Welcome to the summary page for FabulousFusionFood's Spice guide to Sha Ren along with all the Sha Ren containing recipes presented on this site, with 4 recipes in total.

This is a continuation of an entire series of pages that will, I hope, allow my visitors to better navigate this site. As well as displaying recipes by name, country and region of origin I am now planning a whole series of pages where recipes can be located by meal type and main ingredient. This page gives a listing of all the spice-based recipes added to this site.

These recipes, all contain Sha Ren as a major flavouring.

The spice, known as Sha Ren in Chinese and also by its Latinate descriptor Fructus Amomi represents the seed pods and seeds of Wurfbainia villosa a member of the Zingiberaceae (ginger) family of flowering plants.

Wurfbainia villosa, also known by its basionym Amomum villosum, (Chinese: 砂仁; pinyin: shārén) is a plant in the ginger family which is grown as a cardamom-like spice throughout Southeast Asia and South China. Like cardamom, the plant is cultivated for its fruit, dry capsules containing strongly aromatic seeds. W. villosa is an evergreen monocotyledonous plant 1.5 to 3.0 m in height, the branches and leaves of which are similar to those of ginger. It grows in the shade of trees and has a reproductive peculiarity whereby those flowers borne on creeping growth at ground level will set fruit, while those borne on aerial branches will not. It blooms in March and April, the colour, translucency and waxy lustre of the flowers being likened traditionally to those of white jade.

The seed of Wurfbainia villosa is used as a spice in Chinese cuisine, in which it can also form an ingredient in certain recipes for the traditional spice mixture known as five-spice powder and Chinese thirteen-spice powder. From as early as the time of the Tang dynasty, many ancient books, including, notably, the Compendium of Materia Medica, have been unanimous in describing the taste of W. villosa seeds as 'acrid, fresh, and slightly bitter'.