Cinnamon and This Is the Best One

Cinnamon isn’t a mystery to most of us. After salt and pepper, it’s probably the seasoning we become familiar with as children, in the form of comforting cinnamon toast, oven-warm cookies, and the warm apple cider that sustains us through the winter months. It’s just… cinnamon, right?

Well, yes and no. All cinnamon comes from the inner bark of trees in the genus Cinnamomum, but it branches out from there. Cinnamomum Verum is sometimes referred to as “real cinnamon,” but other varieties, especially cassia, maybe even more familiar to our palates, because that’s what we grew up eating.

So should you spend time and cash seeking out the “real” stuff, and is it palpably better tasting, smelling, and all that jazz? There was only one way to know for sure: via a blind tasting by the Extra Crispy staff, plus a few hardy volunteers from our office mates at Food & Wine. One trip to New York City’s Kalustyan’s market netted us 10 different forms of cinnamon in stick, quill, chip, and powder form, but how do you actually evaluate them side by side? The “cinnamon challenge” technique of taking a spoonful straight to the face was out of the question because that’s stupid, and snorting seemed ill-advised, so we settled on making a tea with the solid varieties, and an ersatz cinnamon and sugar toast with the powder.

The team numerically rated each variety on the excellence of taste and smell, as well as giving feedback on how closely it resembled the definitive cinnamon of their childhood canon. Just a few points separated the top couple of contenders, followed by a distinct drop-off to the next tier down, and free-fall to the absolute bottom. And those weren’t even necessarily terrible—just far less potent than their counterparts at the top of the heap.