Cinnamon, Beyond Chai: Everyday Ways to Use Meghalaya Cinnamon

Most Indian kitchens use cinnamon in exactly two ways: a stick dropped into the biryani, and a pinch in the chai. Both are good. Both also badly undersell what cinnamon can do — especially a sweeter, more fragrant cinnamon, which is rather wasted in long savoury cooking where its delicacy simply boils away.

A quick word on which cinnamon this is, because it changes everything that follows: our cinnamon is a Meghalaya-grown variety, closer to the sweet, floral end of the spectrum than the hard, aggressive cassia most Indian shelves carry by default. (If that distinction is new, cassia vs Ceylon lays it out properly.) That sweeter profile is exactly what makes the uses below work — they'd fall a little flat with a sharp cassia.

In your coffee, before it brews

A small pinch stirred through the ground coffee before it brews — in the filter basket, the moka pot, the French press — gives the whole cup a warmth that tastes faintly expensive and costs nothing. Far better than dusting it on top of the foam afterwards, where it mostly just sits there looking the part.

On the morning oats, dahi and fruit

This is cinnamon's natural home. Through porridge or oats, stirred into dahi with a little honey, dusted over cut fruit — it's genuinely transformative on banana and on papaya — or the old, slightly silly pleasure of cinnamon toast: buttered bread, a little sugar, a dusting of cinnamon, a minute under the grill. Better than it has any right to be.

In the actual baking

Here a sweet cinnamon finally gets to lead rather than support: cakes, cookies, banana bread, an apple crumble, cinnamon rolls, a sooji or atta halwa. As a rough rule it lifts anything with butter, sugar and fruit in it. Fold it into the dry ingredients so it spreads evenly instead of streaking.

The savoury exceptions worth making

Cinnamon does belong in some savoury cooking — just not boiled to death in it. A restrained pinch lifts a slow-cooked rajma or a tomato gravy, and it's arguably more at home in a kheer or phirni than in the biryani everyone defaults to. Add it toward the end, or bloom it briefly in fat; don't subject a delicate cinnamon to an hour of hard simmering and expect to taste it.

The one rule that ties it together

Cinnamon's flavour lives in volatile oils, and heat drives them off. So for anything where you genuinely want to taste the cinnamon — rather than just faintly perfume a pot — add it late and don't cook it to death. Treat it as a finishing spice as often as a base one, and a good Meghalaya cinnamon goes a surprisingly long way.