What is the difference? Lately I've been getting a lot of people asking about cilantro and coriander and I find it interesting that one question is coming up a lot. Some of it iss online some of it is in person, so I thought I will go ahead and answer it in a video.
It's a plant, a leafy green that you can eat. It has a very distinct and individual flavor to many dishes. I live in Texas and here in the southwest cilantro is a very common herb that's put in many soups and salsas.
In my personal experience coriander is a little less common. It's a spice that comes off the same plant as cilantro, in fact I think some of the confusion comes from... well, the reason people are asking me this question is that they hear the term "cilantro" and "coriander" and some people actually call the plant Coriander. In many other places around the world the cilantro plant is actually called Coriander. There's a scientific name for the plant coriander, Coriandrum or something like that, and that's why people call it coriander. For some reason here in the United States we had to call it Cilantro.
If I got my facts straight the word cilantro comes to us by way of a Spanish translation of a similar herb (culantro, similar but different), but by the time it got to America and was well known it was just called cilantro. That does now provide some confusion with this thing we call coriander.
It's really not that confusing at all. By now, you're picking up on the fact that cilantro and coriander come from the same plant. I find it very interesting that this entire plant from the roots to the stems, the leaves and the seeds. All of it is edible. The most common products, at least in our area, are the soft stems and leaves that we call cilantro, and the seeds that we call coriander.
The plant is full of vitamin A which makes it really useful for preventing and treating eye problems in preventing eye disease. One thing that I find very interesting is that the plant cilantro is one of the only substances that you can eat that actually removes (as far as I know) heavy metal from your body. In an age where there's so much heavy metals going into just about everything that we consume this is a really useful thing to know. Heavy metals are associated with certain diseases and syndromes, and also the effects of aging. Cilantro: anti-aging, fights disease, helps flush your system... sounds like a winner to me.
Let's talk more about the coriander side. It's really just the seeds of the Cilantro plant. I grew Cilantro in my garden then let it dry out. Once it's very dry, the little seed balls come off very easily. The seeds are harvested simply by letting it dry out and pulling them off of the plant if you get a little bit of the leaf or stem in your coriander it's okay because, remember the entire plant is edible. They're still flavor in the dried leaves and stems.
But let's talk about how to get the coriander seeds off the plant and stored without a lot of that extra leaf and stem. First I quickly and coarsely rub the seed balls off until they fall onto the tablecloth.
Mama's going to be happy that I got this done because she's tired of this dried out twig hanging out in her kitchen.
After it is all on the tablecloth we rub it around break it all up a little bit. Pull out the really big stuff now.
The coriander will be collected with an index card and sifted through a mesh strainer. The index card is just a really easy tool
to scrape all those seeds up with. Take your time though, because you can flip the seeds all over the kitchen. Once they're collected. I put them into the mesh strainer. The seeds stay in the strainer. The dusty bits fall through. Some twigs remain, but they are easily removed by hand.
I hope that kind of clears up the differences for you between the herb of cilantro and the spice of the coriander
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