Black cardamom
A large ridged brown pod dried over open fires until it is thoroughly smoky, and a different species from the green cardamom it is named after. Substituting one for the other in a recipe produces something unrecognisable.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Amomum subulatum
- Family
- Zingiberaceae
- Part used
- Fruit, Seed
- Origin
- The eastern Himalaya — Sikkim, Nepal and Bhutan
- Drunk in
- Sikkim, Nepal, Bhutan, Darjeeling
Character
Heavily smoky with a cool camphor note underneath, and much more savoury than green cardamom. One pod flavours a large pot and two overwhelm it.
Notes: smoke, camphor, resin
History
Grown under forest shade in the eastern Himalaya, with Sikkim the historic centre of the trade and Nepal now the largest producer. The smoky character comes from the drying method used in the growing regions rather than from anything in the plant.
How it is drunk
Goes into North Indian, Nepali and Tibetan cooking — biryani, dal, and the meat dishes of the mountains — and into some regional chai. It is much less common in sweet preparations than green cardamom.
Production
Pods are dried over wood fires in bhattis, which is where the smoke comes from; kiln-dried pods lack it entirely and are a noticeably different product. Sun-dried Nepali material is increasingly common and much milder.
Preparation
Decoction · Steeped with milk
Boiling and decoction
1–3 g/100 ml · 98–100 °C · 10 min
What gets confused
A different genus from green cardamom despite the shared name. How it was dried is the biggest quality variable and is almost never stated on a packet.
Common mistakes
- Using it in place of green cardamom in sweet preparations. The smoke is wrong for almost all of them.
Related botanicals
- Cardamom — Different genera despite the shared name. Black cardamom is fire-dried and smoky and is wrong in almost every sweet preparation green cardamom belongs in.
Teas this connects to
- CTC black tea — Used in the regional chai of the Himalayan foothills, where its smoke suits a strong CTC base.
Comparisons
- Black cardamom vs green cardamom — Different genera despite the shared name, and the difference is smoke. One is fire-dried in the eastern Himalaya and belongs in savoury cooking; the other is the sweet aromatic of chai and pastry.
- Cassia vs black cardamom — The two assertive spices of a mountain chai, both able to stand up to milk and long simmering, and both wrong in a delicate preparation.
- Clove vs black cardamom — Two spices that take over a pot, one by intensity and one by smoke, and both of which reward being counted rather than spooned.
Evidence for this page
This page is TeaHQ synthesis throughout. No external source stands behind any statement on it, including the botanical name. Twenty of the 150 botanicals have had their names and distribution checked against a taxonomic authority and this is not one of them.
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 Black cardamom 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.