Cloves vs. Cinnamon: Flower Bud vs. Bark, Eugenol vs. Cinnamaldehyde

Cloves taste hot, pungent and a bit medicinal; cinnamon tastes sweet, warm and woody. They share a jar in lots of spice blends, but one is a flower bud and the other is bark. Cloves are the dried buds of Syzygium aromaticum, a myrtle-family tree native to Indonesia’s Maluku islands, and cinnamon is the dried inner bark of Cinnamomum trees in the laurel family. Clove bud oil is 70 to 90% eugenol,¹ while cinnamon bark oil is mostly cinnamaldehyde. They do overlap in one spot: Ceylon cinnamon’s bark oil carries 5 to 18% eugenol, while cassia, the cinnamon most often sold in North America, has only traces.²³

Side by side

The oil percentages come from different PROSEA entries for different spices. They show which compound leads each aroma, not how strong cloves are next to cinnamon. For the individual spices, see cloves and cinnamon.

Bud and bark

A clove is a whole flower bud. PROSEA describes the harvest: the whole flower cluster gets picked just before the first buds open, because picking early lowers the yield and picking late sharply lowers the oil content.¹ What reaches your kitchen is the dried bud, whole or ground.

Cinnamon is bark, the inner bark of the tree. For Ceylon cinnamon, PROSEA describes commercial bark no more than 0.5 cm thick and dull pale brown, with smaller pieces slid inside longer ones to build compound quills.² Ceylon is the cinnamon the NIH calls “true,” but cassia is what you’ll most often find in North America.⁸ None of our sources describes retail cassia sticks; see Ceylon vs. cassia cinnamon.

Eugenol and cinnamaldehyde

Cloves. Britannica gives 14 to 20% essential oil in the buds.⁴ PROSEA puts eugenol at 70 to 90% of clove bud oil, with eugenyl acetate up to 17%,¹ and a 2020 review gives eugenol as about 85 to 92% of clove oil.⁹ The same review notes that clove oil and eugenol have analgesic, anesthetic and antiseptic effects, which is why they’re common in dentistry.

Cinnamon is built on cinnamaldehyde, at 50 to 75% of Ceylon bark oil and 70 to 95% of Chinese cassia bark oil.²³

Where they overlap. Ceylon bark oil also carries 5 to 18% eugenol, while Chinese cassia bark oil has only traces.²³ So of the two cinnamons, Ceylon has more in common with cloves. Allspice does too: PROSEA gives eugenol as 50 to 80% of allspice berry oil,¹⁰ and allspice is so named because its flavor resembles a combination of cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. See allspice vs. cloves.

You’ll often see cloves described as camphoraceous and piney, with a eucalyptus note. Our sources don’t describe them that way, and the main compounds they report are eugenol and eugenyl acetate,¹ so we’ve left that description out.

Where they meet

These two are partners more often than rivals:

• Chinese five-spice powder. Fennel seed, cassia, cloves, star anise and Sichuan pepper. See Chinese five-spice powder.
• Garam masala. Cloves and cinnamon are among the spices commonly used. See garam masala.
• Cincinnati chili. Saveur’s recipe uses cloves and cinnamon with allspice and nutmeg.¹¹
• Pumpkin pie spice. Not always. McCormick’s lists cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and allspice, with no cloves,¹² so check any blend’s label.

Each also has jobs of its own. Cloves flavor many foods, especially meats and baked goods. Whole cloves also get studded into a ham or simmered in mulled drinks. In Europe, cinnamon goes mostly into baked goods and sweets, hot drinks, herbal infusions and mulled wine, and into Indian preparations like garam masala and masala chai. It also goes into cinnamon rolls, cinnamon toast and oatmeal.

Safety

Cloves. We found no regulator that sets an amount at which cloves in food become a concern. The line that matters is between the spice and clove oil. The European Medicines Agency’s monograph on clove oil, a traditional herbal medicine for minor mouth and throat inflammation and toothache, says it’s not recommended for children and adolescents under 18.⁵ Clove oil is far more concentrated than the spice, and it doesn’t belong in a recipe in place of ground cloves. See cloves.

Cinnamon. Cassia can carry a lot of coumarin. BfR puts the average in German monitoring at about 3 g per kg of cassia, and calculates that a 60 kg adult reaches the tolerable daily intake with about 2 g of cassia a day, a 15 kg child with about 0.5 g.⁶ That intake, 0.1 mg of coumarin per kg of body weight a day, is EFSA’s.¹³ Separately, a US FDA public health alert on ground cinnamon lists specific products with lead results from 2.03 to 7.68 parts per million.⁷ The cinnamon profile has the details.

Can one stand in for the other?

Not directly. Neither substitute page we reviewed lists the other spice on its own. Here are better routes, labeled the same way as on our substitute pages.

Full rankings are on clove substitutes and cinnamon substitutes. For whole versus ground forms, see ground vs. whole cloves and ground cinnamon vs. cinnamon sticks.

What isn’t known

• The oil figures come from separate entries and samples; no source analyzed both spices side by side.
• We found no essential-oil content figure for cinnamon bark, so we can’t compare the two spices’ oil content.
• We found no dated, sourced retail price comparison.
• You’ll often hear that whole cloves go into ham because they cut through fat. None of the sources we found explains or tests that.

Related

• Cloves, cooking with cloves, clove substitutes and too much clove
• Cinnamon, Ceylon vs. cassia cinnamon, cinnamon substitutes and too much cinnamon
• Cinnamon vs. nutmeg, nutmeg vs. cloves, allspice vs. cloves and cloves vs. star anise