Steenbergs Organic Cloves Fairtrade

Cloves Fairtrade are strongly aromatic and have a pungent, woody spice taste. Their camphor-like woodiness goes well in curries and aromatic dishes. Use them to stud a ham just like my mum does, or pop a few into your mulled wine or cider for a warming drink in the winter months.

Steenbergs sources the highest quality organic Fairtrade Cloves from a farmers’ cooperative that we’ve been working with for over 20 years. They are hand harvested and hand sorted in Sri Lanka, then lovingly packed in North Yorkshire to give you the best organic Fairtrade cloves we can find. Clove buds should be whole and still contain a really brittle ball in the top of the nail.

Axel’s Tasting Notes: Pungent: intensely medicinal with a warming woody, sweetness.

Cloves are a great baking spice, lifting the flavours of pears and apples. Whole cloves are used to pickling meats, studding hams at Christmas or to flavour bread sauce. Add a clove to lift a beef stew.

More about Cloves

Cloves come from an evergreen tropical tree, Syzygium aromaticum. Cloves are their dried, unopened flower buds.

The trees grow to 10 m high. Cloves are harvested when the trees get to 6 years old and are productive for another 50 years.

Cloves begin as clusters of 10 – 15 flower buds that are picked when fully sized and before they flower. At this stage, they are a pale green. 1 kg of dried whole cloves contains about 15,000 buds.

Next, the flower buds are removed from the stems, then they  are air-dried for a few days. During the drying process, the buds become brittle, turn a deep brown colour and chemical reactions make the volatile oil, eugenol.