A couple of years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to a discovery he made—that mixing a little bit of lavender in with his weed resulted in a very pleasant and flavorful smoking experience. It made enough sense—there are tons of herbal cigarettes on the market that make use of fragrant herbs to the same end. But what makes it good, my friend explained to me, are the terpenes (more on that later) found in lavender—specifically, linalool. And so what started out as a “high-dea” turned into what so many high-deas turn into: a rabbit hole. I immediately wondered if I could apply this newly acquired knowledge to food. Beyond lavender and weed, what else on our planet has linalool?
Apparently, coriander. The dried seeds of this common garden herb pack considerably more linalool than lavender does (the flavor’s more subtle, too, so, it’s a little easier to cook with). Blueberries, too. In fact, linalool is one of the key terpenes used when laboratories synthesize the flavor of blueberries. Did that mean, I wondered, that coriander and blueberries go together? Are they secretly best buds?
Better blueberry pie through science.
Now, I’m not the first person to make this connection: Niki Segnit mentions linalool in her book, The Flavor Thesaurus, as a major reason why blueberries pair well with coriander seed. “Coriander seeds can contain up to 85 percent linalool, a flavor compound with a woody, floral, slightly citrusy quality that’s a key component of synthesized blueberry flavor. Freshly ground, they can lend a fragrant background note to your home-baked blueberry muffins.” Genevieve Ko, author of Better Baking, mixes coriander into a blueberry and nectarine pie filling. In his book, Marbled, Swirled, and Layered, Irvin Lin makes coriander a costar in his recipe for blueberry and coriander shortcakes. Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Julie Tanous smear a blueberry-coriander compound butter all over their blue corn pancakes in their book, Food Between Friends.
They all use coriander because, well, it works. I even taste-tested it to be sure, preparing blueberry lemon corn muffins two ways, adding a pinch of freshly ground coriander seed (you can use a bigger pinch if you’re using pre-ground) to one batch and leaving the other batch coriander-free. Without revealing which was which, I invited my partner and a couple of friends to taste both versions. They all agreed that the muffins with coriander were better, though nobody could quite put their finger on what made the blueberries so … blueberry-y.
What exactly are terpenes?
It wasn’t until I really started digging into research about terpenes that I started to understand how they can be used to amplify and complement flavors.
Haley Sater, Ph.D., of the University of Maryland Extension, an expert on the biochemistry of blueberries, tells me that terpenes are “a group of volatile compounds that are produced through a specific metabolic pathway. Many different organisms can make terpenes, including animals. In plants many of the terpenes that are produced have odor activity, including linalool.” (Aha! Odor activity! Taste and smell are intrinsically tied, remember?) In nature, she explained, some terpenes will attract pollinators, while others serve as herbivory deterrents, dissuading animals and insects from eating the plant's leaves or fruit. For culinary purposes, it turns out that those odor compounds are everything.
