Lemongrass
Also known as lemon grass, citronella grass, Cymbopogon citratus
Quick answer
The stem base of a tropical grass, used fresh, dried or as a paste for a clean citrus aroma that has none of the acidity of lemon. It is fibrous enough to be inedible in most preparations, so it is usually bruised, infused and removed rather than eaten.
- Tastes of
- citrus, grassy, floral, clean
- Goes with
- Chicken, Prawns, White fish
- If you have none
- Lemon — see the limits
Forms
Where the forms of a spice differ enough to need separate answers, they get them. Most spices do not appear here; these do because treating their forms as interchangeable produces a dish that is wrong.
Fresh stalks
The form nearly every Southeast Asian recipe means. Aromatic, fibrous and considerably more fragrant than any preserved form.
The full clean citrus aroma with its grassy edge intact. The lower few centimetres of the stem carry almost all of it.
Trim the dry top and the root, peel off the tough outer layers, and use the pale lower stem. Bruise the whole stalk for a soup or curry and remove it before serving; slice very thinly across the grain or pound to a paste where it will be eaten.
Not interchangeable with dried whole or paste
Dried lemongrass has lost most of its top note and is only useful in an infusion; the paste carries other ingredients — often oil, salt or acid — that a recipe has not accounted for. Neither reproduces a fresh stalk in a curry paste, where lemongrass is contributing body as well as aroma.
Dried stalks or slices
Shelf-stable and much diminished. Usable for infusions and teas, and a poor substitute where fresh lemongrass is a structural part of the dish.
Muted and hay-like, with the bright citral top note largely gone and a woodier character in its place.
Steep in hot liquid for longer than fresh would need, and accept that it will scent rather than flavour. Rehydrating does not bring back the top note.
Not interchangeable with fresh
Dried lemongrass cannot stand in for fresh in a curry paste or a salad. It has lost the citral top note that made it worth using and it never softens, so it contributes a faint hay-like scent where the recipe wanted a bright aroma and an edible body.
Lemongrass paste
Convenient, and rarely only lemongrass. Most jarred pastes carry oil, salt, acid and often other aromatics, so a spoon of paste is not a spoon of lemongrass.
Recognisably lemongrass, flattened by processing and shifted by whatever else is in the jar. Reasonable in a cooked dish and noticeably preserved-tasting in an uncooked one.
Check the ingredient list before substituting; a paste carrying salt and acid changes the seasoning of the dish it goes into. Add to cooked dishes rather than raw preparations.
Not interchangeable with fresh
A jarred paste is not a measure of lemongrass. Most carry oil, salt and acid, so substituting it for fresh stalks changes the seasoning and the moisture of the dish as well as the aroma, and commercial recipes vary too much for any ratio to hold.
Other names
What this spice is called elsewhere, and where the translation is not clean.
takhraiตะไคร้
Thai
serai
Indonesian
serai
Malay
sả
Vietnamese
xiangmaocao
Mandarin
Literally "fragrant grass". Chinese cooking uses lemongrass far less than its Southeast Asian neighbours, so the term is less settled than the Thai or Vietnamese ones.
gandhatrina
Hindi
Flavour and aroma
Mildly citric and slightly bitter, mostly delivered as aroma rather than taste. Fresh stalks are noticeably more fragrant than dried, which loses much of the top note.
Clean, bright and lemon-like, with a grassy green edge and a faint soapy or floral note. It carries the citrus aroma without any of the sourness, which is the reason it is not interchangeable with lemon.
Woody and intensely fibrous. Even finely sliced, the outer layers stay unpleasant to eat, which is why most uses either pound it to a paste or remove it before serving.
- Citral — The dominant compound and the source of the lemon aroma. It is the same compound that gives lemon peel much of its scent, which is why the resemblance is genuine rather than approximate.
- Geraniol — A rose-like floral note sitting under the citrus.
Pairings
Ranked by how well established the combination is, with the reason and the caveats attached.
