Recipes with star anise

Hearty Italian spaghetti sauce with pork ribs, homemade meatballs, and scorched tomato paste simmered for hours into rich, meaty perfection.

Anise biscotti (mandel bread) with lemon zest, anisette liqueur, and star anise baked twice for a crisp, crunchy dunk-worthy cookie. An Italian-Jewish crossover recipe with optional hazelnuts or sliced almonds.

Pfefferneusse are traditional German pepper cookies with molasses, star anise, cinnamon, allspice, and black pepper, rolled in powdered sugar. This old-world recipe mellows for weeks in stoneware for the best flavor.

Traditional Tuscan cavallucci spice cookies built from a hot sugar syrup kneaded with walnuts, candied orange peel, and warm spices like clove, anise, and cinnamon. Chewy, perfumed, and unmistakably medieval.

Chicken simmered in coconut-infused milk with saffron, star anise, coriander, plum jam, and blanched almonds. A fragrant, lightly spiced dish served over rice.

Another homemade Italian sausage, mild or hot as desired.

Cinnamon sugar crusted sweet bread: a lightly sweet yeast bread flavored with anise and wrapped in a buttery cinnamon-sugar crust. Sliced thin and buttered for coffee time.

A fragrant homemade Chinese ten-spice blend with toasted star anise, Szechuan peppercorns, fennel, coriander, and cumin. Toast, grind, and store for marinades, stir-fries, sauces, and meat rubs.

Bizcochitos are the official state cookie of New Mexico: lard-based shortbread perfumed with anise and sweet wine, dusted in cinnamon sugar, and baked into delicate flaky rounds. The traditional Christmas and wedding cookie of the Southwest.

This is a good "guest" food. You can appear to have mastered esoteric Oriental cooking techniques without ever having actually prepared the dish before... Unless you drop the pot on the kitchen floor and set it on fire with the hot salt, it's a pretty foolproof cooking technique.

Bread machine pepper spice bread with black pepper, star anise, cinnamon, allspice, pecans, and honey. A warmly spiced yeast loaf with an unexpected peppery bite.

Classic anise cookies build a meringue-like base from eggs whipped with sugar for 30 minutes, then rest overnight before baking into pillowy, licorice-scented Italian cookies.

Peach tres leches cake soaked in three milks and peach schnapps, topped with star anise and cinnamon poached peaches, vanilla whipped cream, and crispy meringue strips.

Authentic mole poblano sauce made from scratch with mulato, ancho, pasilla, and chipotle chilies, roasted vegetables, toasted nuts, sesame seeds, and Mexican chocolate. A complex, deeply layered sauce worth every minute.

Classic Italian aniseed cookies (anisbroetli or anise drops) made with whipped eggs, powdered sugar, and ground anise, dried overnight before baking for the signature crisp shell and soft middle.

Red braised pork shoulder slow-cooked in dark soy sauce, Shaoxing wine, star anise, cinnamon, and rock sugar. A classic Chinese hong shao technique for meltingly tender pork.