Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsDelicious
Reviewed in the United States on October 15, 2017
Have been using this brand of Asafoetida for a couple of years, it's essential for making various styles of curries taste right. As other have said, it tastes like very concentrated garlic but also has a strange sweetness on the tongue. It smells stinky, but in a way that after a time is pleasant, sort of like some varieties of cheese.
It also has a fascinating history; In Roman times the giant fennel plant (known as Silphium or Laser) was so valued for culinary and medicinal uses that it was harvested to extinction - Asafoetida, a close cousin, was considered a worthy alternative and has remained in use for thousands of years since. Egyptians and Minoans both had specific glyphs to represent this unique fennel resin. Apparently animals that grazed on the original giant fennel had extra delicious meat, and this may be the reason the original went extinct (no one ever figured out how to mass cultivate the plant).
The most fascinating aspect of this story is that the original giant fennel had heart shaped seeds. They were so famous and valued that the first heart symbols (representing the seeds) in human history were put onto coins, as Silphium resin was worth its weight in gold. Its connection to love is that Silphium prevented pregnancy - like many plants in the fennel family, it was pharmacologically active and prevented pregnancy very successfully. It was the first birth control. And from that legacy here you have Rani "Asafetida" which is a weird spelling of the Roman word "Asafoetida", coming from Parthian (Persia / modern Iran) trader's word for resin "Aza" and latin "foetidus" meaning stinky.
Enjoy your delicious fascinating stinky resin.
