Ingredients · Herb

Dill

Anethum graveolens · Apiaceae (carrot family)

Dill
Two ingredients from one plant, and the shop sells both. Dill weed is the feathery leaf — delicate, grassy, faintly anise, and famously poor at drying: dill is best used fresh, because it loses its flavour rapidly when dried. Dill seed is the dried fruit, and it is a different proposition entirely: warmer, sharper, more caraway-like, and it holds. Four products carry one or the other. The one in a pickle jar is usually the seed, whatever the name on the jar says.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partLeaf and seed
KindHerb
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromNorth Africa and West Asia (native range)
TasteThe leaf is delicate, grassy and faintly anise; the seed is warmer and sharper, closer to caraway. Carvone is the main aromatic in both

How to use it

The leaf goes in at the very end — cooking destroys it, and so does drying, which is why dried dill weed is a pale shadow of fresh. The seed goes in early: pickling brine, rye bread, cabbage, potato. With fish and cucumber in either form. In gravlax, lemon dill salt, and anything sour.

With food

Cucumber and pickles. Salmon and white fish. Potato. Sour cream and yogurt. Eggs. Lemon. Beetroot. Cabbage. Rye bread.

With spices

Mustard seed and celery seed, in a pickling brine. Caraway. Black pepper. Lemon peel. Garlic.

With tea

Not a tea ingredient.

Its story

Where it comes from

Native to North Africa and West Asia, and grown widely across Eurasia. Our lots name no origin.

What happened

Dill has been in kitchens a very long time. It was found in the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep II, around 1400 BC, and documented in ancient Greece by the seventh century BC, where Theophrastus wrote about it. Its name carries an old confusion: the genus name Anethum is the Latin form of a Greek word that meant both dill and anise, which is a fair description of how the seed tastes. The Germanic word dill has uncertain origins.

On the shelf with it

Sold on its own, and in these blends.

Every ingredient in the shop

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Other ways in

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