Frontier Basil Leaf, Sweet (Cut & Sifted), CERTIFIED ORGANIC, 0.4 oz. bottle (Ocimum basilicum) Culinary use Basil is most commonly recommended to be used fresh, and in cooked recipes, is generally added at the last moment, as cooking destroys the flavour quickly.

Mediterranean and Indochinese cuisines frequently use basil, the former frequently combining it with tomato. Basil is one of the main ingredients in pesto — a green Italian oil-and-herb sauce from the city of Genoa, its other two main ingredients being olive oil and pine nuts. The most commonly used Mediterranean basil cultivars are 'Genovese', 'Purple Ruffles', 'Mammoth', 'Cinnamon', 'Lemon', 'Globe', and 'African Blue'. Chinese also use fresh or dried basils in soups and other foods. In Taiwan, people add fresh basil leaves into thick soups (羹湯; gēngtāng). They also eat fried chicken with deep-fried basil leaves.

Basil is sometimes used with fresh fruit and in fruit jams and sauces — in particular with strawberries, but also raspberries or dark-colored plums. Arguably the flat-leaf basil used in Vietnamese cooking, which has a slightly different flavour, is more suitable for use with fruit.

Chemical components

The various basils have such different scents because the herb has a number of different essential oils which come together in different proportions for various breeds. The strong clove scent of sweet basil comes from eugenol, the same chemical as actual cloves. The citrus scent of lemon basil and lime basil is because they have a higher portion of citral which causes this effect in several plants, including lemon mint, and limonene, which gives actual lemon peel its scent. African blue basil has a strong camphor smell because it has camphor and camphene in higher proportions. Licorice Basil contains anethole, the same chemical that makes anise smell like licorice, and in fact is sometimes called Anise Basil.

Other chemicals helping produce the distinctive scents of many basils, depending on their proportion in each specific breed, including:

* cinnamate (same as in cinnamon) * citronellol (geraniums, roses, and citronella) * geraniol (as in geranium) * linalool (a flowery scent also in coriander) * methyl chavicol (which gives tarragon its scent) * myrcene (bay, myrcia) * pinene (which is, as the name implies, the chemical which gives pine oil its scent) * ocimene * terpineol

Health issues

Basil, like other aromatic plants such as fennel and tarragon, contains estragole, a known carcinogen and teratogen in rats and mice. While human effects are currently unstudied, the rodent experiments indicate that it would take 100–1000 times the normal anticipated exposure to become a cancer risk.