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Gin has never been much to my liking. In fact, for the longest time, when asked what I do not like to drink, I would instantly and firmly respond, "Gin! *shudder*" I have tested this conviction time and agin, especially in light of the fact that my grandmother was a great fan of the gin martini - by my reasoning, if someone so wonderful liked it so much, how is it possible that I detest it so? But alas, my palate has remained obstinately opposed to accepting as enjoyable the unique flavor of gin.
There are likely many who will recoil in horror at my assertion that I have never tasted a Gin and Tonic. (In fact, if there has been one drink I have historically detested more than gin it has most certainly been, and likely will forever be, tonic. Yuck. Though this also has a longer explanation...) I have never drunk a gin martini. Rarely have I enjoyed a cocktail that contained gin. It is one of the admitted failings of my tastebuds and their associated neural circuitry that seems to be set in stone. Or was, until I went to England and tasted a gin that has recalibrated my understanding of the drink.
Image source here.
Webb deVlam is the design firm consulted for the recent Plymouth brand update.
Part of the problem with developing a taste for gin is that most gin that is widely available adheres very strongly to the "London Dry Gin" style of the drink. A quick look at Wikipedia will give a basic understanding of the requirements for something to be called "gin." In short, a spirit in which the dominant flavour and aroma is that of the juniper berry. There are other technical requirements about alcohol content and permitted basic ingredients, but I'll let you read up on the minutae yourselves rather than transcribe them here. There is also a storied history of the evolution of modern gin from the Dutch drink "genever," a drink that is being revived in the current old-school cocktail craze. But that history, too, you may read on your own.
Important here is that not all gin is created equal, a fact for which I am grateful.
Gin has a very complex flavour. The very different vodka is simply the basic spirit distilled from a fermented mash of starch- or sugar-bearing plant matter (I'll let you argue about what must be used to make "Real Vodka".) The flavour of vodka comes from the very slight impurities carried through the distillation and also the water used to create the mash and to dilute the distilled alcohol to the correct strength. Gin, by contrast, starts with a base alcohol that is distilled to the point that it is almost 100% alcohol and has no flavour whatsoever. The only reason to drink that stuff would be to cauterize your epiglottis, disinfect your stomach, and cause instant and catastrophic drunkenness. To this liquid gin-makers add things like juniper berries, coriander and cardamom, lemon and orange peel, pepper, rosemary, etcetera. After steeping the flavourings for a while, the mixture is filtered and distilled again, this time so that only the volatile flavours that taste good will remain in the final spirit. Then the spirit is diluted with water down to regular strength, bottled, and sold. So what you taste when you drink gin is really the mixture of added flavourings and the technique of the distiller and there is infinite variation in both. 
The London Dry style of gin is a very astringent one. (Astringency can be described as the feeling of dryness in the mouth and throat.) The flavour and "texture" of juniper can range from lightly tart and refreshing all the way to parching. And there are other spices, too, that add to the quality and quantity of the astringency. London Dry gins tend to live at the parching end of the spectrum, hence the description as "dry." Beefeater, Gordons, Bombay Sapphire, and Tanqueray are good examples of the style, if you're curious. And since these are basically the most common brands I was surprised when I tasted Plymouth gin and encountered a totally different animal.
Image source here.
The Plymouth distillery, which actually is and forever will be in Plymouth, England, makes a big deal of many aspects of their history - being the original Navy gin, having the terroir of the building and town and water that they use, etcetera. And while most of that is interesting to a point, most important is that they make a gin that still tastes like gin but which warmed my throat and pleased my palate and did not make me pull a hideous and awkward face while trying to force it down. Instead, I could appreciate the flavours rolling around in my mouth - not fighting each other and my tongue, as the dry gins seem to do, but dancing and blooming and then settling to a warm, yet refreshing finish.
Gins, especially smaller-market, craft-distilled gins, are becoming increasingly popular, so I expect to be surprised again, but Plymouth is an old-school, traditional gin. I am happy to have it as a reference point, both for future tasting and for the quality of taste I can try to coax out of cocktail recipes I make up that involve gin. I have been served a few surprising gin cocktails that have further broadened my horizon and look forward to more, though I may never like Gin and Tonic and it may be a while before I can really enjoy a gin martini or two like my grandmother would.
