Can you eat bay leaves? What you should consider

Bay leaves are usually removed from food before serving. Find out here whether you can eat the leaves and what dangers there may be.

Bay leaves are used in some dishes for their flavor, but can you eat them or should you remove them?

Laurel: Popular spice and medicinal plant

The true bay leaf, also known as the spice laurel, originally comes from Asia, but also grows in the Mediterranean region. Its fruits and leaves and the laurel oil extracted from them are used in medicine, among other things.

However, bay leaves are most commonly used in the kitchen to flavor soups, stews, meat dishes and pickled foods. Many recipes call for a bay leaf to be added while a dish is cooking or marinating. The leaf should be removed before serving – but why?

Eating bay leaves: healthy or poisonous?

Especially with soups and sauces, it can easily happen that you puree before you have taken the bay leaf out of the pot. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that your dish is no longer edible:

• Bay leaves are not poisonous. Theoretically, you can eat the leaves – after all, you can also buy ground bay leaves, which cannot be removed from the food after cooking.
• However, bay leaves have an unpleasantly tough consistency and a bitter taste. Chopped or pureed bay leaves in food can make your soup or sauce too bitter and therefore inedible. The only thing that helps here is a taste test.
• Eating bay leaves is therefore not harmful to your health. Recipes recommend removing the leaves from food for taste reasons.

Tip: For a dish for four people, one or two bay leaves are enough. You can tear the leaves slightly before adding them so that they release more flavor. The fresher the leaves are, the more bitter they taste.

Laurel: risk of confusion with poisonous species

Real laurel can easily be confused with cherry laurel, also known as cherry laurel. Strictly speaking, cherry laurel is not a laurel but a member of the rose family. It is increasingly used as a hedge plant, but all parts are poisonous.

• The leaves of the cherry laurel have a similar elongated shape to those of the bay laurel and also bear black, shiny berries.
• If you eat the leaves or fruit, you may experience nausea, vomiting and stomach cramps. If you notice that you have accidentally eaten cherry laurel, you should seek medical help. According to the Bonn Poison Control Center, if you eat fewer than three berries, drinking plenty of water is enough to combat the symptoms of poisoning.
• The cherry laurel is particularly characterized by its distinctive smell: if you rub a leaf between your fingers, it smells like bitter almonds because of the hydrogen cyanide it contains. Its leaves are also shinier than those of the common laurel. The cherry laurel also has a more branched growth.

If you want to pick bay leaves yourself, you should be careful and, if in doubt, do not eat the leaves you have collected yourself. The plant can also be dangerous for animals.

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