Ingredients · Fruit

Strawberry

Fragaria × ananassa · Rosaceae (rose family)

Strawberry
Dried strawberry pieces and sometimes the leaf — ten products carry one or the other, and they are not the same ingredient. The fruit brings sweetness and that unmistakable jammy smell; the leaf brings a mild, slightly tannic, tea-like character and no strawberry flavour at all, which is why it turns up in herbal blends that want body. Dried strawberry loses more of itself in the drying than peach does, so blends usually lean on it for aroma and colour and let something else carry the sweetness.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partFruit
KindFruit
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromFrance (bred), the Americas (parent species)
TasteSweet and jammy with a fresh, almost green edge; the leaf is mild, tannic and tea-like

How to use it

In fruit infusions, hot and iced; cold brewing keeps more of the aroma. With hibiscus and rosehip for a pink, tart cup. The dried leaf steeps like a mild black tea and is used to give herbal blends body.

With food

Cream. White chocolate. Rhubarb. Basil and black pepper, both of which sharpen it. Vanilla. Balsamic. Mint. Almond.

With spices

Vanilla. Black pepper, in small amounts. Rose. Cardamom. Mint.

With tea

White tea and matcha, both of which it is paired with here. Rooibos. Green tea, iced. Hibiscus and rosehip.

Its story

Where it comes from

The garden strawberry is a hybrid, and a surprisingly recent one: it was first bred in Brittany in the 1750s, from a cross of Fragaria virginiana from eastern North America with F. chiloensis, the Chilean strawberry, which Amédée-François Frézier had brought back from Chile in 1714. So the strawberry everyone knows is a Franco-American-Chilean invention about 270 years old. No lot origin is named in our notes.

What happened

Two things about the strawberry are not what people assume. It is not a berry — botanically it is an aggregate accessory fruit, and each apparent seed on the outside is an achene, a fruit in its own right with a seed inside it. And the plant is an engineered thing: two wild species from opposite ends of the Americas, carried to Europe by a French military engineer and a series of collectors, crossed in Brittany in the 1750s. The smell that everyone recognises comes substantially from one compound, furaneol, which is also what makes a strawberry candy smell like a strawberry.

On the shelf with it

Every product it goes into.

Every ingredient in the shop

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Other ways in

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