How stuff grows, Vol. 3

In today’s episode: The Kardashians of the plant world and other vegetative disappointments.

First up: liquorice.
Liquorice is gross and made from twigs:

Hahaha, just kidding, don’t be ridiculous.
Those are obviously roots.

The liquorice plant, Glycyrrhiza glabra, is a legume, grows up to 1.5 meters (5 feet) tall and looks like the most pedestrian of bushes:

It takes between two and four years before its roots are ready to be harvested, during which time they grow up to 3 tangled meters (10 tangled feet) long. Come harvest time, the plants are cut down, the soil is turned over and the roots are pulled out:

They’re chopped up and boiled to extract the sap, which contains anethole, the chemical compound most responsible for the typical liquorice flavor.

Most supermarket liquorice contains only a tiny amount of real liquorice, though. Instead it’s often flavored with something else that contains anethole: anise oil. This is made from two very similar tasting yet entirely unrelated plants, star anise and aniseed.

Star anise likes to pretend it isn't gross by looking very pretty:

It comes from the Illicium verum tree, difficult to cultivate and slow to mature, flowering only after 6 years:

The part that we use as a spice is the pericarp, the outer layer of the dried fruit:

It still contains the seeds ‒ unless they have fallen out at some point, which I always thought meant that the flavory part was gone, but turns out it’s in fact the pericarp itself that contains most of the flavor, so that’s good to know. In powder form it’s one of the ingredients in Chinese five-spice, but on its own it’s usually sold whole and used like a stick of cinnamon: you add it to whatever you want to flavor and fish it out at the end.

As of 2006, however, 90% of the annual Chinese star anise harvest didn’t go towards cooking at all.

Instead, they were bought up by pharma giant Roche to extract the shikimic acid needed for the manufacture of their bestselling flu medicine, Tamiflu. But harvests can be fickle and demand can rise, which led to a shortage of Tamiflu during the birdflu epidemic of 2004. As far as I was able to find out, no viable large-scale synthetic replacement has been developed since*, so Roche is most likely still the #1 buyer of star anise in the world. The more you know!

(*ETA: thanks to @LynerBarsett, who just told me that in 2006, 30% of shikimic acid came from E. coli, so there IS a large-scale alternative. We don't know about current numbers, and they DID still buy all the natural stuff back then, so they might still be #1. Or not.)

Don’t start eating star anise to combat the flu, though, the acid is just a step in the production, not an active ingredient.

Also, don’t go picking the fruit off any random star anise tree you encounter in the wild, there’s a lot of toxic varieties (one of them grows in Florida, so you can see how that needed pointing out).

On to aniseed which, despite its name, is in fact not the seed but the tiny dried fruit...

... of the anise plant (pictured here in white but also comes in yellow):

Aniseed is native to the Eastern Mediterranean region and Southwest Asia. It’s one of the oldest spices we know and has been cultivated for about 4,000 years.

It’s what flavors all those mediterranean spirits like ouzo, raki, arak, pastis and sambuca (as well as absinthe) because due to a terrible oversight nobody ever asked me if that was a good idea.

In case we’ll ever be able to go to parties again, here’s something for your small talk arsenal: it’s the anethole in those spirits that is responsible for the „ouzo effect“ where a clear alcohol goes cloudy when water is added. Spontaneous microemulsion, baby! Surefire panty-dropper.

Aniseed is part of the Apiaceae family, which is just about my least favorite family in the plant world. They’re a lot like the Kardashians in that regard, also in that everybody looks alike and is kinda gross. Please note my restraint in not spelling them all with a k.

There's cumin:

Caraway:

Coriander:

Celery:

Dill:

And fennel (there’s more, like parsley and carrots, but I’ll give those a pass):

Like aniseed, all of these are commonly called seeds but are actually tiny dried fruit.

Also like aniseed, they all went and ruined themselves with varying levels of anethole, most notably fennel, the big dummy. Cumin might possibly be the only holdout but I honestly think it’s more likely that the internet just gave up and doesn‘t know.

Because humanity never fails to disappoint, our forebears decided that, out of ALL the plant families, this one was the one we needed to eat more of. (To be fair, unlike the Kardashians they’re actually good for you, especially the seeds, with a myriad of health benefits that have been put to medicinal use for millennia, and apparently some people even LIKE them, but still. Not cool.)

So everyone who went „WTF, that’s not celery!“ up there, hold your horses:

We also eat the celery stalks...

