Reference point
One dried star anise point, snapped in two.
Do this before you read on. An entry only works when you have just smelled the thing.
Sweet, round, and slightly cool at the end although it belongs to the spicy family — a small paradox worth remembering.
It can hardly be mistaken for anything else. Trans-anethole makes up most of it and has a very distinctive smell, so star anise is one of the few entries in the dictionary that almost nobody describes wrongly.
At high concentration it turns into a light numbing sensation on the tongue. That is the trigeminal nerve at work again, as with cinnamon, but in the opposite direction.
How to smell it
Snap a dried star anise point to expose the inside and smell at once. Compare it with a fennel seed if you have one — they share the same dominant molecule although they are completely different species.
Why this one is hard
It is not hard. This is the easiest entry in the dictionary, which makes it useful as a check that your nose is working normally before you tackle the harder entries.
Don’t confuse with
This entry
Star anise
Spicy family
Star anise is sweet, round and cool at the end; black cardamom is smoky and camphorous, much heavier.
Scientific note
The trans-anethole in star anise has a stable conjugated structure, and the same compound is found in fennel, Japanese star anise and several unrelated species. Note the difference between fennel and dill: they are different plants, and in dill we could not confirm a significant amount of anethole. It is also an industrial precursor for synthesising some other aroma chemicals. Notably, Japanese star anise is toxic even though it shares the same dominant compound — the toxicity comes from other substances in the fruit, not from anethole.
In Vietnamese life
Lang Son is the world’s second-largest star anise growing region, after Guangxi in China. But the two are not on the same scale: China accounts for nearly nine tenths of world production and Vietnam about one tenth, of which Lang Son produces nearly nine tenths of the national output. Star anise was once a strategic raw material for the pharmaceutical industry as a source of shikimic acid, and Vietnamese star anise prices have at times swung sharply for that reason.