Litsea berry

• mùjiāngzǐ木姜子

  Mandarin — Guizhou, Yunnan, Hunan, Sichuan

  Also called shānhújiāo (山胡椒), "mountain pepper", a name Chinese botany also gives to a different laurel, Lindera glauca. In English "mountain pepper" more often means the Tasmanian pepperberry, an unrelated plant.

• shāncāngzǐ山苍子

  Mandarin

  The name behind the trade name "may chang", used mostly for the distilled oil rather than the berry.

• maqaw

  Atayal — Taiwan

  The Atayal name, now used generally in Taiwan for the berry and the dishes it seasons.

• màng tang

  Vietnamese

• krangean

  Javanese

Lemon and ginger with a light peppery warmth and a slight bitterness.

Intensely lemony and fresh, with a sweet, fruity edge and none of the grassy note of lemongrass.

Green when fresh, black and wrinkled when dried — very like a peppercorn.

Firm small berries; the dried fruit is hard and is crushed before use.

• Citral (geranial and neral) — Two-thirds to seven-eighths of the fruit oil across its Chinese range — among the highest citral contents of any plant, and the reason litsea smells of lemon more intensely than lemon does.(what citral is)

Crush the berries just before use and add them late, or finish a dish with a few drops of the oil. Use sparingly: the lemon aroma is strong enough to take over a dish.

A lemon-scented finishing spice for sour soups, fish, chicken and chilli dips in south-western China and Taiwan, used fresh, dried or as a seasoning oil. Elsewhere it is little known as a berry, although its distilled oil is a common lemon flavouring.

• grinding — Crushed or pounded fresh into chilli dips and pastes, where the lemon aroma is released at once.
• boiling — Added to sour soups and braises near the end; citral is volatile, and long boiling drives the aroma off.

Crush a berry: it should smell strongly of lemon at once.

• A dull, woody smell on crushing

• Loss and oxidation of citral, which flattens the lemon character

Lauraceae

A small deciduous tree or shrub with separate male and female trees, growing in hill country from the eastern Himalayas through southern China and mainland South-East Asia to Java and Taiwan. The fruits are small, round and peppercorn-sized, green ripening to black.

Native from the eastern Himalayas through southern China, Taiwan and mainland South-East Asia to western Indonesia.

• China (The southern provinces, north to the Yangtze) — major producer. China is the main producer, largely for the distilled oil; the berry is a regional seasoning in the south-west.
• Taiwan — notable producer. Grown and gathered in the mountains as maqaw.
• Vietnam — native range
• Indonesia — native range

The fruit is picked when mature; in Taiwan flowering is from February to May and fruiting from September to October, while in Indonesia the tree flowers and fruits through the year.

1. Picking — Mature fruits gathered by hand from the tree.
2. Drying or pressing — Used fresh, dried whole, or processed for oil; the essential oil is steam-distilled from the fruit.

Grown for its essential oil mainly in China, Japan and Taiwan, and gathered from the wild across much of its range.

Hill country; in its range it grows well between about 700 and 2,300 metres.

Whole, crushed at the moment of use. The aroma is citral, which is volatile, and a ground powder loses it quickly.

• A strong lemon smell when a berry is crushed.
• Sold by its Chinese name, mujiangzi, or as maqaw — not simply as "mountain pepper", which may mean another plant.

Traded internationally mostly as may chang oil, a commercial source of citral for flavourings, perfumery and chemical synthesis; China is the largest producer of the oil. The berry itself is mainly a regional product.

The fruit, leaves and bark have medicinal uses in several traditions of its range. Recorded as context only; SpiceHQ makes no health claim.