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Barks

A small group with an outsized naming problem: most of what is sold as cinnamon in the world is cassia, a different species with a different flavour and a different price. Barks are simmered rather than steeped, and whole quills give up far more slowly — and far more pleasantly — than ground powder.

7 recordsPeeled and rolled or dried in strips, and almost always simmered.

All 7

  • Cassia
    Hot, sweet and bluntly assertive, with more bite and less complexity than Ceylon cinnamon. It stands up to milk and to long simmering, which is why chai uses it.
  • Cinnamon
    Delicate and sweetly aromatic, quite unlike cassia’s blunt heat. The quill crumbles between the fingers, which is the practical test.
  • Eucommia
    Woody and lightly bitter with a roasted depth when the bark has been toasted. The leaf version is greener, lighter and closer to a mild roasted tea.
  • Korintje cassia
    Sweet and woody with a blunt heat — less complex than Saigon, much heavier and less delicate than Ceylon. It is what most people mean by cinnamon without ever having been told which plant they mean.
  • Lapacho
    Woody and faintly sweet with a bitter astringent finish and very little aroma — a light-bodied brown decoction that tastes more of the pot than of the plant if it is under-simmered.
  • Saigon cinnamon
    The sweetest and most aggressively spicy of the cinnamons — notably high in cinnamaldehyde, with a heat that arrives quickly and stays, and without the delicate citrus-and-floral top notes of Ceylon bark.
  • Sassafras
    Sweet, rooty and strongly aromatic — the flavour most Americans read immediately as root beer — with a soapy camphorous edge if it is simmered hard or long.

Commonly confused within this group

  • Cinnamon and Star anise — Both warm sweet spices in mulled drinks, and neither is what the other is. Cinnamon is a bark and star anise a fruit.
  • Cassia and Cinnamon — The single most consequential substitution in the spice trade. Ceylon quills are thin and layered; cassia is one thick hard curl, and outside a few markets it is what 'cinnamon' means.

Guides covering this group

Other groups

Grouping is by the plant part used, which is a fact about the material rather than a judgement about flavour. A plant appears in one group only, so cinnamon is a bark and not a spice here even though every kitchen in the world files it the other way.