depeperwinkel
Forest cloves
Forest cloves
A clove is the unopened flower bud of the clove tree. Our forest cloves come from cultivation in the jungle in a nature reserve in India. The cultivation is organic and the harvesting method is 'spotless', resulting in a fresh red-brown cup that you can squeeze between your fingers. And extremely aromatic!
Reduced in price!
The clove comes from the Syzygium aromaticum, a tree that originally only grew in the Moluccas, especially in the sultanates of the North Moluccas (Maluku Utara).
The clove tree is a 10-15 meter high tree that bears cream-colored flowers that turn red during flowering. That often doesn't happen, because before the flowers emerge, the buds are picked to be dried into what we call cloves.
The tree first bears flowers in the fourth to seventh year, and can live up to eighty years. The buds are picked manually by experienced pickers. The moment at which the buds are harvested is quite precise, the buds must be nicely round and have already started to color. As soon as a bud opens, it becomes useless as a spice.
The Portuguese discovered the clove site in 1424, long before the Dutch asserted their supremacy over the Moluccas and forcibly appropriated the clove trade. With means that cannot tolerate daylight, they achieved that cultivation was limited to the island of Ambon in the Central Moluccas. Nowhere else in the world did the clove tree grow.
On May 8, the Banda Massacre is commemorated annually, now 400 years ago. The West Frisian Museum looks back on it online.
The Frenchman Pierre Poivre (no, not a joke) managed, despite all the precautions of the Dutch, to alienate plant material from the Moluccas in 1770 and plant it on the French tropical island of Saint Mauritius off the coast of Africa. He thus succeeded in breaking the VOC's monopoly on clove cultivation. Nowadays, cloves are grown all over the world, and Indonesia is the absolute world leader with plantations in Sulawesi and Java. Cultivation on the Moluccas is of little significance.
Our premium siputih cloves have a thousand weight of 100 grams (one thousand buds per ounce) and are of very high quality. They are dried in such a way that the stem is completely dry, but the red-brown bud remains quite soft. You can easily remove it from the stem and squeeze it between your fingers. The exuberant aroma tells the rest.
Smell and taste
The clove aroma comes from the sharp-tasting eugenol, and combines excellently with spices and herbs that also contain eugenol, such as nutmeg, allspice, cinnamon, pepper, vanilla (eugenol is the raw material for the preparation of vanillin), basil and star anise .
Usage
Cloves are suitable for sweet and savory preparations, in baking dishes and desserts as well as in roasts and stews, in pickled meat dishes and curries, and of course in sauerkraut, red cabbage and mulled wine. Many famous spice mixtures contain cloves.
Features:
- 100% dried flower buds of the Sygyzium aromaticum
- wild picking - manually picked
Assortment
- available in glass and stand-up pouch (no test tubes)
- glass jar contains 45 grams
- larger quantities on request
Gift packaging
- the glass jar is available in a tasteful gift box consisting of a cube box filled with black tissue paper
- for an overview of our gift packaging, please refer to the gift packaging section
General advice
- store cloves in a dark, dry and cool place
Save:
- keep your cloves in closed packaging
- preferably store in a dark, dry and cool place
- best before October 2025 (10/25)
- this expiration date is an indication
Batch number
The batch number helps us trace which supply an item comes from. It is stated on the packing slip and the invoice