Under the simple name “5 spices” lies one of the most famous seasonings of Chinese cuisine, which, however, not only found use in its homeland, but also spread throughout the world. Unlike another famous spice mixture, which, despite its fame and phenomenal aroma, never made it beyond Indian cuisine, Chinese 5 spices are also used in other, completely non-Chinese dishes. Let's try to figure out what these 5 spices are, and at the same time understand the reason for their popularity.

Chinese cuisine, in addition to the fact that it is completely different from any of the European ones, including ours, has centuries-old roots. One of the rules of this cuisine, which comes from ancient times, is maintaining the right balance of flavors. There are five basic tastes in Chinese cuisine - sweet, sour, bitter, hot and salty - and the mixture of 5 spices represents their complete balance and harmony. This mixture is also known to advanced cooks as “wuxianmian” or “wuxianfen,” which literally translates to “five-spice powder.”

However, despite the clear designation, there is no single recipe for five spice powder; different cooks prepare it in different ways for different purposes. It comes to the point that 5 spices can contain both 6 and 7 ingredients, but this does not bother the Chinese at all. However, let's look at the most common option, which with some stretch can be called canonical. It includes:

Cinnamon

Moreover, cinnamon is not simple, but Chinese - the bark of the evergreen tree Cinnamomum cassia. Nowadays it is most often sold under the name “cinnamon,” but you may also come across the bark of its close relative, Ceylon cinnamon. From an authenticity point of view, it is better to use Chinese cinnamon, but if you only have Ceylon cinnamon (or, as is also likely, the origin of the spice is not stated in sufficient detail on the packaging), take what you have: they are to a certain extent interchangeable.

Fennel

Fennel is a close relative of the much more familiar dill; they even have similar greens, except that fennel greens have a more delicate taste and aroma with hints of anise and mint. Fennel seeds are also similar in appearance to dill seeds, but have a greenish tint with a slight hint of yellow. Fennel is actively used as a seasoning in Italian cuisine, primarily for pork dishes, including the famous porchetta; it is also no stranger to Indian cuisine (in particular, Indians chew its seeds to freshen their breath after eating). I won’t say that here fennel is sold on every corner, but if you search properly in stores that specialize in spices, you will definitely find it.

Carnation

Perhaps the most common spice among those included in the Chinese 5 spice mixture: you may not have cinnamon in your house, for example, but you probably have cloves. It is used for cooking broths, marinating meat, as a seasoning for sauces and stews, and it is as if they have forgotten that the homeland of the clove tree is Southeast Asia. More precisely, the Moluccas Islands, which received the name of the Spice Islands thanks to the light hand of the Chinese, who have long brought various spices from there.

Star anise

This spice is the dried fruit of the star anise plant, which is also sometimes called star anise. Perhaps this is the most beautiful spice, if not in general, then definitely on this list: the fruits of star anise have the shape of a regular six- or eight-pointed star, in the “rays” of which the seeds are hidden. The aroma of star anise is also absolutely impossible to confuse with anything else - it is a powerful, spicy, sweetish spice, the very smell of which excites the blood and evokes thoughts of distant countries. In Asia, soups, sauces and marinades are prepared with the addition of star anise, primarily for meat, because in most cases it is too strong a seasoning for fish. It is not surprising that star anise is also included in the 5 spices.

Sichuan pepper

Although it is called pepper, Sichuan pepper is not at all related to the familiar black pepper - this is the name given to the shells of the fruits of the prickly ash tree, and the fruits themselves are thrown away during the production of the spice: they are bitter. Sichuan pepper is the main star of Sichuan cuisine, which is famous for its spiciness, but in addition to its slight heat, it also provides another special effect - a chill that makes the lips and tongue slightly numb. For this reason, it is impossible to find an adequate replacement for Sichuan pepper in a 5-spice mixture, but this is the only spice that I was unable to buy, so I was forced to replace it with another pepper. If you also cannot get Sichuan pepper, when making your own five-spice powder, you can replace it with black pepper, white pepper, or a mixture of them: as mentioned above, they cannot fully replace Sichuan pepper, but in the absence of better options, such a trick is quite acceptable.