Foods
Chicken
ClassicDocumented across Thai, Vietnamese and Malay cooking, and it works because lemongrass gives citrus aroma without acidity. Lemon juice on chicken firms the surface and changes the texture; lemongrass gives the same bright register with none of that, which is why it can go into a marinade for hours or into a broth for minutes and do no harm either way.
How: Pounded to a paste with garlic and chilli as a marinade for grilled chicken; Bruised stalks in a poaching broth, removed before serving
Add alongside: Garlic, Galangal, Turmeric
- Only the pale lower stem is worth using; the dry upper leaf gives fibre and very little aroma.
Prawns
ClassicTom yum is the documented case and the mechanism generalises: prawns are sweet and faintly iodic, and the citral in lemongrass cuts both without adding the acid that would start cooking them. In a hot-and-sour broth it is the aromatic doing the lifting while lime juice does the souring — the two are usually assumed to be one thing and are not.
How: Bruised stalks simmered in the broth with galangal and lime leaf; Finely sliced raw through a warm prawn salad
Add alongside: Galangal, Chilli flakes, Coriander leaf
- Sliced raw it must be cut very thinly across the grain, or the fibres are unpleasant to eat.
White fish
StrongA delicate fish is the case where lemongrass has the clearest advantage over lemon: it perfumes without acidifying, so the flesh stays soft. Steaming or grilling in a leaf parcel with bruised stalks underneath is the standard Southeast Asian treatment and puts the aroma into the fish without any liquid at all.
How: Bruised stalks laid under a whole fish for steaming or grilling; In a coconut broth for poached fish
Add alongside: Galangal, Turmeric, Coriander leaf
- Long boiling drives off the fresh top note and leaves the duller, more resinous part behind.
Other spices and blends
Galangal
ClassicThe defining aromatic pair of Thai cooking, and they are partners precisely because they share nothing: lemongrass is citric from citral, galangal piney and camphorous from cineole. Neither substitutes for the other and a paste built on one alone is recognisably missing an axis. Recording the pair is the useful correction to the widespread assumption that they are two versions of the same thing.
How: Both pounded into a curry paste; Both bruised into a tom kha or tom yum broth
Add alongside: Turmeric, Chilli flakes, Garlic
If you have no lemongrass
What to use instead, and — more usefully — where each replacement stops working.
Lemon
AcceptableThe nearest thing in an ordinary kitchen, and it is a partial match for a real reason: lemongrass and lemon peel share citral, which is the compound the aroma is built on. What lemon zest lacks is the grassy, faintly floral body underneath — geraniol and the rest — and what it adds, if the juice is used rather than the zest, is acidity the recipe did not ask for. Use the zest, not the juice, and add it late.
| Flavour | Aroma | Colour | Heat |
|---|---|---|---|
| partial | partial | close | n/a |
Works for
- Soups and broths where lemongrass was infused and removed
- Marinades and dressings wanting a citrus lift
- Teas and infusions
Does not work for
- Curry pastes, where lemongrass is pounded in as body as well as aroma and zest cannot supply the bulk
- Dishes where the lemongrass is eaten — a finely sliced salad, a larb
- Anywhere added acidity would break the dish, which rules out using the juice
Cuisine: A Thai or Vietnamese dish stays recognisable and reads as generically citrus rather than specifically lemongrass. The difference is most obvious in a green curry paste and least obvious in a broth.
No ratio, because zest and stalk are not measured in comparable units and the usable part of a lemongrass stalk varies with how much of the tough outer leaf is discarded. The zest of one lemon against one stalk is where most cooks start.
Lemongrass
PoorCitral is volatile and drying takes most of it. What is left is woody and hay-like, and it never softens, so dried lemongrass can scent a liquid and cannot be an ingredient in one. Rehydrating does not bring the top note back — it was lost rather than concentrated.
| Flavour | Aroma | Colour | Heat |
|---|---|---|---|
| partial | different | close | n/a |
Works for
- Teas and long infusions where the stalk is strained out
- Stocks and broths, at a longer steep than fresh would need
Does not work for
- Curry pastes, where lemongrass is pounded to a paste and eaten
- Salads and raw preparations
- Any dish where the bright citrus top note is what the lemongrass was for
Where a recipe simply says "lemongrass" and the dish is Southeast Asian, it means fresh. Dried is a different product with a narrower range of uses rather than a shelf-stable version of the same one.
