How to Use Spearmint
The Refreshing Herb
Sweet · Fresh · Light · Cooling
Spearmint is sweet and mellow. Where peppermint bites, spearmint refreshes, making it perfect for lamb, yogurt, salads, chutneys, and springtime desserts. When a recipe just says "mint," it means this.
FORMS
- Fresh: Fresh leaves are the herb at its most expressive. Bright green and lance-shaped (the "spear" in spearmint), their flavor is sweet and gently cooling with a citrus lift. They have almost no menthol, which is why spearmint tastes minty without the icy bite of peppermint. Look for vibrant, unwilted, unspotted bunches with firm stems.
- Dried: Spearmint dries better than most soft herbs, which is why Middle Eastern, Turkish, and Afghan cooking relies on it. The flavor concentrates and turns slightly hay-like, but its core character is intact. Crumble the leaves between your fingers before they go in to break the cells and release the oils. Use about a third as much dried as you would fresh.
STORAGE
- Fresh: Wrapped in a barely damp towel inside a bag, expect 5-7 days. For 10-14, stand the stems upright like a bouquet in an inch of water, drape a bag loosely over the leaves, and refrigerate while changing the water every couple of days. Don't wash it until you need it, and never seal wet leaves in a bag, which produces that familiar dark, slimy failure. Spearmint also freezes better than most soft herbs. Strip the leaves, spread them in a single layer on a lined tray, freeze until solid, then bag them. This is an excellent tactic for dropping them straight into a cooked dish, blending into a sauce, or muddling into a drink.
- Dried: Store airtight, away from heat and light, and dried leaves will keep for about a year.
PREPARATION
- Stripping and Tearing: Strip off older stems as they turn woody, but tender young ones are fine left whole. Tear or roughly chop the leaves just before they go in.
- Chopping: For salads, garnishes, and tabbouleh, stack the leaves, roll them into a tight cylinder, and slice across the roll into fine ribbons. You get maximum aroma with a clean look and no bruising. Add them at the last moment, since the flavor fades quickly against heat and acidic dressings alike. Spearmint bruises and oxidizes fast, so a dull knife and a long session on the board will leave you with similarly dull-tasting mint. Sharp knife, few strokes, straight into the dish.
- Muddling and Pounding: For cocktails, press and twist gently against the bottom of the glass. The aim is to express the oils, not shred the leaf, because pulverized mint turns bitter and clouds the drink. South and Southeast Asian cooking does the opposite: mint goes into the mortar with chili, garlic, lime, and sugar and gets pounded properly, until its flavor disappears into the paste.
- Infusing: Spearmint lends its flavor readily to warm liquid. Steep fresh or dried leaves in syrup, cream, tea, or a spirit, then strain. Five to ten minutes of gentle heat is plenty. Any longer will extract bitterness rather than more flavor. This is the route to sorbets, panna cotta, cordials, and every mint syrup behind a bar.
COOKING
- The Finishing Herb: Fresh spearmint is at its best added at the very end, or not cooked at all. Its flavor rides on volatile oils that heat drives off, so it fades rather than deepens in a long simmer. Stir it through a lamb stew as the pot leaves the stove, scatter it over vegetables straight from the roasting tray, fold it into a warm grain salad. Residual heat releases the oils without destroying them. Dried spearmint is the exception and can go in earlier.
- Cutting Richness: Mint works in savory cooking by contrasting with fat. That is the logic behind British mint sauce with roast lamb, Greek keftedes, and the Turkish and Levantine habit of dusting dried mint over yogurt and lentil soup. The same principle holds with pork, duck, and legumes: something sweet and cool laid across something heavy.
- As a Raw Herb: Across South and Southeast Asia, mint is also treated as a green leafy vegetable rather than a seasoning herb. In India, it goes by the handful into raita and biryani. Vietnamese cooks put it on the herb plate beside every bowl of bún and every roll. Thai larb and yam salads too: uncooked in quantity.
- Drinks and Desserts: Spearmint's sweetness makes it the right mint for drinking. It carries Moroccan mint tea and both the mojito and the julep. In desserts, it belongs with fruit above all, torn through watermelon or strawberries, steeped into a syrup for sorbet, or muddled into lemonade.
A classic mojito, the cocktail that put spearmint on the map. The trick is in the muddling: bruise the leaves just enough to release the oils, but stop before you tear them up. Over-muddled mint goes bitter and grassy fast. A few firm presses with a wooden muddler is all it takes.