Seeds are very small fruits

Coriander seeds, cumin seeds, celery seeds, anise

Seeds, caraway seeds, even black peppercorns — some of the most popular spices in the whole world, and despite their names, none of them are actually seeds.

They are all fruits — very, very small fruits. Seems super weird, but it'll make total sense as soon as you see how they actually grow. Here's a much larger fruit growing in my garden — a baby cucumber. Cucumbers are fruits, melons. We established that in a previous video. A fruit is the swollen, mature female reproductive organ of a plant — the ovary and associated parts. First, a plant produces a flower.

In most cases, it'll have both male and female parts. The stamen there are the male parts. They produce pollen. The wind, or a bug or something grabs the pollen from the stamen and carries it away. The bee in this case might carry the pollen away to the flower of a neighboring plant, or to a flower on the same plant in the case of self-pollinating plants. The pollen reaches the pistol, the protruding end of the female part of the flower. There, the pollen fertilizes the ovules down here, and now you've got a plant embryo or germ, which is enclosed in a seed, which is enclosed in a fruit. Once fertilized, the whole ovary structure swells up and there's your fruit.

Here's an example of a large fruit. That's where the apple attached to the stem. That's where it attached to the rest of the flower. Cut it in half, and you can see all the layers. The protective outer skin is the epicarp. The soft fleshy part underneath is the mesocarp. And under that you have the actual seeds. The seed itself contains the germ or baby plant, then a sugary or oily energy store to feed the baby plant, and then usually a multi-layered protective shell.

The seed itself is protected by the mesocarp, which in the case of apples is super thick and juicy and sweet. Why? Well, to attract animals who will carry the fruit away to eat and thus disperse the plant seeds. You are merely a pawn in the plant's master plan. So yeah, that's what a fruit is. And coriander seeds, cumin seeds, fennel seeds, in this case — these are all fruits, not seeds. I've been growing this fennel plant for about a year now, which is why it is giant. It's fronds — these fuzzy leaves — these still make a delicious fresh herb, but the bulb and the stalks have grown far too big and fibrous to be tasty. We usually eat adolescent fennel plants.

This fennel plant is a full-on grownup. And a couple of months ago, it started putting up flowers — tiny, pretty yellow flowers. The flowers secrete a sweet liquid called nectar to attract pollinators.

Nectar is a bait for bugs who

Come to gather food, and thus they unintentionally carry around pollen in the process.

Very quickly, we see little ovaries swelling at the base of the flower, and then the flowers fall off because their job is done. And all we have left are the fruits — tiny little fennel fruits. Don't think they look like fruits? Well, check them out under the microscope. They look like little mangoes, don't they? Except for that line down the middle.

That line indicates that this is a schizocarp. Schizo is from the Greek word for split. That's where we get the word schizophrenic, meaning split or broken mind. A schizocarp is a fruit that has two easily separated hemispheres, each containing its own seed. And if I cut this fresh green fennel fruit in half, there's the two seeds surrounded by thin, green mesocarp. The green is the equivalent of the flesh in the apple. Fennel seeds are not seeds, they are fruits. But like all fruits, they contain seeds, and there's the seeds.

What does a fresh fennel fruit taste like? Like fennel, which is to say like licorice, but also extremely sweet. That's probably why people first thought to use this flavor in candy. Fennel fruits, like most fruits, do contain some sugar, but they also contain anethole. We've talked about anethole before. That is the chemical compound that makes that licorice flavor that we know from lots of different plants. And anethole itself is super sweet — 13x sweeter than sugar. So it's not surprising that these little fruits are so darn sweet, but I guess I am surprised that people don't eat them this way more often. Super good.

What people usually do with all of these spices is just let the fruits dry on the plant. The tissue encasing the seeds gradually dies and desiccates in the wind and the sun. This is the natural process by which all kinds of plants get ready to drop their seeds. This is how cereal grains like wheat do it. They just let their seeds dry out until they are naturally preserved, and then they naturally shatter and blow away on the breeze to grow the next generation. The trick for a wheat farmer or a spice farmer is to harvest the seeds when they are as dry and preserved as possible, but before the seeds shatter and fall all over the ground as you're trying to bring them in. Then maybe you let the stems dry out a little more before you just smash them or thresh them to knock the seeds off, same way you do it with wheat. I obviously need to let these dry a little bit more.

Only a few are coming off, but those few are dry enough that the two hemispheres break apart really easily. That's why they call it a schizocarp. And I called it a seed again, sorry. It's a fruit, but in its dry state, the fruit skin and flesh is just so desiccated and thin that it's basically negligible. Cut it in half, you can see the actual seed in the core there.

Lots of other spices look almost exactly

The same as fennel here.

Cumin looks basically the same, caraway, anise,

Even celery seeds.

Celery seeds are just a whole lot smaller.

There's a reason all of these spices look almost exactly the same. They're all from the same family, apiaceae. That's why fennel stalks look like celery stalks, which look like these carrot stems — same family, same U-shaped stem. Parsley's got it too. And yes, carrot and parsley fruits are also edible, even though we usually call them seeds. Here's what the cumin plant looks like with its fruit. Here's caraway, anise, dill is the same deal. Coriander, AKA cilantro, same family, same deal.

The coriander fruit is a little bigger and more bulbous, but it's still a schizocarp with two seeds. All of these dried fruit spices are siblings, with the exception of peppercorns. Piper nigrim is a totally different kind of plant, not related at all to the others, but it still produces a tiny fruit that we dry and call a seed, right? Peppercorn. Corn just used to mean seed in English, and it's still used that way sometimes in British English. In the US, we've pretty much only referred to this particular seed as corn since the 18th or 19th century — it's shortened from Indian corn. But anyway, that's why we call these peppercorns, even though they are dried fruits. The black ones are picked unripe and then briefly boiled, which causes them to brown a lot as they dry. Crack it open, and it looks like a coconut, because a coconut is also a fruit with an oily single seed at its core.

Pink peppercorns are picked fully ripe. That's the skin of their ripe fruit peeling off there. These are dried in ways that preserve their color, usually at the expense of getting all the water out. Still kind of wet in there, but that allows you to see quite plainly that this is a fruit with a seed inside, not a seed, AKA corn. I just thought you'd want to know that — fruit not seed. That's it. That's the video. Hey, just because something is quick and simple doesn't mean it lacks value.