Preparation and use
Only the pale lower stem is worth using; the tough outer layers and the dry upper leaves are for stock at best. Bruise it if it is going to be removed, and pound it if it is going to be eaten — slicing alone leaves fibres that survive cooking and are unpleasant to chew.
Pounded into Thai and Malaysian curry pastes; bruised whole into tom yum, laksa and coconut broths and removed before serving; sliced very finely into salads and larb; skewered through or laid under grilled fish and chicken; and steeped for tea across the region.
- grinding — Pounding to a paste is the only way to make lemongrass edible rather than merely infused, and it is what a curry paste needs. A blender leaves fibres a mortar would have broken down.
- infusing — Bruised stalks give their aroma up readily to a hot liquid within minutes. Long boiling costs the fresh top note and leaves the duller, more resinous part behind.
Storage and freshness
| Form | Good for | Conditions | Fridge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fresh | 1–1 months | Refrigerated, wrapped loosely, for two to three weeks. Lemongrass freezes unusually well — whole stalks can go straight into the freezer and be used from frozen with little loss. | Yes |
| Dried whole | 6–12 months | Airtight, cool and dark, and used within a year. It is already much reduced when bought, so there is less to lose and less time to lose it in. | — |
| Paste | 1–3 months | Refrigerated after opening, tightly closed, with a clean spoon each time. | Yes |
A good fresh stalk is firm, heavy and pale at the base, and scratching it releases an immediate lemon scent. Dry, hollow, browning stalks have little left. Dried lemongrass that does not smell of anything through an opened bag will not flavour a dish.
- A stalk that has gone light and hollow, which means it has dried out in the refrigerator.
- Browning or shrivelling at the cut base, where deterioration starts.
- No lemon scent when the base is scratched with a thumbnail.
- Slime at the cut end or mould in the wrapping, which is what happens to a stalk sealed damp in plastic.
- A paste that has darkened at the surface or separated in the jar.
Quality is not the same as safety
A hollow, scentless stalk is a waste of money and not a hazard, and the same goes for dried lemongrass that has faded to hay. The two genuine spoilage cases are a fresh stalk that has been sealed damp and gone slimy or mouldy, and an opened jar of paste kept warm — both are wet products and both should be discarded rather than trimmed.
Buying and quality
Buy fresh and freeze what you will not use within a fortnight. This is the rare aromatic where freezing is genuinely close to the fresh article, and it makes the dried form hard to recommend for anything but tea.
- Firm and heavy with a pale, plump base rather than a thin dry one
- Immediate lemon scent when the base is scratched
- No browning, hollowness or shrivelling
- Bought fresh in preference to dried wherever the dish will be pounded or eaten
Botany
Cymbopogon flexuosus, East Indian lemongrass, is grown mainly for oil distillation rather than for cooking.
Poaceae
The grass family — the same family as wheat, rice and bamboo, and a long way from anything else in this dataset.
The swollen stem base and the lower few centimetres of the tightly wrapped leaf sheath. The upper leaves are too tough to use for anything but a tea or a stock.
A tall clumping perennial grass of tropical Asia, reaching a metre or more, with sharp-edged blue-green leaves. It is propagated by division, and a supermarket stalk with its base intact will often root in water.
Commonly confused with
Citronella grass
Cymbopogon nardus, the species grown for insect-repellent oil. Closely related and distinctly harsher, and not the grass used in cooking, despite lemongrass being sold under the name citronella grass in some places.
Lemon verbena and lemon balm
Unrelated leaves with a similar citrus aroma, used as herbs. They can approximate the aroma in an infusion and cannot replace the stem in a paste, where lemongrass is contributing texture and body as well as scent.
