Plant · P-614

Asafoetida

Ferula assa-foetida

Asafoetida is a giant desert umbellifer grown for the pungent gum-resin tapped from its root - sulphurous and sharp raw, but mild and onion-like once cooked, and used across Indian cooking as a garlic substitute and as an ingredient of Worcester sauce. The plant itself is edible too: leaves and young shoots lose their strong smell when boiled, the cabbage-like heads are eaten raw, and the roots are cooked after steeping out their bitterness. It grows for years on a single thick taproot before flowering once and dying, so a resin harvest depends on raising overlapping batches rather than one planting. It needs full sun, deep well-drained soil, and resents any root disturbance, so it is grown from seed sown directly where it will stay.