star anise

Illicium verum, an evergreen native to southern China's Guangxi province and northern Vietnam; what looks like a star-shaped pod is, botanically, a follicle, a ring of about eight seed cases each meant to split along one seam. Eight teas in this library carry it, all at a bare pinch: 0.05 grams in five of them, Blue Euphoric Tea, Chamomile, Lavender & Star Anise, Digestive Mint Tea, Spikenard, Lavender & Star Anise, and Warm Mint Comfort Tea; 0.1 grams in Desert Recovery Night Tea; and a whole broken pod, 0.3 grams, in Lavender, Star Anise & Jujube and Spikenard & Star Anise. How it is treated splits the same way the dose does: in the ginger-forward digestive teas (Desert Recovery, Digestive Mint, Warm Mint Comfort) it is simmered a few minutes before the heat comes off and the chamomile or mint goes in, while in the floral and root blends it is never simmered at all: water just off the boil is poured over it alongside lavender, spikenard, or jujube, and it steeps five to ten minutes.

The pod's aroma is close to a single note: trans-anethole typically makes up seventy-two to ninety-two percent of the essential oil. Anise seed and fennel produce the very same molecule despite not being related to star anise at all: Illicium sits in the Schisandraceae, anise and fennel in the Apiaceae, and two lineages that diverged long before either tasted of anything arrived at the identical compound independently. Anethole is also sweet by way of the same T1R2/T1R3 receptor every sugar and sweetener uses, though the number usually quoted for how much sweeter than sugar it is, thirteen times, traces to an uncited sentence and a solubility limit that makes the standard sweetness test impossible to run on the pure compound. Treat any multiple you read for it as folklore rather than measurement.

For a few years in the mid-2000s this spice was a pharmaceutical bottleneck: its fruit runs about 7.1 percent shikimic acid by dry weight, and shikimic acid was Roche's starting material for synthesizing oseltamivir, sold as Tamiflu, through many steps of epoxide chemistry that have nothing to do with star anise's own effects. Shikimic acid is not antiviral, and a cup of this tea treats flu no better than a fence post treats a chair. The real caution is a look-alike: Illicium anisatum, Japanese star anise, is visually near-identical once dried and contains anisatin, which blocks the brain's GABA-A receptor and has caused seizures in infants given the tea for colic, in cases reported from Switzerland and Rhode Island. Buy it from a supplier who can name the species, and keep it out of a baby's cup. The Journal's note on star anise has the case reports and the numbers behind the Tamiflu story.