Star Anise Substitute: The Options, and Why Pho Notices the Difference

If you’re mid-recipe and just discovered the star anise jar is empty, the fix depends on what you’re making. Here’s what actually works, ranked by how close each one lands, plus an honest note about the one dish where none of them quite disappear.

Chinese Five-Spice Powder Is the Closest You’ll Get

This is the strongest option for a simple reason: star anise is already one of its ingredients, usually blended with cinnamon, cloves, fennel seed, and Sichuan pepper. Swapping in five-spice powder means you’re not really replacing star anise’s flavor so much as diluting it into a wider spice mix. Use about ½ teaspoon of five-spice powder per whole star anise pod a recipe calls for. The tradeoff is that you’re also adding cinnamon, clove, and Sichuan pepper notes along with it, which works fine in a braise or marinade built around warm spices, but changes the profile more than a straight one-for-one swap in something delicately seasoned.

Anise Seed: Related in Name, Not in Botany

Despite the shared name, anise seed and star anise come from unrelated plants — anise seed is the fruit of Pimpinella anisum, while star anise is the pod of an evergreen tree native to China and Vietnam. What they do share is trans-anethole, the compound responsible for licorice flavor in both, which is why anise seed is the most reasonable flavor stand-in on this list. It’s noticeably milder and more purely “licorice-y,” without star anise’s herbal, slightly woody undertone. Start with ½ teaspoon of anise seed per whole star anise pod and taste before adding more — it’s easier to add than to pull back once a broth or braise has been simmering.

Fennel Seed Works, But the Flavor Drifts

Fennel seed carries the same trans-anethole backbone, but its secondary notes lean piney and slightly camphor-like rather than warm and woody, which is a more noticeable departure from star anise than anise seed is. It’s a reasonable emergency option at ¼ to ½ teaspoon per whole pod, and it happens to already be a supporting player in most pho spice blends alongside star anise and coriander seed — so using a bit more of it isn’t as jarring as introducing an unrelated spice. On its own, though, it reads as a different flavor to anyone who knows what star anise actually tastes like.

What Doesn’t Work: Allspice and Cloves

Both get suggested online, and both are worth being skeptical of. Neither allspice nor cloves carries any licorice character at all — what they offer is warmth and a general “holiday spice” aromatic quality, which can round out a dish but doesn’t replicate what star anise is actually doing. They’re worth reaching for only if the goal is general warm spice depth rather than star anise’s specific flavor, and even then, a small pinch goes a long way since both are far more assertive than star anise pod for pod. If your pantry gap doesn’t stop at star anise, a rice vinegar substitute follows a similar logic — match the underlying character first, then adjust for what’s different about it.

Why Pho Specifically Doesn’t Hide a Substitute Well

Star anise is what most people would call pho’s defining spice — it’s largely responsible for the broth’s sweet, slightly bitter aroma, simmered alongside cinnamon, black cardamom, cloves, and usually coriander and fennel seed. Pho isn’t built around star anise alone; it’s more of an ensemble of spices working together, which is exactly why swapping out one piece of that ensemble is noticeable rather than invisible. In controlled taste tests comparing star anise, anise seed, and fennel seed side by side in dishes including pho, tasters were able to pick out the difference without much trouble. That doesn’t mean a substitute ruins the broth — plenty of home cooks make do with what’s on hand — but it does mean the result will taste like a variation on pho, not quite the same broth you’d get with the real spice.

If You’re Out Mid-Recipe

For a braise, marinade, or anything with a lot of other strong flavors already in play — soy sauce, ginger, garlic — five-spice powder is the easiest fix and the one most likely to go unnoticed. For a broth like pho where the spice blend itself is the star of the dish, anise seed is the more honest substitute, since at least you’re not introducing cinnamon and clove flavors that weren’t part of the original recipe. Either way, add whichever substitute in stages and taste as you go rather than dumping in the full converted amount at once — it’s much easier to add more than to fix a broth that’s gone too far in one direction. If the broth comes out cloudy on top of tasting different, that’s a separate issue with the simmer itself rather than anything to do with which spice you used.

I once ran out of star anise halfway through simmering a pho broth and reached for fennel seed instead, mostly out of desperation since it was already in the pot from the original spice mix. The broth still tasted good, genuinely, but it tasted like a good broth that wasn’t quite pho — my mother-in-law took one sip and asked, without any prompting, what I’d changed. She couldn’t say what exactly, just that something was off. That’s the closest thing to proof I’ve had that star anise really is doing something the other spices in that pot can’t cover for.

Kelly Thuy — field notes, Ho Chi Minh City

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