Photo: Primejyothi, CC BY-SA 3.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)
Annatto
Bixa orellana
Also known as Achiote, Lipstick Tree, Bija, Roucou, Urucum
Key benefits
✦Traditional uses
✦Long before it colored supermarket cheese and butter, annatto was one of the most treasured plants of the Maya and other Indigenous peoples of tropical America, who ground the seeds into a vivid paste for body paint, ceremonial dye, and cooking. Traditional healers across Central and South America have used seed preparations to soothe upset stomachs, calm skin irritation, and cool a fever. Spanish colonizers carried the seeds back across the Atlantic, and annatto followed trade routes into Caribbean, Filipino, and West African kitchens, where it remains a beloved souring and coloring agent in dishes like cochinita pibil and Filipino kare-kare. Today it is best known as the natural source of that warm orange-red hue in cheeses, margarine, and smoked fish.
How to grow & use it
✦The full apothecary for Annatto
Traditional remedies and step-by-step preparations, a complete growing guide, and how to harvest, dry, and store it, all unlocked with HerbLens Unlimited.
- ✦Remedies & preparations
- ✦ Growing guide
- ✦Harvest & storage
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- ✦Turmeric
- ✦Cumin
- ✦Cilantro
- ✦Turmeric (for color, though the flavor differs)
- ✦Paprika (for color in savory dishes)
“You want the warmth of sunset in a jar, the color that turns plain rice into something worth setting the table for.”
The bright red-orange pigment in annatto seeds, called bixin, is the same coloring long used to tint cheddar cheese, butter, and smoked fish, and it earned the plant its common nickname, the lipstick tree, because Indigenous peoples of the Amazon crushed the seeds into a paste for body paint and ceremonial adornment.
Annatto is safe in normal culinary amounts. In concentrated doses it may lower blood sugar or affect blood thinners and blood pressure medication, so use caution beyond food amounts if you take those; rare allergies have been reported.