Chocolate-coated Danish licorice balls beside black salmiak licorice, Swedish licorice skulls and a piece of dried licorice root.

Licorice: The Complete Guide to Sweet, Salty and Chocolate-Coated Licorice

Most of the world thinks it knows what licorice tastes like. Then someone hands them a small black diamond from Helsinki or Copenhagen, they put it in their mouth, and their face does something involuntary. Scandinavian licorice is salted with ammonium chloride, not sodium chloride, and the first encounter is closer to a dare than a dessert.

That is only one corner of the category. Licorice is a root, an extract, a candy tradition stretching from Calabria to Lapland, and, in the last twenty years, a Danish luxury product coated in chocolate and sold in tins that look like they belong in a design museum. This guide covers what licorice actually is, why the Nordic countries salt it, how the sweet and salty styles are made, what the good producers do differently, and how to buy and store it without guessing.

What licorice actually is

Licorice comes from the root of Glycyrrhiza glabra, a perennial legume in the same botanical family as peas and lentils. The plant grows wild across southern Europe, Turkey, Iran and Central Asia, and its roots run deep enough that harvesting them is closer to digging than picking. The genus name is Greek for "sweet root," which is not marketing. The root contains glycyrrhizin, a compound the scientific literature describes as roughly 30 to 50 times sweeter than table sugar, with a sweetness that arrives slowly and lingers far longer than sucrose.

To make candy, the roots are chopped, boiled and concentrated into a dark extract. Pure licorice extract, sold as small hard lozenges in Italy, is intensely sweet, bitter at the edges and faintly medicinal. Almost everything else called licorice is that extract diluted into a paste of sugar, wheat flour or starch, molasses or glucose syrup, then cooked, extruded and dried.

Two clarifications save a lot of confusion. First, red "licorice" contains no licorice at all; it is a fruit-flavored extruded candy that borrowed the shape. Second, licorice and anise are different plants with different chemistry. Anise, fennel and star anise get their aroma from anethole. Licorice gets its sweetness from glycyrrhizin. Many black candies add anise oil for the familiar smell, which is why people conflate them, but a good salmiak drop or pure Calabrian lozenge shows what licorice tastes like on its own: earthy, sweet, slightly woody, with none of the sharp perfume of anise.

Sweet licorice and the Danish style

The soft, sweet, chewy licorice most Americans recognize belongs to a broad northern European tradition. The Netherlands eats more licorice per person than almost anywhere else and calls it drop, sold in dozens of shapes and degrees of hardness. Germany, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark each have their own house styles, and the Nordic ones tend to be firmer and darker than the Dutch.

Denmark turned sweet licorice into a luxury category. In 2007 Johan Bülow started cooking small batches of licorice in a kitchen on the island of Bornholm, and the company that became Lakrids by Bülow built its reputation on one idea: a soft, sweet licorice center coated in a thick, well-tempered layer of chocolate, then rolled in a flavored powder. The licorice inside is dark and pliable, with a clean molasses sweetness. The chocolate shell is real chocolate, not compound coating, and the two textures are the whole point. You bite through a snap of chocolate into something that yields.

The line reads like a periodic table because each letter is the company's shorthand for a recipe. Our shelves currently hold B, the passion fruit version, where a sharp tropical acidity sits on top of white chocolate and pulls the licorice into focus; C, sour strawberry, built on a sweet red licorice center with white chocolate and a sour strawberry dusting; and the larger tin of peaches with white chocolate, which is the one to bring to a dinner where half the guests claim to hate licorice. The peach and cream flavors arrive first, and the licorice shows up a second later, quiet enough that skeptics usually take a second piece before they notice.

Salmiak: why the Nordics salt their licorice

Salty licorice, called salmiak in Finnish and Swedish, salmiakki in Finland and salt lakrids in Denmark, is seasoned with ammonium chloride. That is the same compound once used in pharmacies as an expectorant, which is roughly how it entered candy: Nordic apothecaries sold licorice and sal ammoniac as throat lozenges, and the flavor migrated into the sweet shop. Ammonium chloride does not taste like sea salt. It is sharper and cooler, with a faint tingling astringency that intensifies the licorice underneath it. Sweet, salty and bitter land at the same time, and the effect is closer to a cocktail than to candy.

