Steenbergs Organic Star Anise

Organic Star Anise is a premium spice, essential to Chinese and South-East Asian cooking. It has a deep brown colour and a beautiful star shape. Star Anise smells and tastes of anise seed and liquorice.

Star Anise has a sweet anise flavour, popular in Chinese and South East Asian dishes. Use it for a Chinese master stock, or put under white fish when boiling in milk to add flavour and stops it sticking to the pan. If you’d prefer it ground, visit Star Anise Ground.

Axel’s Tasting Notes: Pungent; liquorice, pungent, lingering, numbing, leaving the palate feeling refreshed and stimulated.

Food Pairing: Fruits, figs, pumpkin, fish and seafood, chicken and pork.

More about Star Anise

Star anise is the dried fruit from a small evergreen tree, Illicium verum, which grows to 5 m. The tree begins to fruit in its sixth year and will bear fruits for up to 100 years.

The tree has shiny aromatic leaves, which are 7 – 8 cm long, and small greenish-yellow unscented flowers.

After flowering, the fruits develop with their characteristic eight seed-holding segments. The fruits are picked when still green. They are dried in the sun, turning a deep, red-brown colour whilst its flavours develop.

When the fruits are dry, the compartments split open to reveal little seeds within each segment.