Star anise

• bajiao八角

  Mandarin

  Literally "eight horns", after the shape.

• chakra phool

  Hindi

• hoi

  Vietnamese

• anís estrellado

  Spanish

Sweet, warm and strongly anise-flavoured, with a light bitterness from the woody carpel and a lingering finish. It is a big, slow spice: it does not fade during long cooking, which is exactly what suits it to braises and stocks and exactly what makes it overwhelming in a quick dish.

Powerfully sweet and liquorice-like, with a warm resinous depth and a faint camphorous edge behind it. It carries a long way and clings to a grinder.

Red-brown to dark brown woody stars, usually of eight points, each carpel holding a single glossy amber seed.

Hard and woody, closer to a piece of bark than a seed. Star anise is used whole and removed; the carpels never soften enough to eat.

• trans-Anethole — Overwhelmingly dominant, and the source of the entire liquorice character. The same compound dominates aniseed and fennel, which is why all three taste related despite being unrelated plants.
• Foeniculin — A supporting sweet-aromatic note characteristic of this species.
• Limonene — A light citrus lift at the top of the aroma.
• Shikimic acid — Not an aroma compound at all, but present in quantity and commercially significant — see the trade notes.

Use whole. Toast the stars briefly in a dry pan until they smell of liquorice, then add them to the pot and take them out before serving — a stock bag or muslin makes retrieval trivial in a large braise. Start with less than seems right: star anise is stable under long cooking, so what tastes moderate after twenty minutes will be dominant after two hours. Where a ground blend genuinely needs it, grind fresh in small amounts and be aware that the mill will carry the smell to the next thing you put in it.

A long-cooking aromatic. Its natural home is anything simmered: Chinese red-braises and master stocks, Vietnamese phở broth, South Asian biryani and Mughlai braises, and European braises of pork and duck. It suits fatty meat, soy and dark sugars, and it works surprisingly well with orange and stone fruit. It is also the loudest note in Chinese five spice. Quantity is the whole discipline — one or two stars flavour a large pot, and four will make it taste like a sweet shop.

• infusing — The natural way to use it. A star or two in a simmering braise, stock or syrup gives up its aroma steadily over a long cook and can be removed the moment it has gone far enough.
• toasting — Brief dry heat before use rounds the aroma and takes off some of the raw camphorous edge. It scorches readily, so the window is short.
• grinding — Grinds to a coarse, fibrous powder that never becomes truly fine, and the aroma is strong enough to persist in a mill and flavour whatever is ground next. Ground star anise also loses its lift quickly while keeping its heaviness.
• boiling — Unusually stable under long wet cooking. Where most aromatics are exhausted after an hour, star anise is still contributing to a stock several hours in — the reason it anchors Vietnamese phở and Chinese master stocks.

Snap a point off a star. Fresh star anise releases its liquorice smell instantly and audibly cracks; spent stars break softly and smell mostly of wood.

• Faint or absent aroma when a point is snapped
• Greyish, dusty or bleached colour
• Soft rather than brittle carpels
• Any visible mould, which is a disposal matter rather than a quality one

• Volatilisation of anethole and the lighter terpenes
• Oxidation to flat, resinous off-notes
• Moisture uptake, with mould risk in under-dried whole stars

Buy whole, and here the case is stronger than for most spices. Whole stars keep better, are used whole in nearly every traditional preparation, are removable from a dish, and — uniquely among common spices — are the only form in which the species can be visually assessed at all. Ground star anise gives up all four advantages for a convenience the spice rarely requires.

• Whole, unbroken eight-pointed stars rather than a bag of fragments.
• Deep red-brown colour, not grey or bleached.
• A strong liquorice smell through the packet before it is opened.
• Glossy seeds still sitting in their carpels.
• A supplier that will say where the spice came from.

Commercial grading rests on the proportion of whole intact stars, colour and freedom from foreign matter, with broken material sold as a separate cheaper class.

Schisandraceae

A small to medium evergreen tree of southern China and northern Vietnam, slow to come into bearing and long-lived once it does.

Southern China and the adjoining north of Vietnam, where the tree is native and where cultivation remains concentrated.

• China (Guangxi and neighbouring provinces) — origin. The dominant producer by a very large margin.
• Vietnam (Lạng Sơn and the northern uplands) — major producer
• India — notable producer

Fruits are picked while still green to yellow-green, before they are fully ripe, and dried until they open and harden into the familiar brown star.

1. Picking — Immature green fruits are picked by hand from the tree.Why: Captures the fruit at a good aromatic stage before over-ripening.
2. Blanching or scalding — In some producing areas the fruits are briefly heated in water before drying.Why: Assists uniform drying and colour development.
3. Sun drying — Fruits are dried in the sun until hard and red-brown, opening out into the characteristic star.
4. Sorting — Dried stars are sorted for wholeness, colour and freedom from broken and foreign material.Why: Whole intact stars carry a premium, and sorting is also the control point against contamination with other Illicium species.

Graded principally on the proportion of whole unbroken stars, colour, and freedom from broken pieces and foreign matter. Broken material is cheaper and is a normal product rather than a defect in itself, but it makes species contamination harder to detect.

The serious issue is species substitution rather than bulking: Japanese star anise, Illicium anisatum, has been found in consignments sold as culinary star anise, and it is not edible. Both the European and United States regulators have addressed it, and cases have been associated with infusions in particular. This is why broken and ground material carries more risk than whole stars, and why supplier provenance matters more for this spice than for almost any other in the cabinet.

Grown as a plantation and smallholder tree crop. Trees take several years to come into bearing and remain productive for decades, so planting decisions respond to price only slowly.

Warm, humid subtropical uplands with reliable rainfall. The range in which the tree crops well is narrow, which is a large part of why cultivation has not spread far from where it began.

Star anise has been used in southern China for a very long time and reached Europe comparatively late, by the overland and maritime routes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where it was received as a cheaper source of the aniseed flavour already familiar from Pimpinella anisum.

Star anise is an unusual case of a culinary spice with a significant non-culinary industrial demand. It is a principal commercial source of shikimic acid, which was for years the starting material for the synthesis of the antiviral oseltamivir. Pandemic-driven demand for that drug has at times competed with the food trade for the same crop, and the resulting price movements have no culinary explanation at all.

Illicium verum fruit has a documented history of medicinal use and has been assessed as a herbal medicinal product in Europe, principally for digestive complaints. Recorded as documented tradition and regulatory context, not as a health recommendation.