Incense Sticks

Most incense sold in the West is dipped: a blank bamboo stick soaked in synthetic fragrance oil, which is why it smells strongly for the first minute and then smells of burning. Traditional Indian agarbatti is hand rolled, with the aromatic paste worked around the core, so the material itself burns. It is slower, quieter and smells of what it is made from. The difference is obvious once you have burned both.

Names worth knowing. Nag champa is the frangipani and halmaddi resin blend that most people mean when they say incense smell. Masala agarbatti is the broader category of hand-rolled paste incense. Loban is benzoin resin, burned on charcoal rather than as a stick, and it is considerably stronger than either.

One thing that is specific to burning these in an American home. Building code puts a smoke detector in or near nearly every room, and a good number of them are ionisation type, which reacts to exactly this kind of smoke. A stick burning under a sensor will set it off, and in a building with interconnected alarms that becomes everybody's problem. Burn away from the detector, near an open window, or with the kitchen extractor running.