Do bay leaves actually make a difference to a recipe?

AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:

In the kitchen, there are some ingredients that are staples - garlic, onions, salt and pepper, maybe some Lawry’s. Without them, your recipe wouldn’t be the same. But what about the bay leaf? Does it really add flavor and complexity? Is it really necessary, or is it a scam? That’s what Boston Globe reporter Beth Teitell explored recently. And with Thanksgiving just around the corner, we thought we’d ask her about bay leaves - love them or leave them out? Beth Teitell, thanks so much for joining us today.

BETH TEITELL: Thank you. You know, I am so glad we’re having this conversation because I have to tell you what I’ve learned. I’m a bay leaf skeptic. Every skeptic suffers alone.

RASCOE: Well, let me ask you, though, what led to your skepticism about bay leaves?

TEITELL: (Laughter). OK.

RASCOE: (Laughter).

TEITELL: I have to say, I realized that I had always been kind of skeptical, but I never really was confident to even surface my concerns. And it was not long ago I was making a chicken soup, and I was really running late. And all of a sudden, I’m like, part way through the recipe, and I see that it calls for bay leaves. And I grabbed the jar that I have, which basically, I only keep for show. And instead of having the two bay leaves that the recipe called for, it was just kind of one very dry, ragged shard. So I was thinking, do I run out and hope that this soup doesn’t boil over in the middle or I just skip the bay leaf? So that’s kind of what made me think about it. That’s what launched this investigation.

RASCOE: OK. What happens when you use a bay leaf?

TEITELL: Well, OK, I guess it depends on who you ask, right? So the people who are the pro bay leaf people - they will talk just about how bay leaves deepen other flavors, and they add subtle notes of pine and eucalyptus. But then there’s these other people who - when I asked around, people said, oh, it’s a scam. It’s a fraud.

It’s - the funny thing is that it’s an ingredient that’s - as you know, they’re very sharp. So you cook with them, but then you’re always instructed to remove them. But what I was interested to hear is that, at first, it seemed to me that the skeptics were really people who didn’t cook at all. Like, oh, yeah, it’s easy to say it doesn’t matter 'cause you’re not even really cooking. Or if you are cooking, like me...

RASCOE: Yeah. Like me.

TEITELL: Yeah.

RASCOE: (Laughter).

TEITELL: Right. You’re like, you might be actually - I don’t want to say this. I’ll speak for myself. I’m in what I realized was a self-fulfilling bay leaf doom loop because the only bay leaves I ever had were very old. So of course they’re not going to be that good. There are a couple of things that I use bay leaves in, and I’ve always wanted to make them without the bay leaves to see if it made a difference, and I never have, so I’m not sure.

RASCOE: Well, yeah, 'cause you did a taste test. Can you talk to us about this taste test that you did?

TEITELL: Oh, sure, of course. So I just - finally, I figured I just had to find the answer for myself, so I got a recipe for this wonderful Tuscan bean stew. And it calls for tomatoes and these beans and tomato paste and minced sage and a quarter cup of minced flat-leaved parsley, which - honestly, those are ingredients I also might have skipped in the past.

But I had eight testers - some who were certain going in that they could easily ID the dish with the bay leaf, and other who were kind of nervous. Like, one of my testers said, I have a terrible palate. But to my surprise, five picked the one that had been made with the bay leaf. And of the two who got it wrong, one said that she had just mixed up the batches, and in fact, she was right. The only person who didn’t know was the person who went into it saying she had a bad palate.

RASCOE: Oh, really? So you found that people like the ones with the bay leaves or they could taste the difference?

TEITELL: I’ve come to realize that my test was not actually clinically done that well. Like, right...

RASCOE: (Laughter).

TEITELL: ...I don’t know if it was better. Like, it was...

RASCOE: It’s OK. It’s OK.

TEITELL: ...It wasn’t peer reviewed or anything.

RASCOE: (Laughter).

TEITELL: You know, so they claim that they liked it better. But I - something I learned I thought was pretty interesting - which was that one reader said, no, you probably can’t detect the flavor of bay leaves in your soup. But if it’s not there, something will be missing. So that almost seemed kind of philosophical to me - like, really deep.

RASCOE: Yeah.

TEITELL: And then somebody on Reddit - of course, the ultimate authority on everything - said that bay leaves are like Santa. You have to believe.

RASCOE: OK. So is that your final conclusion, though? How do you feel about it?

TEITELL: I guess I’m still a little insecure, so I would still add them. But the thing that kind of cracks me up about it is that people got very passionate. And on one hand, I sort of felt like, let the bay leaf believers bow to the dogma and do it, and the rest of us can go on our merry way ahead of the game.

RASCOE: That was Beth Teitell of The Boston Globe. Beth, thank you so much for your great work and for, you know, taking on this very important issue.

TEITELL: Well, thank you, and I’m wishing you and everyone listening a wonderful Thanksgiving.

(SOUNDBITE OF GABRIEL GARZON-MONTANO SONG, “FRUITFLIES”) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.