Caraway Seeds: Flavor, Carvone Chemistry, History and Uses

That flavor in seeded rye bread? That’s caraway, and it does a lot of the seasoning in sauerkraut, Central European cheeses and the Scandinavian spirit aquavit, too. The “seed” is actually the dried fruit of Carum carvi, a member of the carrot and parsley family. Its smell comes mostly from two compounds, carvone and limonene, in roughly equal measure. Read translated Indian recipes twice: in Hindi, caraway is “foreign cumin,” and the two get mixed up.

At a glance

What caraway is

Caraway is a biennial herb with finely cut leaves and flat-topped clusters of small white flowers. The “seed” is a crescent-shaped fruit about 5 mm long, with five prominent ridges down its back. Between the look and the name, people mix it up with cumin all the time. Cumin is a separate plant in the same family; see caraway vs. cumin.

There are two crop types. Winter (biennial) caraway, grown mainly in the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary and Russia, has more oil and the stronger taste. Spring (annual) caraway is grown in Egypt and western India. Dutch caraway has long had a reputation for high quality.

Flavor and the compounds behind it

Caraway’s aroma is reminiscent of anise, with a warm, slightly sharp taste. In the pot it comes across as sweetish, a little bitter and faintly minty. It’s assertive, too, so a small amount goes a long way. We found no measurement of that, though.

The aroma lives in the essential oil, which Britannica puts at about 5% of the fruit.² PROSEA gives 1.5–5.0% for spring-type fruit and 3.0–7.0% for winter-type fruit.¹ Two compounds dominate that oil:

Carvone is the one that gives caraway its characteristic flavor.¹

Origin and history

Caraway is native to temperate Eurasia, in Europe and western Asia. The spring type is indigenous to the eastern Mediterranean, including Egypt.

• Prehistory. Caraway fruits turn up at Neolithic village sites. Gernot Katzer points out that this only shows the plant grew there, not that anyone cooked with it.³
• Rome onward. From Roman times on, Katzer finds plenty of records of caraway in food and medicine. Medieval monasteries grew it mostly as a remedy for flatulence.
• Shakespeare. In Henry IV, Part 2, Justice Shallow invites Falstaff to eat apples of his own grafting “with a dish of caraways.”⁴

A few popular stories about caraway’s history don’t trace back to any source we could find: that its use began with the ancient Arabs, that it shows up in a medical text from 1500 BCE, that the Romans brought it to England, and that Elizabethans used it mainly to freshen their breath. Katzer suggests the English word probably reached Europe by way of Arabic, from a form of Latin carum. That may be where the “Arab” story got started.³

How caraway is used

Caraway’s main kitchen uses are meat dishes, breads, cheese, sauerkraut and coleslaw, and its oil flavors spirits like aquavit and kümmel.

• Germany and Austria. Katzer calls caraway the spice that gives Southern German and Austrian food its characteristic flavor. Traditional sauerkraut is always seasoned with it, alongside juniper.
• Breads and baking. The whole fruit goes into baked goods in parts of Europe and North America, and rye bread is the best-known example.
• Cheese. Some Central European cheeses are made with whole caraway.
• Spirits. Kümmel, a caraway liqueur, is made and drunk mostly in northern Germany and Scandinavia. The oil also flavors akvavit.
• North Africa. Katzer singles out Tunisia, where caraway often goes into harissa, the chile paste.
• India. Caraway is also one of the spicy fruits of Indian cooking. Be careful with translated recipes, though. Many languages have no separate word for caraway and just use the word for cumin (in Hindi, caraway is “foreign cumin”).³ So an Indian recipe that says “caraway” may mean cumin, and the other way around.

Whole seeds give up more flavor when you toast them lightly or simmer them in the dish. Ground caraway spreads evenly through rubs and sausage mixes. More in cooking with caraway seeds.

Pairings

Caraway goes well with pork, cabbage, potatoes, apples, onions, rye and other carrot-family spices like dill and coriander.

Buying and quality

Look for whole, intact, evenly brown seeds that smell strong when you crush one. Dusty or faint-smelling seed has lost its oil. That’s a practical check, not an official standard. On the industry side, caraway oil is often cut with synthetic d-carvone, and dill fruit oil sometimes gets passed off in its place.¹

Production numbers are thin. PROSEA estimates world caraway oil output at about 30 tonnes a year and US imports of the fruit at about 3,000 tonnes a year in the early 1990s. Both figures are old, and the oil figure has no date at all.¹ We couldn’t find a current statistical source for world caraway production.

Storage

The dried fruit stores and travels very well. No regulator or standards body gives a shelf life for it. Keep the seed whole, sealed and away from heat and light, and go by smell: if a crushed seed smells faint, it’s faded.

Safety and health claims

In the United States, caraway and caraway fruit oil are “generally recognized as safe” for food use, according to PROSEA, which also gives a maximum level for the oil in food products of about 0.02%.¹

The European Medicines Agency recognizes caraway fruit as a traditional herbal medicine for digestive complaints like bloating and flatulence. That status is based on long-standing use, not clinical trials.⁵ The monograph advises against medicinal use during pregnancy and breastfeeding (there isn’t enough data) and lists allergy to caraway or other carrot-family plants as a reason not to use it.⁵ None of this is about the small amounts you cook with. You’ll also see mineral, vitamin and fiber figures for caraway floating around. We haven’t checked those against a nutrient database, and we found nothing to support the disease-prevention claims that often come attached to them.

Substitutes and comparisons

• Caraway seed substitutes
• Caraway seeds vs. cumin
• Caraway seeds vs. fennel seeds
• Cumin