Don't forget the olives!
To you, Grandma.
Apparently I have a food allergy. This is tragic. I am used to being able to try most any food without being afraid that it would kill me, only that it might, at worst, cause me to pull a funny face and shudder in disgust before I spit it out. Now I am trying to avoid being afraid of fruits I do not know. If you think this reaction is a bit extreme, here's the story:
I arrived in Israel at about lunchtime after flying all night and eating what politely can only be called "food-like semi-nourishment" along the way. I was to stay with a family friend named Ian who generously prepared a delicious Israeli-style salad (cucumber, tomato, olive oil, salt, and feta, though the presence of feta supposedly means it is called a "Greek salad") for lunch. After lunch, we spoke for a while about family, etcetera, and then were to go walk the resident dog. Just before going out, I was presented with a fruit that looked like an apricot. It had been washed, peeled and seeded so the only thing I ate was the flesh. On the upside, it was delicious - like a firm but sweet apricot that had been drizzled with lime juice.
On the downside: I left the house and walked across the street and my ears started itching. I got to the end of the block and felt like I'd just swigged some bad vinegar. I walked another fifty feet and I was coughing and it hurt to swallow. And I had to work very hard to stay calm enough to breathe. I walked quickly back to the house, grabbed a bottle of water, and took two Benadryl and an Allegra (my other antihistamine) though, in retrospect, I should have taken more Benadryl. At this point I was trying not to panic and not to pass out from panic. I could breathe if I did so slowly and deliberately, but I couldn't swallow. My tongue started feeling funny so I looked at it in a mirror. It was covered with little blisters. Ian had returned just after me and I said something along the lines of "If I'm not feeling better within five minutes I think I should go to the hospital." The poor man was understandably mortified. Five minutes later we got in the car.
We got to the emergency room and I tried to communicate to the receptionist that I was having an allergic reaction and having trouble breathing. I must have succeeded because within the next 5 minutes I had been taken in, sat down in a chair, my veins plumbed for an IV, blood drawn, two nurses and a doctor consulted, IV fluids hooked up and some serious steroids pushed into my bloodstream. And then I sat there with Ian for several hours under observation to make sure the drugs worked and I didn't die. Coming down from panic plus IV steroids plus ridiculous jet-lag made me very loopy and sleepy for the next few hours even though I tried to stay awake and conversant with Ian. I do remember several moments where I was in the middle of a sentence and then the sentence just carried on into a very bizarre dream for the next indeterminate length of time. And then I'd wake up and not realize I'd been asleep.
Eventually, an E-N-T specialist came to inspect me. An older man, built like a troll, with magnifying-glass eyes, he grabbed my tongue with a gauze pad and peered down my throat and then said yes, I'd had a reaction to something, and yes, I'd be fine, and yes, I could leave. Amazingly, for the pleasure of much time and care in the Israeli emergency room, the total bill came to $250. I was very pleased not to have to die of shock at the bill after being saved in the ER, like would be typical in the US.
But the most bizarre thing about the whole episode was that none of the doctors, nurses, specialists, receptionists, or even anyone else I met over the entire course of my trip had ever heard of someone being allergic to the fruit known in Hebrew as "shessek" and in English as "loquat." Lucky me. Here's the offender:
Of course there's always the possibility that I was allergic to something microscopic on the fruit or in the water or in the air or anywhere. But the reaction was consistent with a food allergy, especially the way that all of the surfaces in my mouth reacted where they had touched the fruit. I'll go get allergy tests to confirm that it was the fruit so long as they can find essence of loquat with which to test me... So now I'm supposed to carry an emergency epinephrine shot, just in case.
Ah, food, the things I do for you.
p.s. If you're not allergic to them, loquats are delicious. Well, they're delicious even if you are allergic to them, but death rather takes some of the pleasure away, I think. I prefer to live to eat another day!
Germany may be the place known for its wurst, but I am a particular fan of what stands in for hot dogs as Paris street food. The merguez sausage is thin, unassuming, and perhaps not terribly attractive, but full of flavour, especially if it has been slowly cooking in a giant round steel pan with onions, peppers, lamb and chicken kebabs, and probably a year or two of built-up daily leftover grease. It looks like this when served on the French version of a hot-dog bun which is really just half of a day-old baguette (though the missing bite was my doing - I just couldn't wait.)
