Korintje cassia
The bark most likely to be inside a jar labelled simply “cinnamon” in North America and much of Europe. It comes from the Kerinci highlands of Sumatra, it is the cheapest of the four commercial cinnamons, and it is the volume species of the world trade.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Cinnamomum burmannii
- Family
- Lauraceae
- Part used
- Bark
- Origin
- Sumatra, Indonesia — principally the Kerinci highlands of Jambi and neighbouring West Sumatra
- Drunk in
- Sumatra, Kerinci, Jambi, Indonesia
Character
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.
Notes: cinnamon, wood, dry spice
History
Sumatran cassia planting expanded under Dutch colonial administration and the export names — Padang, Batavia, Korintje — are shipping ports and districts rather than botanical distinctions. Kerinci smallholders supply most of the world’s volume today and the crop is the mainstay of that district’s economy, which is a considerable amount of weight for one spice to carry.
How it is drunk
In Indonesia kayu manis goes into wedang jahe and other spiced drinks and into cooking. Exported, it is a baking and beverage spice and is the base of most ground cinnamon sold in supermarkets, where it is rarely named. It is in far more cups than any other cinnamon and on far fewer labels.
Production
Bark is peeled from trees of several years’ growth and sun-dried into irregular thick quills that curl inward from both edges — a double-rolled shape that distinguishes it from the single roll of Chinese and Vietnamese cassia. It is graded by thickness and cleanliness under district-named grades, and most of it is ground rather than sold whole.
Preparation
Decoction · Steeped with milk · Blended with tea
Boiling and decoction
1–3 g/100 ml · 98–100 °C · 10 min
What gets confused
Sold as cinnamon, as Indonesian cinnamon and as korintje, and it is a cassia. The double-rolled quill shape is the field mark: Ceylon bark is thin, papery and made of many layers rolled together, Chinese and Vietnamese cassia rolls from one edge, and this rolls from both.
Common mistakes
- Assuming ground supermarket cinnamon is Ceylon. In North America it is very unlikely to be.
Evidence for this page
This page is TeaHQ synthesis throughout. No external source stands behind any statement on it, including the botanical name. 132 of the 204 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 Korintje cassia 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.