In addition to this, the most common option, the composition of 5 spices, supplementing or replacing them, may also include anise seeds, cardamom, nutmeg, licorice, or galangal and even tangerines.

As mentioned above, five spice powder represents the balance and harmony of the five basic tastes, so the ratio of ingredients is given no less attention than their choice. Fortunately, there is a simple and win-win option - take all the spices in a 1:1 ratio, except that you can take twice as much cinnamon. In this case, before making the mixture, spices can be heated briefly in a dry frying pan to make their aroma more intense, and then turned into powder using a mill or mortar and pestle. In a closed jar, 5 spices will live for at least six months, after which they will slowly begin to lose their aroma: to prevent this from happening, use them to prepare poultry (especially duck), meat (especially in sauce), seafood (especially scallops) and spicy cocktails.

It's a good idea to add to the five spices and get a versatile seasoning with a subtle and appetizing aroma that can be used in ready-made dishes to suit your taste.

The traditional Chinese spice mixture is probably best known to my compatriots under the name wuxiangmian. It is, however, often called simply five spice powder or in English transcription - five spices powder.
And in dozens of replicated descriptions you can read that wuxiangmian is a mixture of five spices, that it comes in two types: hot and sweet, that the hot one consists of Sichuan pepper, star anise, cinnamon, cloves and ginger, and the sweet one consists of star anise, cinnamon, cloves, dill and licorice, and, finally, that all spices are included in wuxiangmian in equal parts.
Meanwhile, here, in the previous paragraph, there are as many as five myths about this truly wonderful mixture.

MYTH No. 1 Wuxiangmian has two versions - spicy and sweet.

While studying this mixture, your humble servant found in open sources not 2, but 52 of its recipes, based on 23 types of spices. This amount turned out to be quite enough to conduct my statistical studies, but most likely it is not the limit.
The qualitative division into savory and sweet options is also incorrect. Five-spice powder is sweet in any of its variants, because star anise and cinnamon are sweet spices, but the Sichuan pepper used here is completely devoid of pungency - its spicy properties are completely different. Truly hot pepper is used in wuxiangmian rarely and only in exceptional proportions.

MYTH #2 Wuxiangmian is a mixture of five spices.

Indeed: five is the most likely number of spices that make up wuxiangmian. Of the 52 recipes examined, 35 contained exactly five spices. However, there were also recipes with 6 or 7 spices, while the quantitative maximum generally reached 13. One recipe contained only 4 spices, but it retained the characteristic features of wuxiangmian.
The sometimes proposed interpretation of the five as a five not of spices, but of tastes does not work either. After all, the spices used do not have a basic salty taste. There is no umami taste, which is separately appreciated in China, and many mixtures are completely devoid of spicy.

MYTH No. 3 In wuxiangmian, spices are included in equal parts.

Of course, this is an obvious myth. Add equal amounts of cinnamon and cloves and the latter will, without hesitation, take over the whole spicy “blanket”. I'm not even talking about how different Szechuan peppers are in their spicy power, and this circumstance also cannot be ignored. Therefore, in my factual material, about two dozen recipes argued among themselves only about which spicy proportions of matching spices generate harmony of aroma.

MYTH #4 Authentic wuxiangmian variations include dill.

Initially, there was an obvious translation error, which famously turned fennel, beloved in China, into dill, which is rarely used there. No, it’s not that dill is completely unknown in China, but it is not listed among the popular national spices and its appearance in the traditional mixture seems very doubtful to me personally. Unless, of course, deep experts in Chinese cuisine correct me now.

MYTH #5 The real name of the traditional Chinese five-spice mixture is wuxiangmian.