Merguez is tough to get in the US, though I've never quite figured out why. Perhaps it's too tasty... I'll see if I can get the butcher in my neighborhood to make me some. It has good spice without being too spicy, though I imagine that depends on the maker more than anything. Perhaps that's part of the charm - you can't be sure what exactly you're going to get but you know it will be delicious!
The moose is currently eating an adventure around the world. Soon, there will be many stories of many delicious things, and also a few tragic ones, as well. A preview:
A tragic day!
On which I discover that I have a food allergy and visit the aptly named emergency room.
Gin I actually like.
(Hint: it's made in Plymouth, England. Care to guess what kind of gin I'm talking about?)
They don't make Caerphilly in Caerphilly :-(
Silly Welsh cheesemakers. Or maybe just the Welsh in general?
What do they eat in The Gambia?
Peanuts. Lots of peanuts.
A real Belgian waffle. With chocolate sauce.
Reasons to follow your nose.
How on earth do Israelis stay thin?
This will have to be multiple entries...
The land of Cheese, Wine, and Nutella crepes. What more is necessary for life?
Ok, maybe a baguette, too.
You may have heard the saying "When in Rome..." used to justify or support activities undertaken abroad which might usually be considered out of character. I seem to carry my interests with me and pursue them wherever I happen to be - more along the lines of, say, when a Martian might find itself in Rome.
I like salt, much to the consternation of my father. But not so much the ordinary iodized, granulated, abrasive stuff that food distributors sell in unrefillable plastic shakers. Rather, I am intrigued - nay, fascinated - by the incredible variety of edible salts that exist. Some among you may say, "For Pete's sake, it's SALT!" And to a point you would be right, but the chemists among us would remark that pretty much any combination of cation and anion can be considered a salt, whether these ions are single atoms or charged molecular fragments. There are some exceptions - please explore. But I like the ones we can eat.
With little exception, the one we can eat and which our bodies require (to a point) is sodium chloride (Na+, Cl-). But rarely in the wild can it be collected in pure form, and hooray for that! Otherwise we would not get pink salt from the Himalayas, grey salt from the Norman coast, pink and yellow salt from Australia, black salt from Cyprus, "black salt" from India, or red salt from Hawai'i, just to name a few... In reality, these are all mostly Sodium Chloride, but either they contain "impurities" in the form of other mineral or salt compounds or they exist in a mixture or matrix with things like charcoal, certain types of dried algae, seaweed, or clay. Any of these additions change the flavour of the salt. Some processed salt is iodized so as to prevent goitres, but rarely does this have much of an effect on taste unless way too much iodine is used.
The other widely variable quality of salts is the texture. Most people are familiar with granulated table salt, rock salt for melting the ice on the stairs, and maybe the superfine variety sometimes used on popcorn. But when salt crystallizes on its own and is then subject to meteorological or geological forces it comes out in amazing shapes (all admittedly based on the cubic crystal structure of NaCl.) Salt from deep underground comes in great big lumps and slabs, solid as the rock it is. Tidal rivers leave thin, wispy crystals along their edges. Salt pools drying in the sun produce the delicate flowers of salt - fleur de sel, and also hollow pyramids that grow upward on their own. And further slow drying produces smaller, crunchy crystals that are fantastic in salads. Each of these textures adds a different something to the dishes to which they're added. Cyprus Flake on a slice of radish, French grey salt on a salad, Hawai'ian red salt as a garnish on sesame noodles or roasted fish.
And I'm not even going to get into the myriad flavoured salts - the most incredibly deadly (in a good way) being black truffle salt. SaltWorks is a good place to get some idea of the global variety.
All of the aforementioned salts exist in the rarefied reaches of the gourmetosphere. Salt as a commodity and ingredient is seemingly commonplace (even if it was not always so - see Mark Kurlansky's Salt.) But as you'll see below, people sometimes bypass the processor/middleman and get their salt directly from the source.
