Does Anybody Really Know What Thyme It Is?
With the possible exception of bay leaves, thyme is probably the most popular herb on the planet. Yes, I know parsley is an herb. I like parsley fine, but don’t long for a parsley infused stew or roast.
Thyme has the unfortunate latin name Thymus Vulgaris, and, like many other herbs, is in the mint family. Common terms for thyme are English thyme, garden thyme, common thyme or thyme. It is an impressive ground covering, offers a pleasant aroma and has pretty flowers or purple or white.
One of the interesting features is variation of how the stems grow and the ease, or not, of removing the small leaves from the stems. I’ve purchased thyme in which each stem was only that, and the leaves came off very easily. Then there have been times when a stem has a dozen or more branched from it and the leaves do not come off those branches well, for the branches are so fragile. Fragile branches are a frustration when seeking only the leaves, but the good news is they are edible and choppable. The woody, almost stick, stems do offer flavor and are good wrapped in a coffee filter to flavor stocks or soups, but cannot be eaten.
As flavor goes, the whole plant has thyme flavor. As palatability goes, the leave are far easier and more pleasant to eat than the sticks.
Defining A Flavor
Perhaps, along with describing what blue looks like, describing flavor is 
equally as challenging. Any description depends on some data base of experience to know what mint or rosemary or sage are. That thyme can have a wide spectrum of flavors from plant to plant and type to type makes the task even more challenging. But, let’s do it anyway, challenges and all.
Thyme tastes a bit bright and green. If that’s not confusing, nothing is.
Bright, to me, means the flavor is immediate and quick. It can linger but the flavor doesn’t develop or evolve too much after you eat it.
Green tastes fertile. Yeah, not a lot of help. This is a crude analogy, but effective. Imagine the smell of fresh cut grass. That’s the flavor of green. Grass, too, but that chlorophyll smell tastes like green. It’s in asparagus and avocados and green beans.
Thyme can also have some pine notes and clove or pepper notes, but those are accents to the main flavor.
How Do We Make The Most Of Those Flavors
The element of flavor is its essential oil, called thymol. It is used as an anaesthetic and as an antiseptic in mouthwashes. The Johnson & Johnson company produces Euthymol, a fluoride free toothpaste. Thymol is also to successfully “prevent fermentation and the growth of mold in bee colonies.”[1]
But, to cooking, Reid. Yes. Heat, and as it happens, oil of any culinary type, is the key to extracting those flavors. This point will be a basic cooking principle for all herbs and spices, fresh or dry. There are, however, some tricks for the dry stuff.*
Fresh herbs can be categorized into two very loose categories: salad herbs and cooking herbs. We may cook with them all, but knowing this distinction informs our decision about when to add them. Cooking herbs-thyme, rosemary, sage, lavender leaves, oregano, marjoram, to name some of the heavy hitters, lend their flavors best when used in the early stages of preparing a dish. I add the chopped form of the cooking herb just before I add anything which is very wet: mushrooms or tomatoes or stock. Let that high heat really extract those oils, blend with the ingredients in the pan, then add the next things to stop any chance of scorch. Burnt food is always bad.
Oregano and marjoram have roots on both sides of the line, which means they can, if the leaves are small and young, act as salad herbs.
Salad herbs are fresh herbs which can be eaten raw-basil, chives, chervil, parsley, cilantro-but can be added to cooked dishes, but at the end of cooking.
COO
Country of origin for fresh herbs seems harder to determine but even more seems unimportant. There’s no wars being fought over thyme. That’s good, don’t misunderstand me. But, the gruesome romance of cinnamon or cloves or cardamom just aren’t necessary for a plant which so easily and willingly grows nearly everywhere.
There’s One In Every Crowd
Thyme and all its woody or spindly variations has one notable outlier: 
lemon thyme. It tastes like lemon. The lemon is forward with hints of thyme characteristics behind. Lovely stuff.
Lemon thyme has bright green leaves which are often bordered with a light yellow or white edge. They are not related to the vulgaris clan. According to some research, they have been taxonomically classified a variety of ways, but DNA testing has verified the exclusion, without helping with inclusion.[2]
As a cooking herb, lemon thyme is superb in tomato sauces, particularly the famed Classical French version, Tomatoes Provencal. Lemon thyme is also especially tasty added to the pan of sautéing fish or as a seasoning for vegetarian plates of cooked vegetables.
Thyme Is Not Just For Dinner Any More
Auguste Escoffier and Antonin Carême cooked food, well, for many years and many many years ago, and Bartolomeo Scappi long before them. To speak of a food trend as groundbreaking is to suggest no one had an idea to combine lemons and thyme into a dessert or a cake until the proverbial last week. That does seem silly, even if we can’t Google a written record of it.
The recent trends do have cooking herbs being pressed into service in unconventional ways. As with anything else, if it works, it’s genius and if it fails it was a horrible idea. The aforementioned lemon thyme concoction has a lot of traction and has been tried in short breads, cakes, poundcakes, cookies and more. The pictures look great. Some are good ideas, but this cook is decidedly conservative in my cooking and baking. I may try new and different, but to move me from my perch and make it part of my repertoire, well, that’s some dish.
Sauce Provençale
The genesis of this comes to me from Escoffier, and to him from "the bourgeois kitchens of Provence and is actually a Fondue of tomatoes." I have made an altercation or two but the spirit remains his.
Ingredients
Sauce Provençale
- 9 oz Extra Virgin Olive Oil
- 3# 6 oz Peeled, seeded, chopped tomatoes
- pinch sugar
- 1 each Crushed garlic clove
- 1 t Chopped lemon thyme leaves
- Salt and pepper
Instructions
Prepare the sauce
-
Peel, seed and chop the tomato meat. Save the skins and seeds for a stock or soup base.
Peel the garlic clove; pick and chop the lemon thyme leaves.
Chop the tomatoes into uniform sized of approximately 1 inch cubes.
-
Heat the extra virgin olive oil in a deep, heavy bottomed pot, to nearly smoking. You will see the oil "walking," that is, lines of movement in the oil.
Add the garlic, allow to cook just a few seconds to get browned and add the tomatoes. Please take great caution to avoid splashing the chopped lemon thyme and tomatoes into the very hot oil. It is best to place the tomatoes into a bowl which will fit into the pot and then, with an oven mitt on your hand to protect from steam, put the bowl as near the surface of the oil as you can and tip the tomatoes into the oil.
-
Stir the tomatoes immediately with a wooden spoon. Reduce the heat to low and let the tomatoes simmer for half an hour. Stir often until the heat reduces, then cover the pot and stir now and again.
-
The tomatoes will have broken down greatly but will still have some identity remaining. This is an excellent sauce for fish or chicken or even as a dipping sauce for fried zucchini sticks.
Recipe Notes
For those of you with La Guide Culinaire, this is recipe 72.
This sauce lends itself to accepting a variety of flavors, including anchovies and olives and rinse, salt-packed capers (the brined kind are okay, but the salt-packed have superior flavor).
Classical French purists will bulk and insist no change can be made. Remind them with kindness that Escoffier spent his whole life experimenting and tweaking and finding the best flavor and methods. Surely we can allow that he would approve of an improvement, especially if it tasted good and was cooked well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thymol
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thymus_citriodorus
- Dried, ground spices can be mixed with just a little bit of water to form a lightly runny paste. Add this paste to the pan just before the wet ingredients, just as was described for the fresh cooking herbs. The heat will activate the water which will make steam and help release the essential oils into your food without immediately burning the spices. Try that with your next curry powder dish and taste the difference cooking the spices makes.
One thought on “How Many Thymes Have I Told You”