Why does a bay leaf make soup taste better?
The Quiet Leaf's Trick
Why does a bay leaf make soup taste better?
You drop a dried leaf into your bubbling pot of soup, and somehow — without tasting like leaf, without falling apart, without doing anything obvious at all — it makes the whole thing better. How does one quiet little bay leaf pull off that trick?
Inside that stiff, dusty-looking leaf are tiny pockets of flavor oil — imagine microscopic drops locked inside the leaf's cells, waiting. These oils contain dozens of different aroma chemicals, each one a different note in a flavor chord. The leaf has been drying for months, concentrating those oils, turning them potent and ready.
