Basil
The sweet basil of Mediterranean and South-East Asian cooking, occasionally infused but far more often eaten. Included here to separate it from tulsi, with which it shares a genus and is frequently confused.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Ocimum basilicum
- Family
- Lamiaceae
- Part used
- Leaf
- Origin
- Possible African origin; widely cultivated and long grown in tropical Asia
- Drunk in
- Italy, Thailand, India, Vietnam
Character
Sweet and faintly aniseed, quite unlike tulsi’s pepper and clove. The two are not interchangeable despite the shared genus.
Notes: anise, green herb, clove
History
Carried west from India through Persia and into the Mediterranean, where it became a defining culinary herb. Its journey is the reverse of most plants in this catalogue, which travelled outward from the Mediterranean.
How it is drunk
Almost entirely a cooking herb in Europe. Infused occasionally in Italy and in parts of South-East Asia, usually fresh and usually alongside something else.
Production
Used fresh wherever possible; it dries poorly and loses most of its aroma. Freeze-drying keeps considerably more than air-drying.
Preparation
Infusion
Herbal infusion (tisane)
1–2 g/100 ml · 95–100 °C · 5 min
Category-typical practice rather than a measurement for this specific botanical. Most infusions are far more tolerant of a long steep than tea is.
What gets confused
Sold as 'basil tea' interchangeably with tulsi in some markets. They are different species with different flavours.
Related botanicals
Comparisons
- Shiso vs basil — Two mint-family leaves that taste of anything but mint. Both carry cinnamon and anise notes, and both come in varieties different enough that the name alone tells you very little.
- Basil vs tulsi — Two Ocimum species, one a kitchen herb of possible African origin and the other a religiously significant South Asian plant, and they do not taste alike.
Evidence for this page
The botanical name, family and distribution above are checked against an external authority. Ocimum basilicum L. — GRIN-Global Taxonomy record— retrieved and read, not countersigned by a named human. That source covers naming and distribution only. Everything else on this page — history, culture, production, flavour, preparation and buying advice — is TeaHQ’s own synthesis with no external source behind it.
Brewing parameters here are typical practice for the category rather than measurements of this plant, and each set says so.
This page makes no safety claim. It describes what Basil is, where it comes from and how it is prepared — not what it does to a person. The absence of a safety note here is not a statement that the plant is safe. How TeaHQ handles this.