Where it comes from and how it is made
Maritime Southeast Asia and southern India, where Cymbopogon citratus has been grown so long that it is not known in a genuinely wild state — it rarely flowers in cultivation and is propagated entirely vegetatively.
- TH — major producer
- VN — major producer
- IN (Kerala, Karnataka) — major producer. Also the centre of lemongrass oil distillation, which is a larger industry than the culinary trade.
- ID — major producer
- GT — notable producer. Grown for oil rather than for the fresh culinary market.
Stalks cut at ground level by hand once the clump is established, and cut again every few months thereafter. For the fresh trade the tough upper leaves are trimmed away and only the swollen lower stem is kept, which is where nearly all the citral sits; the discarded leaf goes to oil distillation or to tea.
- Cutting and trimming — Stalks cut at the base, roots removed, and the dry upper leaves trimmed off to leave the pale swollen lower stem.Why: The lower stem carries almost all of the aroma; the leaf is a by-product.
- Drying or freezing — For the preserved forms: stalks sliced and air-dried, or trimmed and frozen whole. Freezing is increasingly the export route and retains far more citral than drying.Why: Shelf stability. Drying costs most of the volatile top note; freezing costs very little, which is why the two preserved forms are not equivalent.
- Steam distillation — A separate industry from the culinary trade: cut grass steam-distilled for lemongrass oil, used in fragrance, flavouring and citronellal chemistry rather than in cooking.Why: Recorded because most of the world lemongrass crop by weight goes this way, and none of it reaches a kitchen.
No consumer grading standard for the culinary product, which is sold as fresh produce and judged on thickness, firmness and how much pale base each stalk carries. Lemongrass oil is graded on citral content and is the only part of the crop with a specification behind it.
A perennial clumping grass, planted from divisions of an existing clump and cut repeatedly for several years before the stand is replaced. It is grown for two quite separate markets — fresh culinary stalks, and distilled oil for fragrance and flavouring — and the varieties and harvesting practices differ between them.
Tropical and subtropical: warm, humid, high rainfall, and no frost at all. It tolerates poor soil well and drought moderately, which is why it is a smallholding and garden crop across its range rather than a plantation one.
History and trade
A domestic plant rather than a traded one for nearly all of its history. Lemongrass has been grown across maritime Southeast Asia and southern India for centuries as a garden crop, used fresh and picked as needed, and it never entered the spice trade for the same reason curry leaf did not: it is worth having fresh and worth very little dried, and nothing worth little dried travelled far before refrigeration. Its spread beyond Asia is essentially a twentieth-century phenomenon, following first the essential-oil industry and then Thai and Vietnamese restaurant cooking.
Two distinct modern trades that are easy to confuse. The culinary trade is in fresh and frozen stalks, air-freighted and refrigerated, and is small. The oil trade is much larger by weight and by value, supplies fragrance and flavour manufacturing rather than kitchens, and is centred on India and Guatemala. A statistic about world lemongrass production is almost always about the second.
Culture
Recorded by tradition rather than merged into one narrative — these are genuinely different practices.
South Asian and Sri Lankan
Used quite differently from the Southeast Asian pattern and rarely mentioned alongside it. In Sri Lanka lemongrass — sera — goes into curries and into the coconut-milk base of many dishes, generally bruised and left whole; across South India and Sri Lanka it is also a domestic tea, drunk on its own or with ginger, which is the form in which most households there encounter it.
- Bruised whole into a coconut-milk curry base
- Steeped with ginger as a domestic tea
Southeast Asia
One of the defining aromatics of the region, appearing with galangal, kaffir lime and chilli in a combination that is characteristic enough to identify a cuisine on its own. It is used in quantity and treated as a base ingredient rather than a seasoning accent.
- Pounded into curry pastes with galangal and chilli
- Bruised whole into broths and removed
- Steeped as a tea
What we do not know
Published openly. A gap we have named is more useful than a gap we have filled with plausible prose.
Every tracked field on this profile carries either a value or an explicit statement of why there is none.