Welcome to the summary page for FabulousFusionFood's Cook's Guide entry for Ajwain along with all the Ajwain containing recipes presented on this site, with 17 recipes in total.

This is a continuation of an entire series of pages that will, I hope, allow my visitors to better navigate this site. As well as displaying recipes by name, country and region of origin I am now planning a whole series of pages where recipes can be located by meal type and main ingredient. This page gives a listing of all the Ajwain recipes added to this site.

These recipes, all contain Ajwain as a major wild food ingredient.

Ajwain (also known as: Carom, Ajowan, Bishop's Weed and Seeds Of Bishop's Weed) and representds the seed-like fruit of the Bishop's Weed plant Trachyspermum ammi syn. Carum copticum. These fruit are generally egg-shaped in form and are either grayish in colour or are paler with vertical stripes. The parent plant is similar in appearance to parsley and probably originated in Egypt. It is primarily used in Indian cuisine, but is also used in dishes from Iran, Egypt and Afghanistan. Raw ajwain smells almost exactly like thyme because it also contains thymol, but is more aromatic and less subtle in taste, as well as slightly bitter and musty. Indeed, the flavour is so strong that even a small amount can completely overwhelm the flavour of a dish. As a result, in Indian quisine ajwain is invariably either toasted by dry roasting or it is fried in ghee. This develops a subtler and more complex aroma that is similar to caraway.



The spice is often added to Indian breads and is used as a flavouring to snack foods such as biscuits. It is also sometimes used as an ingredient in the Ethiopian spice mix, berbere.