Baking With Blueberries? Add a Little Coriander

Mixing a little coriander in with your blueberry desserts or pancakes will make the blueberries taste more, well, blueberry-y. And there’s a scientific reason why.
Overhead shot of blueberry pie with almond crumble topping in a ceramic pie dish with one slice removed to a plate.
Photo by Joseph De Leo, Food Styling by Rebecca Jurkevich

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to a discovery he made—that mixing a little bit of lavender in with his weed resulted in a very pleasant and flavorful smoking experience. It made enough sense—there are tons of herbal cigarettes on the market that make use of fragrant herbs to the same end. But what makes it good, my friend explained to me, are the terpenes (more on that later) found in lavender—specifically, linalool. And so what started out as a “high-dea” turned into what so many high-deas turn into: a rabbit hole. I immediately wondered if I could apply this newly acquired knowledge to food. Beyond lavender and weed, what else on our planet has linalool?

Apparently, coriander. The dried seeds of this common garden herb pack considerably more linalool than lavender does (the flavor’s more subtle, too, so, it’s a little easier to cook with). Blueberries, too. In fact, linalool is one of the key terpenes used when laboratories synthesize the flavor of blueberries. Did that mean, I wondered, that coriander and blueberries go together? Are they secretly best buds?

Better blueberry pie through science.

Photo by Joseph De Leo, Food Styling by Rebecca Jurkevich

Now, I’m not the first person to make this connection: Niki Segnit mentions linalool in her book, The Flavor Thesaurus, as a major reason why blueberries pair well with coriander seed. “Coriander seeds can contain up to 85 percent linalool, a flavor compound with a woody, floral, slightly citrusy quality that’s a key component of synthesized blueberry flavor. Freshly ground, they can lend a fragrant background note to your home-baked blueberry muffins.” Genevieve Ko, author of Better Baking, mixes coriander into a blueberry and nectarine pie filling. In his book, Marbled, Swirled, and Layered, Irvin Lin makes coriander a costar in his recipe for blueberry and coriander shortcakes. Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Julie Tanous smear a blueberry-coriander compound butter all over their blue corn pancakes in their book, Food Between Friends.

They all use coriander because, well, it works. I even taste-tested it to be sure, preparing blueberry lemon corn muffins two ways, adding a pinch of freshly ground coriander seed (you can use a bigger pinch if you’re using pre-ground) to one batch and leaving the other batch coriander-free. Without revealing which was which, I invited my partner and a couple of friends to taste both versions. They all agreed that the muffins with coriander were better, though nobody could quite put their finger on what made the blueberries so … blueberry-y.

What exactly are terpenes?

It wasn’t until I really started digging into research about terpenes that I started to understand how they can be used to amplify and complement flavors.

Haley Sater, Ph.D., of the University of Maryland Extension, an expert on the biochemistry of blueberries, tells me that terpenes are “a group of volatile compounds that are produced through a specific metabolic pathway. Many different organisms can make terpenes, including animals. In plants many of the terpenes that are produced have odor activity, including linalool.” (Aha! Odor activity! Taste and smell are intrinsically tied, remember?) In nature, she explained, some terpenes will attract pollinators, while others serve as herbivory deterrents, dissuading animals and insects from eating the plant's leaves or fruit. For culinary purposes, it turns out that those odor compounds are everything.

Photo by Joseph De Leo, Food Styling by Rebecca Jurkevich

So why does it work?

What is it about linalool specifically that makes blueberries and coriander such a great combination? Sater broke it down for me like this: “In the case of blueberries and coriander, the linalool present is mostly the same type. In a nutshell, there are two different forms of linalool that can be produced in nature, and they actually have different odor properties. The type that predominates both the blueberry profile and the coriander profile is the (S)-(+)- linalool, which has an odor that can be described as green, rosy, floral, and citrusy.”

Since blueberries and coriander share the same type of floral linalool flavor, then, our brains seem to interpret this flavor as the same. Sure, coriander has other flavor and aroma compounds, but combining it with blueberries will layer the linalool, making those blueberries sing.

Further proof

With the success of my corn muffin trial, I tackled some other blueberry recipes to see if adding a little coriander would improve them. Sure enough, it did. A half teaspoon of ground coriander in the streusel topping of a blueberry streusel cake added a very nice, fragrant touch—especially paired with the cinnamon already in the recipe. (As it turns out linalool is present in cinnamon too.)

Adding a half-teaspoon to the filling of a wild blueberry pie (and another half teaspoon to the almond crumble topping) did wonders for the recipe—so much so that I did some quick research on the flavor and aroma compounds in almonds just to see if linalool was in there. There isn’t, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn that almonds do contain the terpenes a-pinene (piney aromas) and limonene (citrusy aromas), and both of these occur in coriander too.

While coriander will enhance some of blueberry’s natural flavors, it won’t enhance all of them. And hey, maybe there are other ingredients that can build on those other compounds—but that’s a rabbit hole for another day. For now I’m still nerding out researching and experimenting with terpenes. Because while trial and error in cooking can be fun, it can sometimes be frustrating. And yeah, we can always rely on the classics (chicken, lemon, and rosemary have terpenes in common! Gin and citrus have terpenes in common!), but getting to know the scientific reasons why certain ingredients pair well together? That’s cooking with an ace in the hole.