... as well as the root, called celeriac (botanically not actually a root but a hypocotyl, which is short for hypocotyledonous stem, but there’s no way I’m reading up on THAT for CELERY):

As you can see, they’re from slightly different cultivated varieties. Use and prevalence varies, the US for example is big on the stalks, Germany mainly uses the roots. They taste very similar but have very different textures, so they’re mostly only interchangeable in stews and soups. My ignorance of the celery habits of other countries lets me live in the fantasy that they’ve smartened up and don’t use it at all. Don’t burst my bubble.

With fennel, we eat the bulbous leaf base...

... but the feathery green leaves can also be cultivated as a herb (same as dill, whose leaves look pretty much identical, so I’m not posting a picture. Suck it, dill).

And finally, there’s coriander leaves, known as cilantro in American English (coz Mexican food), which are so awful they’re both the Kim AND the Kanye of the family.

This pic shows the typical young leaves as well as the more feathery mature ones:

Depending at least in part on your genetic make-up, cilantro either tastes fresh and fruity (so I hear) or moldy and dirtlike (so I read) or overwhelmingly, unbearably, disgustingly like soap (so I know, as you can tell by the adverbs).

The exact science behind this is unclear, the most likely culprits are currently thought to be genetic variants of olfactory receptor genes. It seems that people who hate cilantro are both more sensitive to the soap-like aldehydes in cilantro as well as potentially less sensitive to its alleged more pleasant aromas.

All I know is that I’ll be over here praying this doesn’t turn out to have been a prophecy:

Well, I didn’t like ANY of that.

Let’s go look at some almonds instead and hope they’re actually nuts for once.

They certainly look the part:

Almond trees, Prunus dulcis, are famous for their pink or white blossoms. See, star anise? You can be pretty without being a fraud.

Native to the Middle East, almonds are cultivated in climatically suitable regions all over the world, with California alone producing a whopping 80% of the world’s almond crop.

The following is a straight quote from Wikipedia but it’s so insane it was just too good to pass up: „The pollination of California's almonds is the largest annual managed pollination event in the world, with 1.4 million hives (nearly half of all beehives in the US) being trucked in February to the almond groves. Much of the pollination is managed by pollination brokers, who contract with migratory beekeepers from at least 49 states for the event.“

POLLINATION BROKERS, YOU GUYS. I know what *I* wanna be when I grow up!

Almonds start out green and fuzzy...

... and as they age their outer mantle splits open...

...until they’re ready for harvest:

How are almonds harvested, you ask?
You shake the tree until they fall off.

Look, I don’t make the rules, sometimes the simple way is the best way (olives and pistachios are harvested this way too). Small outfits shake the branches with long sticks and put tarps beneath the trees to catch the almonds. Larger farms rent or own machines that shake the whole tree, as well as so-called sweepers, machines that drive through the grounds and sweep all the fallen almonds into long rows where they’re left to dry in the sun for a week before being gathered up for further processing:

So, are almonds botanical nuts or what? Seed inside a hard shell, yes, looking good, looking good, but wait, surrounded by a fleshy part that splits open as it ripens?
Aw poop, just a drupe.

This is getting ridiculous. Time to start a nut count:

Nut or Not?
Nut: 0
Not: 5 (4 drupes: cashew, nutmeg, pistachio, almond; 1 legume: peanut)

Hrmph.

So turns out the whole business about what exactly defines a botanical nut is way, WAY more complicated than I thought. Like, I’m over here getting cinnamon flashbacks while reading about indehiscence and involucres and plant embryos (I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW PLANTS HAD THOSE) and just when I think I finally got it, it turns out botanists aren’t even entirely sure themselves.

So, serious request, if there are any botanists on imgur, please shoot me a DM, I have QUESTIONS. I just want to be able to explain it in a way that’s factually correct but won’t make peoples‘ eyes glaze over. Or I can’t write about nuts anymore, which would make me sad because I don’t think they let you become a pollination broker if you’re already a cat tax.

*thousand yard stare*

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Previously:
Vol. 1: https://imgur.com/gallery/Sa2qVJQ
Vol. 2: https://imgur.com/gallery/1f1JZM4
Moar:
Vol. 4: https://imgur.com/gallery/LcqzWqO
Vol. 5: https://imgur.com/gallery/a9JyTgq
Vol. 6: https://imgur.com/gallery/rQafyGD
Vol. 7: https://imgur.com/gallery/XaDGEOD
Vol. 8: http://imgur.com/gallery/7HL4A6t

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FP edit: Nut fiends, rejoice! A real-life botanist has offered to answer all my nutty questions! Thank you so much & I'm sorry in advance, @BestRaccoon.