Clove or Laung

Which spice in your spice box is closest to your heart? Do you have a favourite spice? Well, this is a difficult question to answer as each spice has a magical story and a special flavour that they bring to a dish. While cardamoms add a particular flavour to Indian desserts like kheer, cinnamon adds a woody, sweet flavour to rice. Green chillies add a tang to vegetables and curries and turmeric adds a mellow yellow colour and some antiseptic properties to food.

Clove or laung too is one such special spice in our spice box that adds a hot and bitter, rich and warm flavour to Indian food. Cloves are the unopened flower buds of the clove tree. After picking, they are dried in the traditional way, sun-drying them on woven mats. They loose their moisture, become hard and reddish-brown in colour. The best cloves have deep reddish-brown stems though in comparison a lighter crown; they tend to be rough to touch, exude a small quantity of oil if compressed with a fingernail and snap cleanly between the two.

Cloves have an extremely strong and pungent aroma, with notes of pepper and camphor. The taste is rich and warm, aromatic and fruity but also sharp, hot and bitter, creating a numbing sensation on the tongue.

The name clove is derived from the French word clou meaning nail, which is the shape that the bud and stem resemble. Cloves are known to have antiseptic properties and their smell is often associated with the dentist. At the time of the early Chinese civilization commoners chewed cloves to sweeten their breath before talking to the emperor. The Chinese also used cloves as a mild anesthetic for toothache.

Cloves are used in cooking the world over and can be tasted in breads and cakes and in mulled wine. In India, they are added to rice and sweets. Paan or betel leaf is filled with aromatic spices and sweeteners and held together by a single, whole clove.

Cloves should be kept in a tightly sealed glass container in a cool, dark and dry place. Ground cloves will keep for about six months, while whole cloves will stay fresh for about one year stored this way.

Cloves are an excellent source of manganese. They are also a very good source of dietary fiber, vitamin C and omega-3 fatty acids and a good source of magnesium and calcium.

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by Chandana Banerjee