Lemongrass
A tall tropical grass whose stems and leaves carry a clean citrus aroma. It is a cooking ingredient first and a drink second across South-East Asia, and a drink first almost everywhere else.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Cymbopogon citratus
- Family
- Poaceae
- Part used
- Leaf, Aerial parts
- Origin
- Cultivated across the tropics; the wild origin is not settled
- Drunk in
- Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Jamaica, West Africa
Character
Bright and clean, more lemon peel than lemon juice, with a faint warmth behind it. Holds up well to boiling, unlike most leaf botanicals.
Notes: lemon peel, fresh grass, ginger edge
History
Spread through the Indian Ocean trade and into Africa and the Caribbean, where it took root as a household plant. Its use as an infusion is documented in the Caribbean and West Africa as strongly as in its region of origin.
How it is drunk
Takrai in Thai cooking, sereh in Indonesian, and fever grass in Jamaica where it is grown at the edge of a yard and cut as needed. In Vietnam and the Philippines it is boiled with ginger and sugar.
Production
Leaves are cut and dried; stems are used fresh and bruised rather than dried. Dried leaf keeps its aroma unusually well, which makes it one of the better-travelling botanicals here.
Preparation
Infusion · Decoction
Boiling and decoction
1–3 g/100 ml · 98–100 °C · 10 min
Related botanicals
- Lemon balm — Both give a lemon character without citrus fruit, from unrelated plants on different continents.
- Lemon myrtle — Both sold as lemon-scented leaf and lemon myrtle is roughly four times as strong. Substituting by weight ruins the result.
- Vervain — Both turn up under vague 'verbena' and 'lemon' labelling in mixed tisanes, and only one of them has any citrus character at all.
- Makrut lime leaf — The two Southeast Asian citrus aromatics, used together far more often than separately.
Comparisons
- Lemon myrtle vs lemongrass — Both sold as lemon-scented leaf, and lemon myrtle is roughly four times as strong. Substituting by weight is the fastest way to ruin a pot, and it is the most common error with the Australian plant.
- Makrut lime leaf vs lemongrass — The two Southeast Asian citrus aromatics, used together far more often than separately. One is a doubled leaf with an aroma nothing reproduces; the other is a grass with a waxier, softer citrus.
- Lemon verbena vs lemongrass — Two lemon-scented materials from opposite sides of the world, blended together constantly and rarely distinguished. One is a leaf and one is a grass, and the difference in the cup is cleanliness.
Evidence for this page
The botanical name, family and distribution above are checked against an external authority. Cymbopogon citratus (DC.) Stapf — 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 Lemongrass 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.