Insider Ingredient
Healthy, Refined Perilla Oil Needs to Be in Your Kitchen Arsenal
Light and nutty, this chef favorite is perfect for salads, seafoods, and sautéed vegetables.
Photographer: Ted + Chelsea Cavanaugh for Bloomberg Businessweek
More and more home cooks are building up an arsenal of oils to have on hand, whether fancy extra-virgin olive, trendy hemp, avocado, or argan. Now perilla is making a case for its own pride of place.
A longtime staple in Korea, perilla oil has a flavor akin to sesame but with a more nuanced, nutty taste backed up by a hit of licorice. It comes from the toasted seeds of a large, green perilla plant common in Asia. In the U.S., it’s also known as Chinese basil, but the leafy plant is actually related to shiso, in the mint family.