What Is Cinnamon?

Cinnamon is a spice, sprinkled on toast and lattes. But extracts from the bark as well as leaves, flowers, fruits, and roots of the cinnamon tree have also been used in traditional medicine around the world for thousands of years. It’s used in cooking and baking, and added to many foods.

Culinary Use

When cooking with cinnamon, the recipe will usually call for either ground cinnamon or cinnamon sticks. Cinnamon sticks are the curled quills of dried bark as harvested from the tree, while ground cinnamon is simply the same bark ground into a powder. Cinnamon sticks typically give a milder flavor and are added to liquid recipes with slow cooking times, to allow the spice to infuse. The stick is removed and discarded after cooking. Ground cinnamon is stirred into dry mixtures, recipes that cook more quickly, or those that require a stronger flavor.

It is fairly straightforward substituting ground cinnamon for cinnamon sticks, but be careful not to overpower the dish. Try using ½ teaspoon of ground cinnamon per stick, then tasting to see if it needs any more. Substituting sticks for powder is trickier. If it’s a quick recipe, the stick may not have time to infuse, and you may need to use two or three sticks to extract the same flavor. If your recipe involves a dry mixture, cinnamon sticks will not be practical in their current form, but you should be able to grind them into a powder yourself using a spice grinder or a grater.