Siracusa

Siracusa is a Sicilian basil landrace rather than a bred cultivar. Lane Selman of the Culinary Breeding Network and Oregon State University bought the seed folded in a hand-made white paper envelope at a small garden shop in Siracusa (Syracuse), Sicily, and brought it back to the US. It grows out as a Genovese-style basil but with what Adaptive Seeds calls a deep, sweet aroma that is oddly missing from some modern commercial basil, and that flavour reputation alone is what carried it into US seed catalogs. Because it is a landrace it is a population rather than a fixed line, so expect some plant-to-plant variation instead of the machine uniformity of a hybrid. Adaptive Seeds grows the organic seed in Sweet Home, Oregon, and the Experimental Farm Network also lists it. Its home dish is pesto alla trapanese, the Sicilian almond-and-tomato pesto.