Black Cardamom- Indian vs. Chinese

One part of my mundane job is managing a Chinese medicinal herb dispensary. Recently, I needed black cardamom for an Indian recipe, and I realized that the black cardamom you can buy in an Indian grocery store looks completely different than the so-called “black cardamom” you buy in Chinese grocery stores and is used medicinally in Traditional Chinese herbal formulas. I knew they were different, but it turns out that they are from different plants completely.

Both of these plants are in the Amomum genus in the family Zingiberaceae – the ginger family. They are closely related to green cardamom and grains of paradise- grains of paradise are usually sold with the seeds separated from the pod, unlike black cardamom, tsaoko cardamom, and green cardamom. There are several other cardamom varieties used in cooking and medicine in China, as well as ornamental varieties grown for their delicate flowers.

Both of these are used in similar ways in modern cooking. They are generally cracked and added whole to flavor savory dishes. Both are earthy and smoky, with the aromatic lemony camphor flavor similar to green cardamom. Indian black cardamom is actually smoked to enhance its earthy flavor. Ground tsaoko pods and seeds are also used in modern Sichuan cooking, but they have to be ground very finely as the pericarp around the seeds is unpleasantly woody. In medieval cooking, Tsaoko cardamom is used extensively in Soup for the Qan. It makes sense for such a meat-heavy cuisine to include Tsaoko cardamom, in Chinese medicine Tsaoko is warm and pungent, assisting digestion. Strangely, Indian black cardamom is harder to find in pre-1600 sources, though this may be due to poor translations.