Scandinavian producers grade the intensity. A soft sweet licorice might have no salt at all. A standard salt licorice has enough ammonium chloride to make an unprepared American blink. The "super salt" or "extra salt" tier, popular in Finland and Denmark, is sold in small quantities and eaten one piece at a time, often with coffee, because coffee's bitterness and heat round off the salt.

Sweden's contribution is the mixed bag. Swedish children traditionally get candy once a week, on Saturday, a habit that dates to public health campaigns in the mid twentieth century, and the pick-and-mix counter, the lösgodis wall, is where licorice mingles with sour gummies and chocolate. Swedish maker BUBS is a fixture of that counter. Their raspberry and licorice skulls are a good entry point for the salt-curious: a soft, foamy gummy with raspberry on one half and a mild licorice on the other, sweet enough to be friendly but unmistakably Nordic. They sit beside the rest of our Swedish candy.

Italy's pure licorice

The oldest licorice tradition in Europe is Calabrian. The region around Rossano, at the top of Italy's toe, grows some of the most prized wild licorice root in the world, and the Amarelli family has been extracting it there since 1731. Their product is not a candy in the northern sense. It is pure concentrated extract, cut into small black lozenges that are intensely sweet, slightly bitter and completely free of sugar. A single piece lasts several minutes. Italians use it after coffee, after a heavy meal and as a digestive, and chefs shave it over desserts the way they would shave a truffle.

If you have only had candy licorice, the pure Calabrian style is the tasting reference that explains everything else. Every salmiak, every soft Dutch drop and every chocolate-coated Danish ball is a dilution of that flavor.

How to taste and pair licorice

Licorice rewards the same attention you would give to dark chocolate. Let a piece warm in your mouth for a moment before chewing. The sweetness of glycyrrhizin builds slowly, and salmiak in particular changes over thirty seconds as the ammonium chloride dissolves and the licorice comes forward.

The classic pairings all involve contrast. Bitterness works: espresso, or a square of high-percentage dark chocolate from our chocolate bar shelf. Acidity works, which is why the passion fruit and strawberry versions from Lakrids succeed where plain sweet licorice can taste flat. Salt works, obviously, and a few flakes of flaky finishing salt on a soft sweet licorice is a cheap way to understand why Scandinavians took the idea further. Fruit works too. Licorice with strawberries, raspberries or blackcurrant is a northern European standard, and Danish pastry chefs pair licorice with white chocolate and citrus constantly.

In cooking, licorice powder or a small amount of extract seasons ice cream, panna cotta, chocolate ganache and, less obviously, braised meats and game, where it does the job star anise does in Chinese cooking. Use far less than you think.

How much is too much

Licorice is one of the few candies with a genuine dosage question, and it comes from glycyrrhizin rather than sugar. Eaten in large amounts over a sustained period, glycyrrhizin can lower potassium and raise blood pressure. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has advised that eating about two ounces of black licorice a day for at least two weeks can cause heart rhythm problems, particularly in adults over forty. The European Union requires foods with high glycyrrhizin levels to carry a label noting that people with high blood pressure should avoid excessive consumption.

For most people this is a reason to treat licorice like a good cheese or a strong coffee: something to enjoy in real quantities, not something to eat by the pound. If you have high blood pressure, heart or kidney conditions, or take medication that affects potassium, talk to your doctor before making licorice a daily habit.

How to buy and store it

The label tells you most of what you need. Look for licorice extract or licorice root high in the ingredient list; some mass-market "licorice" leans on anise oil and coloring with very little actual root. Ammonium chloride in the ingredients means salmiak, and a warning about intensity is not a joke. For chocolate-coated versions, check that the coating is chocolate rather than a compound coating built on vegetable fat.

Plain licorice keeps for months in an airtight container away from humidity; it will dry and harden if left open and soften if it gets damp. Chocolate-coated licorice wants the same conditions as fine chocolate: cool, dry, away from light and strong odors, never the refrigerator, which causes bloom and dulls the shell. A sealed Lakrids tin is one of the better storage vessels ever designed for the purpose.

Where to start

For skeptics: a Lakrids peaches or strawberry tin, where fruit and white chocolate do the persuading. For the licorice-loyal: the passion fruit version, then the BUBS skulls with coffee. For the fully committed, the salt licorice on the shelf changes with the season; ask what is in stock. Everything we carry lives in our licorice collection, and it ships nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com, or you can come taste at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver.

Sources & Further Reading

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