Are bay leaves a scam? An investigation, and then a taste test.

Do they deepen dishes, adding subtle notes of flavor, as the dogma insists, or are the leaves a sharp and pricey fraud?

Who am I to question a bay leaf? I’m the person who contributes paper goods to a potluck. But as bay leaf season tightens its grip, I’m not the only one asking: Do they actually . . . do anything? Or, as skeptics and even some bay leaf hostages suspect, are they a scam?

On one hand: Who cares. You’re never forced at leafpoint to add one to a recipe. Let the bay leaf enthusiasts bow to the dogma, and the rest of us can go on our merry way, $5.99 ahead of the game. (Or $800 ahead of the game, which was the size of a colleague’s ER bill after a bay leaf hiding in a spinach pie lodged itself in one of her tonsils.)

The problem is that bay leaves, not unlike wrinkle cream, can play with your mind. As a layperson — especially one not versed in global cuisines — you have no way to judge efficacy. Has that leathery thing I dutifully tossed in truly added subtle notes of pine and eucalyptus to my stew? Is my home being perfumed with a reputation-enhancing aroma? Or am I under the spell of a placebo?

So there I was on a recent morning, making chicken soup and also frantically trying to leave for work, when I discovered that the jar of bay leaves I keep for show (in case someone breaks into my house and is later interviewed about my spice rack) held not the two leaves the recipe demanded, but a lone, ragged fragment.

And, oh, it was long expired. Its age, I estimated, was 103.

What to do? Dash out and leave the pot simmering on the stove with no one but the goldendoodle to turn down the flame if it boils over? Or skip the bay leaves and risk ruining a holiday meal? My daughter-in-law? Yes, she’s nice, but her soup — it’s so flat.

Seeking guidance, I turned, as one does for the final, rational word on any subject, to Reddit.

“Wtf does a bay leaf even do?” @SammySprinkles9000 demanded in a post that triggered more than 500 comments. Sprinkles described a dutiful history of using bay leaves when called for, except for a handful of times, and GUESS what? “To be honest i cant tell the difference,” a now-disillusioned Sprinkles wrote. “I’m starting to think bay leaves are [BS].”

Yeah, I cried in joy, high-fiving the doodle. If bay leaves are so great, I told myself, there’d be proof: Bay Spice Lattes, leaf-shaped Peeps, an Uggs collaboration. The leaves would have become politicized, and Vance or Walz would be on cable, clarifying their positions.

But inside, I feared mine was the joy of the lazy. That in fact, I had fallen into a self-fulfilling bay leaf doom loop. That because the only bay leaves I use have aged out — due to years elapsing between cooking episodes — of course I’ve never had a peak leaf experience.

I almost didn’t want to know what I’d been missing. And indeed, when I started to ask around in bay leaf circles, regret filled my bosom.

I heard lovely childhood memories — of a mom who made bay leaf tea to soothe coughs and stomachaches, and another who put them in the sauce for her Lithuanian cabbage rolls. I corresponded with a woman who yearns for a bay leaf tree. I learned that bay leaves aren’t born dried and standing up in a jar!

I spoke with Zoe Hornsby, of Dunstable, the owner of a virtual assistant business, who grew up watching her mom using bay leaves, but dismissed them as an “old wives tale.”

Then, while making some now-forgotten recipe, for reasons she can’t explain, a bay leaf called to her. She answered, and now, 30 years later, at 54, she speaks with the zeal of the convert. “They make a difference,” she said definitively. “One hundred percent.”

One hundred percent.

My heart fell. It seemed definitive. But then I heard back from Lan Lam, deputy food editor of the esteemed Cook’s Illustrated. Her readers are dedicated cooks — people who are not only trying to do things right but willing to put in the effort required to keep one’s spices current — and even among them, she told me, bay leaves are the “most questioned ingredient.”

She was quick to draw a distinction between bay leaves and another often-questioned ingredient: monosodium glutamate, which acts as a flavor enhancer. MSG is polarizing — people either like it or they don’t, she said. But with bay leaves, “people just don’t know.”

But, she added, in many cuisines around the globe, South Asian and Mediterranean among them, bay leaves are not the object of skepticism. “I don’t think anyone would question why they’re in a béchamel,” she said, referring to the creamy white French sauce.

The bay leaves used in South Asian cooking are not only much larger, but have a stronger flavor, too, she said, and are essential in biryani or korma dishes. “It would never occur to anyone to say, ‘Why are you using a bay leaf?’ ”

Even so, bay leaves have prominent doubters, among them celebrity chef and cookbook author Ina Garten. The revelation came in a 2022 “New Yorker Radio Hour” podcast, when she was asked by a listener whether bay leaves are “BS.”

“I really don’t know the answer to this,” she replied. “There are a couple of things that I use bay leaves in and I’ve always wanted to make them without the bay leaves to see if it made a difference, and I never have, so I’m not sure.”

Not to boast — and I’m certainly no Barefoot Contessa, not even a shod contessa — but I have conducted just such a trial, peer-reviewed, even (albeit journalist peers and not cooking experts, especially since the taste test was missed by my own editor, who, just hours earlier, had regaled me with memories of his dad’s artichokes, boiled to perfection with . . . bay leaves).

Working with unexpired bay leaves for potentially the first time in my life, I made two batches of Tuscan stewed beans. One with the bay leaves as suggested, the other without — and each, I’m proud to report, with one tablespoon of minced sage and a quarter cup of minced flat-leaf parsley (ingredients I might have skipped if not for the public nature of the test).

There were eight testers, some certain they could easily ID the dish with bay leaf, others nervous. “I have a terrible palate,” one colleague confessed. “I’m scared of bay leaves,” said another (who, like the spinach pie victim, had also tangled with a leaf). Then, the moment of truth. To my surprise, five picked the one that had been made with a bay leaf. And of the two who got it wrong, one said she mixed up batches “A” and “B” on her plate and might have actually guessed correctly. Only one person, the one with the “bad palate” didn’t know.

Did the findings rise to the level of clinical significance? I thought back to two pieces of wisdom from my bay leaf journey. The first, from Lam, of Cook’s Illustrated. Flavor is an “individual thing,” she said, and if you can’t detect bay leaves in a dish, maybe they’re not “useful” for you.

The second was from Optimal-Witness5311, one of Sprinkles’ hundreds of respondents. “Bay leaves are like santa,” he wrote on Reddit. “You have to believe.”