Welcome to the summary page for FabulousFusionFood's Cook's Guide entry for Asafoetida along with all the Asafoetida containing recipes presented on this site, with 145 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 Asafoetida recipes added to this site.

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

Asafoetida Ferula assafoetida is a member of the Apiaceae family that also includes carrots, cumin, caraway and fennel. It is a herbaceous perennial plant growing to 2 m tall, with stout, hollow, somewhat succulent stems 5-8 cm diameter at the base of the plant. The leaves are 30–40 cm long usually finely-divided. The flowers are yellow, produced in large compound umbels. The spice asafoetida is actually the resin-like gum which comes from the dried sap extracted from the stem and roots. This is greyish-white when fresh, but dries to a dark amber colour (see left-hand image). Pure asafoetida resin is very hard and difficult to grate. As a result it is traditionally crushed between stones or with a hammer. Today, the most commonly available form is compounded asafoetida, a fine powder containing 30% asafoetida resin, along with rice flour and gum arabic.



The spice has a very strong odour which can be nauseating in large quantities and if not kept in an air-tight container will actually contaminate any nearby spices. Once cooked, however, the smell diminishes and asafoetida develops an oniony taste. The spice's name is derived from the Persian asa (resin) and the Latin foetida (a reference to its strong smell).



In Roman times there was a plant known as Silphium (also silphion and laser). It is generally considered to be a form of now-extinct 'giant fennel' and formed the crux of trade from Cyrene to the empire. The valuable product was the resin (laser, laserpicium, or lasarpicium) of the plant. It was harvested in a manner similar to asafoetida, a plant with similar enough qualities to silphium that Romans, including the geographer Strabo, used the same word to describe both. The plant became extinct during the first century CE, probably due to a combination of over-collection and over-grazing. The Romans substituted asafoetida, though the taste was deemed 'not as good'.