Learning to identify botanical materials
Not organised by flavour. Each step is chosen because it is confused with something else, and the journey is a sequence of discriminations rather than of tastes.
Who this is for
Someone who wants to be able to look at a packet and know what is in it.
What you should come away with
Four discriminations you can make by eye, and the habit of reading a binomial rather than a common name.
Leg 1 · The pairs worth telling apart
Peppermint against spearmint first, because it is the one you will use most often. The rest follow the same principle: two plants, one word, a visible difference.
Starting point. Everything after this is measured against it.
Sharply cooling and slightly peppery, with a bitterness that arrives if it is steeped long. Far colder in the mouth than spearmint.
Why this step follows
The gentler of the two mints. Spearmint is sweet where peppermint is cooling, and tasting them in this order makes the menthol in peppermint obvious in retrospect.
Sweet and rounded rather than cooling, with none of peppermint’s cold bite. This is what most people who like mint tea actually like.
Why this step follows
Still a mint-family leaf and still soft, but the citrus replaces the cooling note. A small move that shows how wide the family is.
Softly lemony and slightly green, with none of the sharpness of actual citrus. Dried material is a shadow of the fresh leaf.
Leg 2 · When a petal is decoration
A change of leg into the flowers, where the discrimination is not between two plants but between a plant that flavours a cup and one that colours it.
Starting point. Everything after this is measured against it.
Sweet, faintly apple-like and gently bitter at the finish. Whole flowers give a rounder cup than the crushed material in bags, which extracts fast and turns bitter.
Why this step follows
From a flower with flavour to one with almost none. Useful early, because it teaches that a petal in a packet is often doing visual work rather than flavour work.
Faintly resinous and slightly bitter, with far more visual presence than flavour. In a blend it is doing colour work rather than taste work.
Why this step follows
The same lesson with the colour changed. Two petals present for appearance, and recognising them is most of what reading a blend requires.
Essentially neutral, with a faint hay note at high concentration. It is in the packet so that the packet looks like something.
Read alongside
- Botanicals that are commonly confused
Two marigolds from different genera, two verbenas, two cinnamons, a Coreopsis sold as a chrysanthemum and a safflower sold as saffron. The most useful page in this catalogue for anyone buying.
- One plant, many names
Hibiscus is karkade, sorrel, agua de Jamaica and zobo. Barley tea is mugicha and boricha. Understanding when two names mean one plant saves buying the same thing twice.