Schisandra Fruit - Schisandra chinensis Fructus - Wu Wei Zi - Organic

From China

The five flavor berry. Wu wei zi means five flavor seed, and the name is literal: a single dried berry is sour first, then sweet, then bitter, salty and pungent underneath. Chinese herbalists treat it as the rare herb that carries all five tastes at once, which is why it was written about as much for its strangeness as for its use.

It grows on a woody vine in the cold forests of Manchuria and the Russian Far East. Nanai and other hunting peoples of the Amur region are recorded as carrying the dried berries on long trips into the taiga, and Russian botanists picked it up from them in the twentieth century.

How it is used: a spoonful of berries steeped in hot water makes a deep red, sharply sour tea - the Korean drink omija-cha. Often sweetened with honey or simmered with jujube.