All sorts of treats (+recipes)

Liquorice Parfait. Photo / Ian Jones

Liquorice brings back colourful childhood memories of sitting with Grandma watching Country Calendar on a Sunday night and diving into her lolly jar filled with liquorice allsorts.

Another colourful memory comes from my days working at Taupo's Huka Lodge where we were making a liquorice parfait with Dutch drop liquorice - which has such a salty sour taste it almost put me off the stuff forever.

The liquorice plant is a herbaceous perennial legume. Its flavour comes from a sweet-tasting compound called anethole, also found in anise and fennel. Extra sweetness comes from glycyrrhizic acid, which is more than 50 times sweeter than sucrose.

Liquorice is harvested in the autumn after two to three years' planting. The extract is produced by boiling the root until the water evaporates, leaving a syrup.

Legend has it liquorice allsorts were invented when Charlie Thompson, a salesman for sweet manufacturer the Bassett Company, supposedly dropped a tray of samples mixing up the various sweets. The client was intrigued by the new multi-coloured, oddly shaped creations and soon after the company began to mass-produce the allsorts - made of liquorice, sugar, coconut, aniseed jelly, fruit flavourings and gelatine - which just as quickly became something of a British icon in the sweet world.

Outside of sweets though, liquorice has many uses. Try using dried sliced liquorice root in Chinese braising liquids. If you can't get your hands on liquorice root, aniseed is always a good substitute, as it too has that liquorice flavour.

Although I also strongly recommend using a spice that closely resembles anise in flavour - star anise, a pretty star-shaped fruit harvested from a small native evergreen tree in southwest China. It is a major ingredient in garam masala, five-spice powder and in the making of pho, a Vietnamese noodle soup.

Mexicans use aniseed in champurrado, a warm, thick, chocolaty drink, made with masa (hominy flour), Mexican sugar and milk, all whipped up using a wooden whisk called a molinillo. The whisk is rolled between the palms of the hands and moved back and forth through the mixture until it is aerated and frothy. It's generally served with churros as a simple breakfast.

For another aniseed flavour, I love making a confit of fennel. Take 100ml of garlic-infused oil, 100ml lemon zest avocado oil, half a tablespoon of toasted fennel seeds and two shaved fennel bulbs, and simmer together at 90C for 15 minutes. Drain and toss with fennel tips. Serve with fish and crispy roast potatoes and you'll definitely be all sorted.

Liquorice parfait
Anise flatbread