I was recently in The Gambia, where they dearly love their salty food. And not just NaCl, but NaC5H8NO4, otherwise known as MSG. [Aside: when it is used in such prodigious quantities, you can definitely taste MSG...] Leaving MSG aside, since that must be commercially produced by distilling fermented algae, for example, salt in The Gambia can be taken directly from the river Gambia, which is long, flat, tidal, and brackish for more than half the length of the country. The village I stayed in was close enough to the river (and to large salt flats) that raw gathered salt was sold in the daily women's market for the price of roughly 18 cents for a large coffee can full of crystals. Women in the village would sometimes process the salt with iodine but usually would use it raw. And in this case I do mean raw.
The Gambia river is not exactly the cleanest, though there is little, if any, industrial pollution because most industry of any kind happens within about ten miles of the coast. As you go upriver there is little besides fishing villages and one town on an island far upstream. Parasites and bacteria abound, as does very fine silt and some larger particles of plants and plastic. The additional challenge is that often the salt was simply scraped from the top of the salt flats, bringing some of the riverbed with it. 
Being the cook, chemist, nerd, salt-lover, and perfectionist that I can be, I decided to purify and refine some of the salt to bring home. In the process of doing so I thoroughly grossed out some of my friends, covered much of the kitchen in super-saturated salt water, and produced a mountain of tiny, fluffy, pale-grey crystals. Here's the process:
Step 1: Get salt. I bought two cans-full of raw river salt from a woman in the market, mostly using gesticulation to communicate. It was grey-yellow-brown and in lumps.
Step 2: Boil, boil, and boil some more. When in doubt of the sterility of something, boil the Dickens out of it. And by Dickens, I mean all of the little creatures that might want to take up an inconvenient and distressing residence in your intestines. And hot water dissolves more salt than cold, which is useful if you're trying to purify a lot of it. Thankfully I found a very large cauldron (though I didn't dance around it...much.) 
Step 3: Skim. Some of the lighter stuff floated to the top in a rather nauseating scummy film that I poured off. However, this still left a really murky brew.
Step 4: Make filter apparatus. The kitchen had a tall ceramic teapot (tea being one of the foundations of Gambian social interaction) and I combined this with an old milk-powder can, some Melita paper coffee filters (God only knows why they were there - coffee in West Africa seems to be entirely instant Nescafé), and another funny small filter funnel that didn't seem to have much of a purpose elsewhere. Ultimately, the Melita filters were the most useful and removed the most crud ("crud" being a highly technical term, of course.) I punched some holes in the bottom of the can and used it to hold the paper filters, and then also cut a hole in the can lid to fit the filter funnel. Voilà ! A two-stage filter.
Step 5: Filter! I had to pour slowly because both filters would clog and the paper filters would either disintegrate or get crusted with salt after a bit of work.
Step 6: Results. See the difference? (I actually filtered twice.) And see what the filters removed? Degutante!
Step 7: Boil dry. Or almost - it's hard to remove all of the water from a big bunch of salt by boiling. Some of it started climbing over the edge of the pot, too.
Step 8: Bake until fully dry. Baking the pan of salt produced a solid brick since I did not keep it constantly moving to break up the crystal structure as it dried. It also produced some areas of bluish-tinted salt. I found a small handful of these tinted crystals and I have no idea what caused the color. Trace minerals? Any ideas?
Step 9: Powder. I used the back of a spoon and also a wooden pounding mallet to crush the salt into a relatively uniform powder. 
It came out surprisingly light and soft. And then I packed it up - and hoped I didn't get too many questions about the plastic bag of white powdery stuff in my suitcase.
Really the most striking difference between this other salt I've eaten is the texture. The taste is slightly different - it does taste a little more like sea water - but the texture is light and fluffy, like powder snow that you can't pack into a snowball because it does not stick. I haven't had a chance to use it much for cooking or eating yet, but I'm excited to do so. And if I get the chance, I'll test it to see what makes it chemically unique.
Who knew Salt could be such an adventure?
The London Dry style of gin is a very astringent one. (Astringency can be described as the feeling of dryness in the mouth and throat.) The flavour and "texture" of juniper can range from lightly tart and refreshing all the way to parching. And there are other spices, too, that add to the quality and quantity of the astringency. London Dry gins tend to live at the parching end of the spectrum, hence the description as "dry." Beefeater, Gordons, Bombay Sapphire, and Tanqueray are good examples of the style, if you're curious. And since these are basically the most common brands I was surprised when I tasted Plymouth gin and encountered a totally different animal.
