I found the Chinese grocery yesterday I had wanted to find for some time but always ran out of time or energy before doing so.

Looked at their spices and bought some. Noticed a plastic bag marked “cinnamon stick” and looked at the ends of the sticks. Oh dear, not cinnamon!

Introducing cassia.

If you need a stick or two of cinnamon for your curry or sweet dish or preserving peaches etc etc then adding cassia sticks will result in massive disappointment—they add very little taste/aroma.

You can look up where cinnamon and cassia come from—doesn’t matter for the purpose of this post.

Fortunately, it is easy to distinguish between cinnamon and cassia:

Look at the end of the sticks.

1. If it looks like one thick leaf forming something like a capital ‘C’ then you have cassia. Throw it away and go buy cinnamon!

2. If the stick if made up of lots of thin layers making a solid stick then, congratulations you have proper cinnamon.


Is cassia totally useless? For cooking, yes. For making a nice spiced lager, no.

Adding a stick of cinnamon to the boiling wort will give a beer that is beyond medicinally bitter, undrinkably bitter! Adding two sticks of cassia in place of one stick of cinnamon will give a nice cinnamony flavor/aroma to the lager. This doesn’t show up at once, takes a few months to show.

There are two spices commonly referred to as cinnamon. As many spice
companies prefer not to name them correctly, confusion continues to
prevail about what type of cinnamon consumers are actually purchasing.

Is Cassia Really Cinnamon?.

For many years Sri Lankan cinnamon (Cinnamomum zeylanicum)
was the only variety commonly called cinnamon.

Cassia from Indonesia and Vietnam (Cinnamomum cassia), also 
known as C. burmannii, C. lourerii and C. tamala was called
Saigon Cinnamon in the USA, and  Dutch Cinnamon, Baker’s
Cinnamon, Bastard Cinnamon and Batavia Cinnamon in many
other countries.

—Who knew?

Don’t buy the fake cinnamon!  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

I buy those Masterfoods cinnamon powders to add a sprinkle to my coffee. Coffee is a good pick me up. But the cinnamon just gives that extra boost to my health.

Preground spices have little flavor or aroma tho.

Jovial Monk wrote on Feb 17^th, 2023 at 12:29pm:

Preground spices have little flavor or aroma tho.

Having added the cinnamon to my coffee just now, it says otherwise.

Not as good as fresh.

Reminds me of that Kate & Leopold movie. Leopold being obsessed about perfectly toasting bread and applying the perfect-tasting butter.

Cinnamon is cinnamon. I would not be using it if it was not good or tasty.