Meet culantro—cilantro’s tropical counterpart. It tastes like a more pungent cilantro, and in the right conditions, it grows all year round. This episode touches on how limited our repetoire of herbs are and the possiblities that come when we expand our selection beyond what's just avaliable at the grocery store. We’ll talk to food blogger Reina Gascon-Lopez on how culantro is used in Puerto Rican cuisine and award-winning cookbook author Andrea Nguyen on how she uses it in Vietnamese cooking.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Min 0:45: Annual plants and their tropical counterparts
• Min 3:19: Meet Reina Gascon-Lopez
• Min 4:17: What is culantro?
• Min 6:11: How Reina cooks with cilantro
• Min 7:42: Culantro in the US
• Min 8:46: The downside to culantro
• Min 9:45: Meet Andrea Nguyen
• Min 11:37: Three sources of cilantro notes in Vietnamese cooking
• Min 12:42: How colonization and globalization affect our palates
• Min 17:24: Expanding the way you think of herbs

Climate Cuisine is part of Whetstone Radio Collective. Learn more about this episode of Climate Cuisine at www.whetstoneradio.com, on IG and Twitter at @whetstoneradio, and YouTube at /WhetstoneRadio.

Guests: Reina Gascon-Lopez (@thesofritoproject), Andrea Nguyen (@andreanguyen88)