Bencao House
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Food as medicine

Licorice root

甘草Gān Cǎo

四气 Nature
Neutral · 平
五味 Flavour
Sweet
归经 Channels
Heart · Lung · Spleen · Stomach
Shared-origin list
2002 catalogue · 甘草

Chinese licorice root is neutral and sweet, and the tradition says it enters all twelve channels. Tao Hongjing, c. 500 CE, called it 国老, the old statesman, because its job is to reconcile everything else in the pot. It is also the one item on this list with a well-documented effect on blood pressure, so we use it as a seasoning and nothing more.

Four short cut lengths of dried liquorice root, showing the yellow cross-section, photographed on warm plaster.
Glycyrrhiza uralensis · Dried sliced root

Glycyrrhiza uralensis

四气 · Nature

  1. cold
  2. cool
  3. neutral
  4. warm
  5. hot
Leans neither way

五味 · Flavour

sour
Gathers and holdsLiver
bitter
Drains and driesHeart
sweet
Fills, slows, harmonisesSpleen
pungent
Disperses and movesLung
salty
Softens and sends downKidney
归经 Channels
Heart · Lung · Spleen · Stomach
Part used
Dried sliced root
Shared-origin list
2002 catalogue · 甘草

In the canon

What the texts say

Licorice root appears in more Chinese formulas than any other single item. Of the 398 clauses of the Shanghan Lun, c. 200 CE, it turns up in a very large share of them, and almost never as the point of the pot. Its classical title says why: 国老, the elder statesman — the one who sits in the room so that the others behave.

Shennong Bencao JingThe Divine Husbandman’s Classic of Materia Medicac. 200 CE

Sweet and neutral. It harmonises the hundred medicines and eases what is urgent.

Upper class, among the herbs

“Harmonises” is a real technical claim rather than a pleasantry. Chinese pharmacy holds that licorice does three jobs in a pot: it softens what is harsh, it slows what is fast, and it makes the whole mixture taste like something a person will finish. Li Shizhen kept the elder-statesman title when he wrote it up in the Bencao Gangmu of 1596, and added that it is the item most often overused.

He was right, and that is the useful thing on this page. Licorice is the entry in this collection with the clearest reason not to make it a daily habit. Its sweetness is not sugar — it comes from glycyrrhizin, a compound around fifty times sweeter than sucrose and with real effects on the body at real amounts. Everything below follows from that one fact.

In a kitchen

How it is actually used

The honest kitchen answer for licorice is: one slice, inside something else, occasionally. It is not a tea. Chinese cooking uses it the way a European kitchen uses a bay leaf or a strip of orange peel — a single small piece in a braising liquid, lifted out at the end, doing its work on the balance of the pot rather than on you.

A single slice in a braise

Enough liquid for one braiseAdded at the start; lifted out at the end

1 slice · about 2 g
Dried licorice root — one piece, not a handful
1 piece · about 3 cm
Cassia bark
2 whole
Star anise
4 slices
Fresh ginger, unpeeled
1 L · 4 cups
Stock or water, for whatever you are braising
  1. Put the single licorice slice into the cold braising liquid with the cassia, star anise and ginger before you bring it up to heat.
  2. Simmer whatever you are cooking — pork belly, beef shin, hard-boiled eggs, firm tofu — as you normally would.
  3. Fish the licorice slice out with the other whole spices before serving. It has done its job in the liquid and there is no reason to eat it.
  4. Taste the sauce. It should be rounder and less sharp than the same braise without it, and you should not be able to say why.

One slice. Not two, and not steeped in a mug every morning — that is the habit the caution below is about. Licorice root is also the reason many Chinese cough sweets taste the way they do, and those count toward the same total.

Who it is for

Who it suits, and who it does not

Licorice suits a pot more than it suits a person. Where the classical record does describe it acting on its own it is for something acute and short — a raw throat, a cramping spasm — and for a couple of days, not a season. Keep it an occasional seasoning and you will never meet the problem below. Make it a daily drink and you may.

Tends to suit

  • A cook who wants a braise or a broth to sit more evenly.
  • A raw, scratchy throat, for a day or two and not longer.
  • Anyone who finds a strong pot of ginger or bitter herbs hard to finish.

Tends not to suit

  • Anyone with raised blood pressure, or on medication that manages it.
  • Anyone taking a diuretic, a corticosteroid, or digoxin.
  • Kidney or liver conditions, and heart rhythm problems.
  • Pregnancy.
  • Anyone who already eats black licorice sweets regularly.

Honestly

What to know before you start

The reading

Licorice root suits some people and not others

This page describes a food. It cannot tell you whether it belongs in your week, because it knows nothing about how you sleep, eat or feel the cold. A reading does: thirty questions, one photograph of your tongue, and a document written in English by a physician licensed in China for US $39, sent within 48 hours.

Begin a reading$39Read a sample report