The fact is that the characters of its Chinese name 五香粉 sound a little different - wuxiangfen, which in Latin looks like wu xiang fen. And through just such a name (or as five spices powder or even wu xiang powder) the Chinese mixture appears to the world. And under the name wu xiang main the mixture is known in Russia.

Now let's move on from myths to facts.
So, 52 found recipes, reduced to fractional uniformity of components, were placed in a table suitable for analysis.
First of all (as always in a proven method), we are interested in the frequency of appearance of individual spices in mixtures. This information is significant because it allows us to judge how important a particular spice is in the average (tribal) wuxiangmian ideology. Of course, spices with a higher frequency are more important, and they better reflect the characteristic “family” characteristics of wuxiangmian.

Star anise and cinnamon not only shared the first two places here with a result of 98% (both were absent in only one recipe out of 52), but also significantly broke away from the rest.

This means that star anise (1) and cinnamon (2) carry with them the main aroma of wuxiangmian, which determines the main qualities of the mixture, in fact, its face.

The next group, quite close to each other, included cloves - 82%, fennel - 71% and Sichuan pepper - 69%. Moreover, there is no doubt that the result of Sichuan pepper could be even closer to cloves. After all, it is this type of pepper that is the most authentic in Wuxiangmian. But it is also the most inaccessible outside of China, which pushes non-Chinese compilers of spicy mixtures to replace it. However, there is simply nothing to fully replace Sichuan pepper - its taste is very unique and out of desperation it is replaced with other types of pepper: usually black or white. And despite the apparent formality of such a replacement, it creates a much more universal (from the point of view of international taste habits) aroma of the mixture, and at the same time contributes to the gradual formation of new traditions.
Thus, in the universal wuxiangmian recipe, one could even define a practically established invariant - Sichuan pepper = other types of pepper, with a recipe occurrence frequency of 88%.
Almost the same thing, as the reader will see a little further, can be said about fennel. And its frequency of appearance could also be closer to cloves, when using which, by the way, the authors of wuxiangmian recipes sometimes require separating the round clove “caps” from the petioles and using only the first ones. Thus, the mixture is deprived of the last pungency contained in the clove stems, and the spicy clove contribution, on the contrary, is enhanced.
One way or another, the second leading group has also been determined.

Clove(3), fennel(4) and Sichuan pepper(5) are the additional flavors of wuxiangmian.

It must be said that the names of the main and additional aromas, taken without exception and without any additions, completely coincide with the most common nomenclature of spices, which was found about twenty times among the selected recipes.

After Sichuan pepper, the frequency of occurrence of spices makes a sharp jump down: the sixth position, with a value of 25%, is occupied by ginger, as if settling “on a hillock of local importance,” because after it the probability again drops abruptly, then decreasing evenly, without any steps .
There, in the third part of the frequency list, there is what we have already adapted to call variable spices. The special position of ginger reflects, in this case, the rather persistent efforts of the blenders who want to include ginger - of course, one of the favorite Chinese spices - in the main five. However, we have to admit that so far our spice makers have not succeeded.

So, ginger (6), black pepper (7), cumin (8), white pepper (9), nutmeg (10), licorice (11), kaempferia galanga (12), citrus zest (13), coriander (14 ), cardamoms (15,17,21), angelica (16), anise (18), hot pepper (19), galangal (20), Jamaican pepper (22), laurel (23) - a variable aroma of wuxiangmian.

In this list, special attention is paid to cumin, and I would again be happy to listen to one of the connoisseurs of Chinese cuisine on this topic. The fact is that I have a reasonable suspicion that we are faced with another - the sixth myth in a row, associated with translation errors, which again turned the same long-suffering fennel not into dill, but into cumin. And this suspicion is only strengthened by the fact that in all seven recipes where this supposed cumin was present, there was no trace of fennel.
Considering the above, at the moment (until the final resolution of this issue), I would not recommend making mixtures containing cumin.
If you perform the reverse procedure - turn cumin into fennel, then this will give the latter as much as 86% of the frequency presence instead of today's 71%, which will form a very dense group of additional spices.

