Mexican oregano

• orégano

  Spanish — Mexico

  In Mexico the bare word orégano means this plant. A Mexican recipe translated into English as "oregano" almost never means the Mediterranean herb.

• orégano mexicano

  Spanish

More pungent and more resinous than Mediterranean oregano, with a citric brightness and a longer, slightly bitter finish. It is assertive enough to hold its own against dried chilli and cumin, which is exactly the company it keeps.

Warm and phenolic like its namesake, and then distinctly different: a citric, faintly liquorice-like resin sits over the top where the Mediterranean herb has a minty sweetness. Side by side the two are obviously not the same plant.

A pale grey-green, generally lighter and coarser-looking than Mediterranean oregano, with larger and less uniform leaf fragments.

Coarser flakes than Mediterranean oregano, and often sold with more visible stem.

• Carvacrol — The dominant phenol, and the compound the two oreganos share. It is the entire reason a Spanish speaker in the sixteenth century reached for the same word.(what carvacrol is)
• Thymol — Present alongside carvacrol, contributing the medicinal warmth.(what thymol is)
• p-Cymene — Woody and citric, and higher here than in Origanum, which is part of the citric character.(what p-cymene is)
• Eucalyptol and limonene — The bright citric top notes that separate this from the Mediterranean herb on first smell.(what 1,8-cineole is, what limonene is)

Rub it between your palms as it goes in, and put it in early. Mexican oregano is a long-cooking herb: it goes into the pozole at the start and is still there three hours later. Where it is going into an adobo or a chilli paste, toast it briefly with the dried chillies before grinding — a few seconds in a dry pan, no more — which rounds the citric edge and is a technique the Mediterranean herb does not take nearly as well.

The oregano of Mexican and Tex-Mex cooking: in pozole, menudo, birria, bean dishes, chilli, adobos and marinades, and in American chilli powder and taco seasoning. It keeps company with dried chilli, cumin and garlic rather than with tomato and olive oil, and that difference in company is a more reliable guide to which oregano a recipe wants than the recipe itself usually is.

• grinding — Rubbing between the palms before use releases oil the intact flake holds, exactly as for Mediterranean oregano and for the same reason.
• boiling — Heat-stable, and the standard use is a long one: into the pozole, the bean pot or the birria at the start, where it cooks for hours without disappearing.
• blooming — Fat-soluble phenols disperse well from warm oil, which is how it gets into an adobo or a chilli paste.
• toasting — Briefly dry-toasted with the dried chillies before grinding into an adobo, which is a technique specific to this side of the Atlantic and rounds the citric edge.

Crush a pinch and look for the citric lift specifically, not just the medicinal warmth. Old Mexican oregano loses the thing that distinguishes it from the Mediterranean herb first, which is a neat inversion of the marjoram problem.

• No citric note on crushing
• Indistinguishable from Mediterranean oregano
• Brown rather than grey-green

• Volatilisation of the citric top notes, leaving the phenols
• Fading from grey-green to brown
• Oxidation to a flat hay character

Leaf, and from a shop that knows which oregano it is selling. The whole-versus-ground question is secondary here to the species question: a jar of Mediterranean oregano used in a pozole is a bigger error than any grind could be, and it is the error most English-language recipes quietly invite by writing "oregano" and stopping there.

• A label that names Mexican oregano or Lippia graveolens. "Oregano" alone in a European or British shop means the Mediterranean herb.
• A citric lift over the medicinal warmth on crushing.
• Coarse leaf rather than fine flake, with little stem.
• Bought from a Latin American grocer, where it is ordinary rather than a speciality.

Graded on leaf-to-stem ratio, colour and cleanliness, as for other dried leaf herbs. Wild gathering makes lot-to-lot variation larger than for a cultivated crop, and no grade captures it.

Verbenaceae

A woody shrub of dry scrub and thorn forest, to two metres, with small rough oval leaves and clusters of tiny white flowers. It is gathered from wild and semi-managed stands across northern Mexico and the southern United States rather than being a plantation crop.

Northern and central Mexico, extending into Texas and New Mexico and south through Central America.

• Mexico — major producer. The overwhelming majority of world supply, much of it wild-gathered in the northern states.
• Guatemala — notable producer
• United States — notable producer. Texas and New Mexico, at the northern edge of its natural range.

Cut at flowering, when oil content is highest, and dried where it is gathered.

1. Gathering — Leafy branches cut from wild or semi-managed shrubs.
2. Sun or shade drying — Dried where gathered, often in the open.Why: The phenols that carry the flavour are relatively heat-stable, so this herb tolerates sun drying better than a soft leaf would.
3. Rubbing and sieving — Leaf separated from woody stem and sieved.

Graded on leaf-to-stem ratio, colour and cleanliness. Wild gathering makes the material more variable than a cultivated herb, and origin statements are correspondingly less informative.

The commercially significant problem is the reverse of the usual one: Mediterranean oregano is cheaper and more available in most markets and is routinely sold, or bought, in place of this. Whether that counts as adulteration or as a naming failure, the effect on a pot of beans is the same.

Largely gathered from wild stands rather than cultivated, which makes the supply variable in quality and means the trade sits closer to a forest product than to a farmed crop.

Hot, arid and stony. Like Mediterranean oregano, it concentrates its oil under drought stress, and the same herb grown well-watered is noticeably weaker.

The name is a colonial artefact. Spanish speakers arriving in Mesoamerica met a shrub that smelled of the herb they knew and called it oregano, and five hundred years later two unrelated plants in different families share a word in every English-language recipe that crosses between the cuisines. The plant itself was in use in the region long before contact and never became a European spice.

A real commodity trade, unusually for a wild-gathered herb, driven by demand in the United States for Mexican and Tex-Mex cooking. Mexico supplies most of it.

A medicinal record across Mexico for digestive and respiratory complaints, and the essential oil is studied for antimicrobial activity on the strength of its carvacrol content. Recorded as tradition; SpiceHQ makes no health claim.