16 Fragrant Recipes Featuring Cloves (2024)

Cloves contribute lots of warming flavor in sweet and savory recipes alike. From main dishes like pork rib roast with sweet onion puree to desserts such as gingerbread trifle and buttered rum biscotti, these are the best of Food & Wine's recipes featuring fragrant cloves. Plus, try your hand at making our circulation-promoting mulled wine in the style of traditional Chinese medicine when the weather turns cold and dry.

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Clove and Cider-Glazed Ham

16 Fragrant Recipes Featuring Cloves (1)

For entertaining, TV chef Carla Hall glazes a spiral-cut ham with apple cider, brown sugar, mustard, bourbon, and sweet spices.

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Curried Pumpkin and Buss Up Shut (Paratha Roti)

16 Fragrant Recipes Featuring Cloves (2)

Chef Nina Compton's curried pumpkin recipe is packed with warm spices, aromatic ginger, and rich coconut milk for a perfectly balanced bite. Fresh habanero chiles add a touch of fruity heat to the chunks of tender pumpkin and softened callaloo leaves. Buss up shut gets its name from "busted-up shirt," which describes the flatbread's torn, crinkled texture, perfect for sopping up flavorful curry.

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TCM-Inspired Mulled Wine

16 Fragrant Recipes Featuring Cloves (3)

Warming the body, promoting healthy blood circulation, and lifting the mood are all benefits of drinking this mulled wine in cold and dry weather. Traditional Chinese medicine food therapist Zoey Xinyi Gong's gently sweet recipe is balanced with fragrant clove, cinnamon, and star anise, plus a hint of brown sugar.

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Olive Oil Cake with Buttercream Frosting and Sour Candied Oranges

16 Fragrant Recipes Featuring Cloves (4)

Pastry chef Paola Velez's stunning buttercream-coated olive oil cake is made with a bit of buckwheat flour, which adds color and a deep earthy flavor. It's garnished with candied oranges that have been dredged in a mixture of sugar, salt, and citric acid. The combination turns the oranges into a chewy, sweet-salty-tangy treat reminiscent of candy.

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Pork Rib Roast with Sweet Onion Puree and Crisp Sage Tempura

16 Fragrant Recipes Featuring Cloves (5)

Chef Govind Armstrong adores the variety of heady spices in his aromatic brine, which includes cloves, juniper, and mustard seeds. He often uses them to flavor a whole rack of pork, which he finds easier to cook than individual chops. He also likes to finish the rack on a grill to add smoky flavor.

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Spiced Pickled Beets

16 Fragrant Recipes Featuring Cloves (6)

Pickled beets spiced with cinnamon, bay leaves, allspice, and cloves make for a beautiful co*cktail snack.

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Masala Chai

16 Fragrant Recipes Featuring Cloves (7)

This warming beverage is easy to prepare by steeping spices in hot water and milk before adding black tea. It's not as milky as the chai often sold at American coffee bars; to make it richer, add more milk and sugar to taste.

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Hot Buttered Rum Biscotti

16 Fragrant Recipes Featuring Cloves (8)

Sweetened browned butter, rum, and warm spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and cloves form the base of blogger Jonathan Melendez’s treat — a cookie interpretation of a buttered rum co*cktail. Rum extract provides a punch of flavor without adding a lot of moisture, ensuring the dough stays soft and pliable, not sticky, for easy shaping.

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Onion-Clove Compote

16 Fragrant Recipes Featuring Cloves (9)

Pioneering chef Wylie Dufresne slow-cooks onions with cloves to produce a sweet and fragrant condiment that's great with grilled steak, chicken, or pork.

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Roasted Squash with Mole Almendrado

16 Fragrant Recipes Featuring Cloves (10)

This mole almendrado (almond mole), made with rehydrated ancho chiles, spices, and Medjool dates, makes for a dreamy dish without the fuss or time commitment you might associate with mole. Food writer and cook Paola Briseño-González shows off the beautiful floral flavor of toasted almonds in this weeknight-friendly sauce, which pairs really well with sweet kabocha squash.

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Gingerbread and White Chocolate Mousse Trifle

16 Fragrant Recipes Featuring Cloves (11)

This trifle is three desserts in one: lemon-tinged white chocolate mousse, delicately spiced gingerbread, and pomegranate caramel. Each part is delicious on its own, too.

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Shortcut Café Brûlot

16 Fragrant Recipes Featuring Cloves (12)

Café Brûlot is a signature co*cktail of New Orleans, where it's typically prepared tableside at restaurants in an elaborate process. For this easy version, warmed orange liqueur and cognac, fresh lemon and lime juice, cinnamon, cloves, and hot coffee come together in a simple but satisfying, boozy after-dinner drink that can be quickly prepared, served, and savored.

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Soup Joumou

16 Fragrant Recipes Featuring Cloves (13)

This vegetable and beef Haitian soup is rich and savory, making it perfect for cozy winter months. The recipe begins with an epis, the aromatic flavor base that's a backbone of Haitian cooking, made by pureeing bell peppers, scallions, onions, and garlic. The soup is additionally flavored with a Scotch bonnet chile, parsley, thyme, and six whole cloves.

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Pumpkin Spice Snickerdoodles

16 Fragrant Recipes Featuring Cloves (14)

The secret to nailing these classic cookies is to bake them just until they’re set but not browned. They’ll finish cooking as they cool on the baking sheet, delivering their craveable tender-chewy texture.

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Poblanos Rellenos de Picadillo Dulce

16 Fragrant Recipes Featuring Cloves (15)

There’s a lot to like in these smoky peppers, filled with a Picadillo Dulce of lean ground beef seasoned with briny pimiento-stuffed olives and sweet cinnamon, that sit atop a pool of vibrant red-orange caldillo de tomate, a simple, silky tomato sauce.

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Sugar and Spice-Roasted Squash

16 Fragrant Recipes Featuring Cloves (16)

The squash here gets tossed with pumpkin pie spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves) and glazed with coconut milk.

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