75 g
Cinnamon sticks, 75 g
Hand-rolled quills of true Ceylon cinnamon, cut for tea, mulling, curries and slow simmering.
$14.99 CAD
Details
Cinnamomum verum · Sri Lanka
True cinnamon has layers.
Cassia has one.
Nearly all cinnamon sold in Canadian supermarkets is cassia — a different tree, a single thick curl of bark. We import the other one: hand-rolled Ceylon quills and hand-picked cloves, grown and packed in Sri Lanka.
The range
Three spices, sourced from one supplier
Everything is grown and packed in Sri Lanka by a single certified organic processor, so each batch carries its own certificate of analysis rather than being blended from an anonymous pool.
75 g
28 g (1 oz)
Cinnamon sticks, 28 g
A small tin-sized pouch of C5 grade quills. The easiest way to taste the difference before committing to a larger pouch.
$8.99 CAD
Details
150 g
Whole cloves, 150 g
Hand-picked Sri Lankan cloves with a high proportion of intact heads and a heavy, resinous aroma.
$14.99 CAD
Details
Arriving later this year:
Organic Whole Cloves 100g
Organic Ceylon Cinnamon Powder 227g (8 oz)
The story
For three centuries, Europe went to war over bark
Cinnamon grew abundantly in one narrow belt of wet ground on one island, and everyone who found it tried to own it. The Portuguese came in 1505, the Dutch took it in 1658, the British in 1796. The peeling craft outlasted all three, and it is still done by hand today in the same south-western strip our spices come from.
The collection
Nine recipes built around whole spices
From a two-ingredient Ceylon cinnamon tea to a two-hour Sri Lankan beef curry, by way of watalappan, masala chai and a clove-studded ham. Every one specifies quantities that respect how forcefully clove actually behaves in a pot.
Why it matters
The difference is a compound called coumarin
Cassia and Ceylon are different species. Cassia carries coumarin at roughly one percent by weight; Ceylon carries only trace amounts. The European Food Safety Authority sets a tolerable daily intake for coumarin of 0.1 mg per kilogram of body weight, which works out to about 7 mg a day for a 70 kg adult.
For an occasional pinch this is academic. For anyone who puts cinnamon in coffee or oatmeal every morning, it is the reason to know which species is in the jar.