Forest cloves

A clove is the unopened flower bud of the clove tree. Our forest cloves come from a jungle cultivation in a nature reserve in India. The cultivation is therefore organic and the method of harvesting is 'spotless', resulting in a fresh red-brown cup that you can squeeze between your fingers. And extraordinarily aromatic!

The clove comes from the Syzygium aromaticum, a tree that originally only grew on 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. This is often not the case, because before the flowers emerge, the buds are picked to be dried into what we call cloves.

The tree bears flowers for the first time in the fourth to seventh year, and can live up to eighty years. The buds are picked manually by experienced pickers. The moment when the buds are harvested looks pretty close, the buds must be nice and round and already starting to color. As soon as a bud opens, it has become unusable as a spice.

The Portuguese discovered the clove location in 1424, long before the Dutch asserted their supremacy on the Moluccas and forcibly appropriated the clove trade. With resources that do not 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 remembered every year, now 400 years ago. The West Frisian Museum looks back on it online.

In spite of all the precautions of the Dutch, the Frenchman Pierre Poivre (no, no joke) succeeded in alienating plant material from the Moluccas in 1770 and planting it on the French tropical island of Sint Mauritius off the coast of Africa. He thus succeeded in breaking the VOC's monopoly on clove cultivation. Today, 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 minor importance.

Our premium si putih cloves have a thousand weight of 100 grams (thousand buds per ounce) and are of very high quality. They are dried in such a way that the stem is dry, but the reddish-brown button has remained quite soft. You can easily remove it from the stem and squeeze it between your fingers. The exuberant aroma tells the rest.

Odor and taste

The clove aroma comes from the pungent-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 .

Use

Cloves are suitable for sweet and savory preparations, in baking dishes and desserts as well as in roasts and stews, in sour meat dishes and curries, and in sauerkraut, red cabbage and mulled wine of course. Many famous spice mixtures contain cloves.

Attributes:

• 100% dried flower buds of the Sygyzium aromaticum
• wild picking - picked manually

Assortment

• available in glass and pouch (no test tubes)
  
• glass jar contains 45 grams
• stand-up pouches with a content of up to 30 to 150 grams
• larger quantities on request

Gift Wrap

• 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

• keep 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 best before date is an indication