Cardamom Pods

Description

The sweetly aromatic cardamom is the fruit of a tropical plant related to ginger, and is one of the world's most expensive spices, after saffron and vanilla. Growing cardamom is extremely labor-intensive. The tall plants, grown on plantations in Guatemala or India, flower for eight or nine months of the year. Each pod, or capsule, ripens slowly and must be plucked when it is three-quarters ripe.