)
• 1,8-Cineole — Eucalyptus lift, again higher in lavandin.(what 1,8-cineole is)

Use a quarter of what you think, and measure it. Lavender is the one entry in this catalogue where a doubled quantity does not make a stronger dish but a ruined one, and almost everybody who dislikes it has met it once at twice the right dose. Infuse and strain wherever the recipe allows — buds steeped in warm cream or syrup and then removed give you a stopping point, which is the whole difficulty solved. Where the lavender has to stay in, grind it with the sugar in a mortar first so it disperses instead of arriving in gritty bursts. And check the species before you start.

Used in very small quantities in baking and confectionery — shortbread, biscuits, ice cream, custards, syrups and honey — and in some herbes de Provence and ras el hanout formulations. It works with lemon, with honey, with blueberry and with dark chocolate, and it pairs surprisingly well with lamb and with duck in a savoury rub, where a little of it reads as resinous rather than floral. Infusion and straining is the technique that makes all of these reliable.

• infusing — The dominant and most controllable technique. Steeping buds in warm cream, milk, sugar syrup or honey and then straining extracts the floral fraction and lets the cook stop before the bitterness arrives — which is the whole problem with lavender solved in one step.
• grinding — Ground with sugar in a mortar, lavender disperses evenly through a dough or a batter and loses its grittiness. This is the standard preparation for shortbread and biscuits.
• baking — Survives an oven well; the buds are hard and the compounds are held in the bud rather than on the surface. Overdosing is the risk rather than loss.
• boiling — Prolonged wet heat extracts the bitter and camphorous fraction along with the floral one, which is why lavender infusions are steeped and strained rather than simmered.

Crush a few buds and smell. Fresh culinary lavender is floral and honeyed with camphor behind it; old lavender is camphor with the honey gone, which reads as more medicinal rather than weaker. If a jar smells like a bar of soap, it is either old or lavandin, and neither is worth cooking with.

• Grey rather than grey-purple
• Camphor or soap smell with no sweetness
• Buds crumbling to dust

• Volatilisation of linalool and linalyl acetate, leaving camphor proportionally dominant
• Fading of the purple
• Oxidation to a flat, soapy character

Buy buds and grind them yourself with sugar when a recipe wants them dispersed. A pre-ground lavender product loses its floral top notes fastest and leaves the camphor, which is the failure mode this ingredient least needs help with. The far more important purchase decision is the species: culinary Lavandula angustifolia from a food supplier is a genuinely lovely ingredient, and lavandin from a gift shop is why people think lavender tastes of soap.

• Sold explicitly as culinary lavender, by a food supplier.
• Lavandula angustifolia named on the label — if the species is not stated, assume lavandin.
• Buds rather than whole spikes.
• Floral and honeyed on crushing, not soapy.

The formal grading in this trade concerns essential oil, on linalool and linalyl acetate content, and does not reach the culinary bud. For a cook the useful distinctions are species, bud against spike, and food grade against craft grade — none of which is a formal grade and all of which change what is in the jar.

Lamiaceae

A woody Mediterranean subshrub with narrow grey-green leaves and spikes of small purple flowers on long bare stems. Lavandula angustifolia is the compact, hardier species; lavandin is larger, later-flowering and higher-yielding.

The western Mediterranean, with Lavandula angustifolia native to the mountains of southern France, Spain and Italy.

• France — major producer. Provence, and the Haute-Provence plateaux in particular. Lavande de Haute-Provence carries a protected designation.
• Bulgaria — major producer. Now among the largest producers of lavender oil by volume.
• United Kingdom — notable producer. A small but genuine culinary trade, mostly Lavandula angustifolia.
• China — notable producer

Cut in full flower for oil, and slightly earlier — as the buds colour but before they open — for culinary use, when the aroma is floral rather than camphorous.

1. Cutting — Flower spikes cut and bundled.
2. Drying — Air-dried in shade, hung or laid flat.
3. Rubbing — Dried buds rubbed from the stems and sieved.Why: The bud is the culinary product; stems and leaves are more bitter and are separated out.

Culinary lavender is graded informally on species, on whether the product is bud or whole spike, and on colour. The formal grading that exists in this trade is for essential oil — on linalool and linalyl acetate content — and does not translate to the culinary product.

The commercially significant problem is species substitution rather than adulteration: lavandin sold as lavender, and ornamental or craft-grade material — which may have been treated with something not intended for eating — sold without any statement of whether it is food grade. Buy from a food supplier, not a gift shop.

A perennial shrub grown for many years and cut annually. Almost all commercial production is for essential oil rather than for culinary buds, which are a small by-product of a large industry.

Dry, sunny and alkaline, with cold winters. Lavandula angustifolia grows at altitude in Provence and is the hardier of the two; lavandin does better lower down and yields more.

Lavender has an ancient record as a perfume, a strewing herb, a laundry plant and a medicine — the name descends from Latin lavare, to wash — and a much shorter one as a food. Its place in herbes de Provence is a case in point: the blend is a mid-twentieth-century commercial construction, and lavender was added to some formulations partly because it matched what the world expected Provence to smell like. Its use in shortbread, ice creams and confectionery is largely a phenomenon of the last few decades.

The lavender trade is an essential-oil trade. France and Bulgaria dominate it, and the culinary bud is a marginal by-product of an industry whose customers are perfumers and soap manufacturers.

A very long European record as a calming and antiseptic plant, and lavender oil retains a substantial modern presence in aromatherapy. Recorded as tradition; SpiceHQ holds no clinical source on lavender and makes no health claim.