Mint

• nane

  Turkish

• na'na'

  Arabic

• pudinaपुदीना

  Hindi

• na’na

  Persian

• dyosmosδυόσμος

  Greek

• hierbabuena

  Spanish

  Hierbabuena means spearmint in most of the Spanish-speaking world and is a different plant from menta, which usually means peppermint.

Sweet and cooling, with a clean finish and, in dried spearmint, a dusty warmth the fresh leaf does not have. The cooling is a physical sensation rather than a taste: carvone and menthol both trigger cold receptors, menthol far more strongly, which is why peppermint feels cold in the mouth and spearmint merely fresh.

Spearmint is sweet, green and faintly caraway-like — carvone is the same compound that dominates caraway and dill seed, which is why the resemblance is real rather than fanciful. Peppermint is sharper, colder and more medicinal.

Dried spearmint is a dull grey-green. Bright green dried mint has usually been dried fast or is peppermint, which holds colour better.

Dried mint is usually sold rubbed to a fine flake or near-powder, which is the form Turkish and Levantine cooking uses. Fresh leaves bruise easily and blacken where cut with a blunt blade.

• Carvone — The dominant volatile in spearmint. The same compound dominates caraway and dill seed in a mirror-image form, and the two versions smell noticeably different.(what carvone is)
• Menthol — Dominant in peppermint and almost absent from spearmint. It binds the cold receptor TRPM8 and produces a sensation of cold without any temperature change.
• Menthone — Peppermint’s other principal compound, sharper and more medicinal than menthol.
• Limonene and 1,8-cineole — Citric and eucalyptus lift behind both species.(what limonene is, what 1,8-cineole is)

Establish which mint you have first. If it is peppermint, it belongs in tea and puddings and not in dinner. For dried spearmint, either rub it between the palms into the dish, or use the Turkish technique: melt butter, add the dried mint and a little chilli off the heat, let it foam for a few seconds, and pour it over soup, dumplings or yoghurt. That short contact with hot fat changes the aroma more than any amount of simmering does. Fresh mint goes in raw or at the very end — cooked fresh mint goes grey and tastes of hay within minutes.

One of the most widely used herbs in the world, and used in unusually divergent ways. Dried spearmint seasons kofte, yoghurt sauces, lentil soups and finishing butters across Türkiye, the Levant and Iran. Fresh spearmint goes into tabbouleh, into Moroccan and Levantine tea, into South Asian chutneys and raita, into Vietnamese herb plates, and into British mint sauce for lamb. Peppermint is essentially a confectionery and beverage ingredient rather than a cooking one.

• infusing — The dominant use worldwide. Steeping in hot water or in warm yoghurt or oil extracts the aroma cleanly, and mint is unusual in that infusion rather than cooking is its principal culinary technique across several cuisines.
• frying — Dried mint fried briefly in butter or oil is a technique in its own right across Türkiye and the Levant — the aroma changes character, becoming rounder and less sharp, and the resulting fat is poured over soups, dumplings and yoghurt dishes.
• boiling — Fresh mint suffers badly and goes grey and hay-like within minutes. Dried mint holds up considerably better, which is part of why it is the preferred form in cooked dishes.
• grinding — Dried mint is rubbed to a fine powder in Middle Eastern practice and disperses through a mixture completely, which is how it seasons a kofte or a yoghurt sauce evenly.

Rub a pinch and check for sweetness as well as cooling. Old dried mint keeps a faint cooling note long after the sweetness has gone, which makes it seem serviceable when it is not — it will make a dish taste faintly of dust and toothpaste rather than of mint.

• Dusty with no sweetness
• Brown rather than grey-green
• A tea-like smell

• Volatilisation of carvone and the terpene fraction
• Fading from grey-green to brown
• Oxidation towards a hay character

Buy dried rubbed spearmint and keep fresh mint separately, because they are not alternatives. The dried herb belongs in cooked dishes, in kofte, in yoghurt and in soup; the fresh herb belongs in salads, tea and anything finished raw. Buying only one of them means half the uses of mint are closed to you, and buying peppermint instead of spearmint means most of them are.

• Spearmint rather than peppermint for cooking — check the label, because "mint" alone is ambiguous.
• Sweetness as well as cooling on rubbing a pinch.
• Grey-green rather than brown.
• Fine rubbed leaf rather than coarse flake if you are cooking Turkish or Levantine dishes, where that is the expected form.

Graded on leaf-to-stem ratio, colour and volatile oil. Species is the distinction that matters most and is often not stated: Egyptian and Turkish dried mint is essentially always spearmint, while a jar labelled simply "mint" in a British supermarket may be either.

Lamiaceae

A vigorous perennial spreading by underground runners, to about 60 cm, with toothed leaves and spikes of small pale flowers. Its spreading habit is aggressive enough that gardeners grow it in sunken pots, and it is one of the few plants in this catalogue a cook is more likely to be trying to contain than to keep alive.

Europe and western Asia for spearmint; peppermint arose as a hybrid in England and was described in the seventeenth century.

• Egypt — major producer. A principal supplier of dried culinary mint.
• Morocco — major producer. Of the spearmint selection grown for tea.
• India — major producer. The dominant producer of mint essential oil, a trade far larger by value than the culinary herb.
• United States — major producer. Peppermint and spearmint oil from the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest.
• Türkiye — notable producer

Cut just before flowering. For oil production the timing is more critical still, since menthol and carvone content shift sharply through the flowering period.

1. Cutting — Whole stems cut before flowering.
2. Drying — Air-dried in shade, traditionally hung in bunches.Why: Mint dries better than most soft herbs, and the dried leaf is a legitimate ingredient rather than a fallback.
3. Rubbing and sieving — Leaf rubbed from stems and sieved; the fine rubbed powder is the standard Middle Eastern and Turkish form.

Graded on leaf-to-stem ratio, colour and volatile oil. The much larger industrial trade is in mint oil for confectionery, oral care and pharmaceuticals, graded on menthol or carvone content and quite separate from the culinary herb.

Dried mint is not a frequent adulteration target. The routine problem is species ambiguity — peppermint sold as mint to a cook who wanted spearmint — and excess stem.

A perennial grown from runners and cut several times a season. Beds are replanted every few years as they become congested and disease-prone.

Temperate and damp. Mint is the one herb here that prefers moisture and part shade, and it is the reason mint is the herb northern European gardeners can grow when everything Mediterranean fails.

Mint is among the oldest recorded culinary and medicinal plants of the Mediterranean and the Near East, named in classical sources and in the Bible as a tithed crop. Peppermint is comparatively recent: it was recognised as a distinct plant in England in the seventeenth century and turned out to be a hybrid, which is why it is sterile and why every peppermint plant in the world descends by division from a small number of originals.

The culinary trade is modest and regional. The mint oil trade is not: India dominates world production of menthol and mint oil, and the value of that trade dwarfs the dried herb by a wide margin.

A very long medicinal record across Europe, the Near East and South Asia, principally for digestion. Peppermint oil in particular has a substantial modern pharmacological literature. Recorded as tradition; SpiceHQ makes no health claim on that basis.