Remember Rosemary

From Shakespeare’s prose to herb-encrusted lamb chops, rosemary’s aromatic leaves are hard to forget. Tasting like camphoraceous pine with a hint of lemon, the narrow leaves of Rosmarinus officinalis, a small shrub related to mint, have flavored everything from potatoes to wine. Ancient Greeks and Romans used this Mediterranean native as a culinary and medicinal herb and, through the ages, rosemary developed a reputation for strengthening memory, turning it into a symbol for remembrance and fidelity.

A pinch of flavor

Rosemary’s assertive flavor works in sweet or savory applications. It complements many meats and poultry, as well as eggs and vegetables, including tomatoes, spinach, peas, mushrooms, squash and lentils. In Central Europe, cooks stuff a suckling pig with rosemary sprigs before spit-roasting it, and Italians often use it in a flatbread, schiaccia. It adds a unique accent to lemony beverages and desserts. Its flavor blends well with chives, thyme, chervil, parsley and bay leaf.

Rosemary leaves contain on average 1.0% to 2.5% essential oil, with flavor compounds such as cinoel, limonene, camphor, borneol, alpha-pinene and others contributing to the complex flavor.

Rosemary is available fresh, and in dried whole-leaf form or ground. “From a manufacturing standpoint,” says Peggy Iler, flavor applications manager, Kalsec, Kalamazoo, MI, “the use of fresh rosemary presents some problems in handling, availability and storage.” However, dried product has some flavor and shelf life issues. “An excellent alternative is the use of oleoresin rosemary,” she advises. “As with most herbs, when converting between fresh and dehydrated, a good rule of thumb is a replacement of 3 parts fresh to 1 part dehydrated.” The company’s oleoresin rosemary is approximately 25 times stronger than ground rosemary.

“Oleoresin rosemary can easily replace both the fresh and dehydrated herb in most food applications,” Iler says. “The extract provides all the flavor without the woody stem pieces associated with using either the fresh or dried herb. Unlike some herbs, the flavor of the extract from different growing regions tends to be fairly uniform, having only minor differences. However, the quality of the extract depends on the quality of the starting material. If old, dried product is used, the resulting extract will not have the lighter volatiles associated with higher-quality product.”

Antioxidant ability

Rosemary also contains many phenolic compounds with biological activities, including antioxidants carnosic acid, caffeic carnosol, rosmanol, isorosmanol and rosmari-diphenol. Other phenols that act as antioxidants include methylchavicol, carvacrol, eugenol and thymole, plus monoterpenoid ketone compounds, such as thujone, camphor, verbenone and carvone. Carnosic acid, the most-active antioxidant, has an antioxidant activity seven times higher than BHT and BHA (Journal of the American Oil Chemists Society, 1996; 73(4):507-514).