The last two names are also confusing; by the way, they are present only once each and both in the same recipe. Apparently, what we have here is an obvious fusion, which could easily be omitted.

Orange or tangerine zest serves as citrus zest.

As you can see, spices that are rarely used in our Europe, such as, and, are quite regularly found in the Chinese mixture. But in Chinese cuisine, everything listed is well known and truly loved.

The position “cardamoms” deserves special explanation, uniting another very Chinese spicy family that appears in the recipes of the mixtures under study. The fact is that under this name, such Chinese specialties as Cao Ko cardamom, purple cardamom, red cardamom, white cardamom and other representatives of the ginger family (you can get to know them a little closer), of which, perhaps, only the last, occupy their shares of the mixture. the listed species turns out to be known slightly wider than its natural range. Moreover, the greatest recipe popularity rightfully belongs to the magnificent Cao Ko, sometimes supplemented by other local species.

In the resulting table (Fig. 1) you can clearly see the frequencies of recipe appearance of the first 16 spices from the general list.

Let us now move on to the average proportional values ​​of spices, which show in what proportions different spices are found in specific recipes. It is curious that the maximum of these values ​​falls on two items classified as the main ones. For star anise (its average share in the recipe is 26%) and cinnamon (23%). On the qualitative side, this fact, of course, strengthens the role of this pair in the formation of the traditionally correct wuxiangmian, and we are accustomed to calling such components twice main, and the quantitative indicators will provide excellent milestones for trainee blenders.

A table of average fractional values ​​corresponding to the same 16 spices in their numbered order is shown in Fig. 2.

The average number of spices that make up modern wuxiangmian is 6.

Recipe stability coefficient - 70%(and increasing to 85% by combining a) all peppers b) all cardamoms c) the cumin-fennel pair into separate invariants).

This coefficient was once introduced by me as a numerical indicator of the conservatism of the mixture - the adherence of its recipes to a single canon.
In the mixtures studied earlier, the minimum value of the recipe stability coefficient was in

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A traditional blend of spices for Chinese cuisine that can easily add a Chinese touch to even ordinary dishes. The classic composition of spices is Chinese cassia cinnamon, star anise, Sichuan pepper, cloves and fennel seeds. Depending on the region, other ingredients are sometimes added to the spice mixture (even though the mixture is then called “5 spices” :-)), such as ginger, anise, nutmeg, cardamom or turmeric... Sometimes one of the spices is replaced . Only cassia, anise and Szechuan pepper remain indispensable.

The Chinese, who scattered around the world, popularized this mixture of spices in other countries, mainly Asian, but not only. The “5 Spice” spice mixture can be bought ready-made, but prepared at home it is undoubtedly more aromatic and interesting.

Cassia, or Chinese cinnamon, is a second-rate (so to speak) cinnamon, which is related to the Ceylon cinnamon that is familiar to us, only it has a slightly different aftertaste, a certain bitterness and a slightly different aroma. But you can safely replace it with regular cinnamon.

As for the Szechuan pepper, there is no need to substitute it. It has such a unique taste and aroma that it is worth making your life difficult and looking for it in online stores where it will not be difficult to find it.

You can add the "5 Spice" spice mixture to Chinese dishes, in addition, it is also excellent for duck, goose or pork cooked in your usual way.

• 1 stick of Chinese cassia cinnamon (can be replaced with regular cinnamon), broken
• 2 star anise
• 2 tsp Sichuan pepper
• 1 tsp carnations
• 1 tsp fennel seeds

Cooking time: 5 minutes

1) Heat the spices in a dry frying pan until the expressive aroma of spices is felt.

2) Place all the spices in a coffee grinder or mortar and grind until smooth.

(For those who have a mortar, I wish you strength and patience! :-))

3) Transfer the prepared spice mixture into an airtight container and store for up to 6 months.

Use as directed.