Epazote Dysphania ambrosioides
Pungent, petrol-edged and completely unlike anything else in the rack. In a pot of black beans it is not optional — it is what makes them taste Mexican.
Ingredient reference image: AI-generated. Recipe photography is my own.
In the kitchen
It goes in with the beans
Unlike most soft herbs, epazote is added at the start and cooks for the length of the pot. A sprig dropped into black beans or a pot of pinto beans at the beginning is the standard Mexican move.
Dried works here
One of the few tender-leaved herbs that keeps most of its character dried, which is why it travels and why it is usually what you can actually buy outside Mexico.
One sprig, whole
Add it whole and fish it out, the way you would a bay leaf. Chopped it distributes too evenly and dominates; whole it perfumes the pot and can be removed when it has done enough.
Beyond the kitchen
THE NAHUATL NAME
Epazote comes from the Nahuatl epazótl, generally translated as skunk sweat — a name that tells you exactly how the Aztecs regarded its smell, and that it was in use long before contact.
IT IS A WEED ALMOST EVERYWHERE
The plant has naturalised across the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia and is treated as an invasive weed in many places. Most of the world's epazote grows entirely unplanted and uneaten.
THE BEAN TRADITION
The practice of cooking epazote with beans is ancient and consistent across Mexican regional cooking — black beans, quesadillas, esquites, huitlacoche and mole verde all use it, and the pairing long predates any written explanation for it.
CULINARY QUANTITIES ONLY
Epazote is used in Mexican cooking as a herb, in the quantity a herb is used. Concentrated extracts of the plant are a separate matter entirely and have no place in a kitchen.
A longer history
Epazote is native to Mexico and Central America and was in use across Mesoamerica long before European contact, appearing in Aztec records under its Nahuatl name. It was one of a set of herbs that, unlike chili or tomato, never crossed into global cooking — it remains almost entirely a Mexican ingredient.
Spanish colonists recorded it and it travelled as a plant, naturalising widely across Europe, Africa and Asia as a roadside weed. What did not travel was the culinary knowledge: in most places it grows, nobody eats it.
It remains fundamental in central and southern Mexican cooking — with beans above all, and in quesadillas, soups, mole verde and dishes using huitlacoche. Its presence in a recipe is one of the more reliable markers that the recipe is actually Mexican rather than Tex-Mex.