Saigon cinnamon
The bark of a Vietnamese cinnamon tree, the most intensely aromatic of the four species in the cinnamon trade and the one highest in essential oil. It is a cassia-type bark and a distinct species from both Chinese cassia and Ceylon cinnamon, and the trade calls all three cinnamon.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Cinnamomum loureiroi
- Family
- Lauraceae
- Part used
- Bark
- Origin
- Central and northern Vietnam — Quảng Nam, Quảng Ngãi, Yên Bái and Thanh Hóa provinces
- Drunk in
- Vietnam, Quảng Nam, Yên Bái, Thanh Hóa
Character
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.
Notes: cinnamon, clove, red hot candy, wood
History
Vietnamese cinnamon was a court and tribute good with named district origins long before it was an export commodity, and the district names still carry a premium. The American market for Saigon cinnamon was interrupted by the war and the trade embargo that followed, and resumed from the 1990s, after which Vietnam became a major world supplier and the name reattached itself to a product most buyers had never tasted.
How it is drunk
In Vietnam quế goes into phở broth and into spiced preparations, and the bark is sold in slabs at market. In North America it is marketed as a premium baking cinnamon and is what a great many modern recipes now specify by name, which is unusual — most cinnamon is bought without a species attached.
Production
Bark is stripped from trees of a decade or more, scraped and dried into thick, hard, single-rolled quills that cannot be crumbled by hand. Oil content is the graded property and the Trà My and Thanh Hóa district names appear on premium material; a piece that snaps rather than bends is normal for this species and not a fault.
Preparation
Decoction · Steeped with milk · Blended with tea
Boiling and decoction
1–3 g/100 ml · 98–100 °C · 10 min
What gets confused
Four species carry the word cinnamon in commerce and TeaHQ now holds all four: Cinnamomum verum (Ceylon, “true” cinnamon), C. aromaticum (Chinese cassia), C. loureiroi (Saigon) and C. burmannii (Indonesian korintje). Saigon cinnamon is a cassia and is not a grade or a form of Ceylon cinnamon, and material labelled only “cinnamon” in North America is most often korintje rather than either.
Common mistakes
- Substituting it by weight for Ceylon cinnamon. It is far stronger and takes over a blend.
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 Saigon cinnamon 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.