Cooking With Cloves: Dos and Don'ts

A Tasting Table béchamel uses just 2 whole cloves for 2 cups of milk. With cloves, a few go a long way, and how you add them matters as much as how many: whole for stocks, cider and ham, ground for baking. Strong in aroma, hot and pungent in taste, they flavor meats and baked goods especially. And if you grind your own, keep the powder in glass. For the plant, its history and its chemistry, see the cloves profile.

Why a little goes a long way

America’s Test Kitchen calls ground cloves potent and says its test kitchen uses them sparingly in baked goods.¹ The Spice House, suggesting cloves as part of a cardamom substitute, says to cut the amount to a half or three quarters because cloves can overpower a dish.²

Amounts from recipes:

Recipe	Cloves	For
Tasting Table onion piqué béchamel³	2 whole cloves	2 cups whole milk, simmered 10 minutes, then removed
Oregon State Food Hero hot apple orange cider⁴	12 whole cloves	A batch simmered for 2 hours

Ratio (Method): For ground cloves in a cake, spiced cookie dough or pie filling with no recipe to follow, start at about 1/8 teaspoon per teaspoon of cinnamon and adjust next time. If you overshoot, see too much clove.

Whole or ground: pick the form for the job

America’s Test Kitchen uses whole cloves to flavor stocks, to stud holiday hams and in poaching liquids for fruit, and saves ground cloves for baking.¹ A Couple Cooks says recipes that call for whole cloves usually need them: a mulled drink turns grainy with ground cloves, and you can’t poke ground cloves into an orange or a ham.⁵ For converting between the two, see ground vs. whole cloves.

Studding: ham, onions and oranges

Ham. ATK lists studding holiday hams among the jobs for whole cloves. Pressed into the scored surface, they perfume the glaze and look good doing it.
Onion piqué. The French way to flavor a béchamel or a stock without loose cloves. Tasting Table describes it as half an onion with a bay leaf pinned to it by a couple of whole cloves. Its béchamel simmers the onion in 2 cups of whole milk for 10 minutes, then takes it out. The same trick works in soups and braises: one studded onion goes in, and it comes out in one piece.
Oranges. Cloves poked into oranges or apples make pomanders, which are mostly decorative. A Couple Cooks notes that studded fruit needs whole cloves.⁵

Fish them out

Whole cloves stay hard and intensely flavored, and biting into one is unpleasant. That’s the main reason to take them out. You’ll also read that whole cloves are a choking hazard, but we found no source that documents it. Two easy ways to keep track of them:

Bundle them. Saveur’s choucroute garnie ties cloves with juniper berries, garlic and bay leaf in a piece of cheesecloth.⁶
Count them. Note how many went in so you can count them out, or use an onion piqué as above.

When to add them

Whole cloves are for long cooking. The Food Hero cider simmers 12 whole cloves for 2 hours,⁴ and the onion piqué goes in at the start of the béchamel.³ We found no measurement of how fast whole or ground cloves give up their flavor, or of when long cooking turns a dish bitter. Some say cloves keep releasing oil until the dish tastes of nothing else. If that worries you, pull the whole cloves once the liquid tastes right.

Ground cloves go into batters, rubs and spice blends. If you bloom ground spices in hot fat, keep the heat moderate. Tasting Table warns that scorched spices turn bitter and can ruin a dish.⁷

Pairings and blends

Cloves rarely work alone. Combinations the sources back up:

Chinese five-spice. Fennel seeds, cassia, cloves, star anise and Szechuan pepper. See Chinese five-spice powder.
Garam masala. Cloves are among the usual spices, along with bay leaf, fennel, cinnamon and cardamom. See garam masala.
Allspice, cinnamon and nutmeg. Allspice got its name because it tastes like a combination of cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. Those warm spices, plus ginger, are the most reliable company for cloves in baking. See cloves vs. cinnamon, nutmeg vs. cloves and allspice vs. cloves.
Star anise and cardamom. Both share cloves’ warm, sweet side. See cloves vs. star anise and cardamom vs. cloves.

People often assume pumpkin pie spice contains cloves. McCormick’s doesn’t: its label lists cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice and sulfiting agents.⁸ If you want clove in your pumpkin pie, add it yourself. See pumpkin pie spice.

Grinding and storing ground cloves

Grinding whole cloves yourself gives you a fresher powder. Just watch where you keep it. America’s Test Kitchen ground a five-spice mix that included cloves and stored it in a plastic deli container. A week later, the plastic looked melted where it touched the spices. ATK explains that the eugenol in cloves and the anethole in star anise are chemically similar to polystyrene (plastic #6), so they can soften or dissolve it. It recommends storing ground cloves and star anise in glass; whole spices weren’t a problem.⁹ That test was about storage containers, not grinders. No source we found has tested whether clove oil damages a plastic grinder bowl, but washing the grinder soon after use is sensible either way.

“Getting to Know: Baking Spices”, America’s Test Kitchen. americastestkitchen.com · Publication ↩ ↩²
“Cardamom Substitute”, The Spice House, 2017. thespicehouse.com · Merchant ↩
Susan Olayinka and Tasting Table Staff, “Onion Pique Béchamel Sauce Recipe”, Tasting Table, 2022. tastingtable.com · Publication ↩ ↩²
“Hot Apple Orange Cider”, Food Hero, Oregon State University Extension Service. extension.oregonstate.edu · Reference work ↩ ↩²
Sonja Overhiser, “Best Substitute for Cloves”, A Couple Cooks, 2026. acouplecooks.com · Publication ↩ ↩²
“Sauerkraut With Pork and Sausages (Choucroute Garnie)”, Saveur. saveur.com · Publication ↩
Marco Rossi, “How To Improvise Instant Pot Seasoning Without Burning Your Spices”, Tasting Table, 2023. tastingtable.com · Publication ↩
McCormick Pumpkin Pie Spice, product page, McCormick. mccormick.com · Merchant ↩
“Why You Should Store Spices in Glass”, America’s Test Kitchen. americastestkitchen.com · Publication ↩

Also drawn on

Clove (Britannica Editors, revised by Anoushka Pant, updated 4 Sep 2026), Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
Five-spice powder (Tony Hill), Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
How to make garam masala (GBC Kitchen, updated 14 Feb 2025), Great British Chefs. greatbritishchefs.com
Allspice (Britannica Editors, updated 3 Sep 2026), Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com

Cooking With Cloves: How Much to Use, Whole vs. Ground, and What to Pair Them With