Five Flavors Kitchen

Chocolate and the hungry heart

Chocolate, Essex Street Market, NYC,  2.14.09

I finally got my Aunt Flora's chocolate pie recipe. Dense, rich, smooth, it may be a perfect food. I haven't had it in over 20 years, but I remember it still.  This is the power of chocolate.

Chocolate is a good thing, but like all things of power and beauty chocolate needs to be respected. I have gone one on one with chocolate - on more than one occasion and chocolate has always won. Cacao has a bitter flavor and the bitter flavor in Chinese medicine is associated with the heart. As you might imagine, it's best to proceed with caution here.  Actually, many mainstream studies have  connected chocolate to a reduction in cardiovascular risks and protection against cancer. So chocolate, once the bane of acne prone teenagers, has experienced redemption. Yes, chocolate has anti-oxidants, could anything be more perfect?

Chocolate is more that a sum of its chemical constituents, however. The Aztecs thought the cacao tree was stolen from paradise and indulging in chocolate, is still for many,  going over to the dark side. Chocolate is warming, a stimulant, by virtue of its theobromine content. It actually has very little caffeine. Again, stimulation itself is not evil. As always it's a matter of dosage. If you're not responding to something, you're dead.

Chocolate has become the symbolic food for our national heart holiday, Valentine's Day.  I've wondered, though, with all the bitter foods, how did chocolate win out? Why not give bunches of arugula? And why does the bitter flavor go to the heart anyway? Enlightenment happened on the F train, between 14th and 23rd streets.  The bitter flavor drains. It drains fire. It drains heart fire. A cleared heart could flow with the Dao unencumbered by emotional baggage.

Arugula is bitter and spicy. Chocolate is usually bitter and sweet since we combine the cacao with sugar in most applications. Arugula goes to the heart, but in a dispersing kind of way. It goes in expands outward and shakes things up due to it's spicy flavor. With chocolate, the bitter plays with our heart, but the sugar makes the process linger, drags it out like some romantic indiscretion that has gone on for way too long, but from which we cannot and don't really want to escape.The arugula bouquet warrants immediate change, the box of Godiva, well, we don't want to get rid of that until we're good and ready.

I'll bet that guy in the Springsteen song ate an arugula salad followed by a 70% + chocolate bar before leaving his wife and kids in Baltimore.

Aunt Flora's chocolate pie recipe would be in the strategic impurity section of your recipe collection.  I'm sure someone can come up with a "healthy" version with agave sweetener or something like that. I just couldn't. Maybe I can convince myself that the lemon peel makes up for the stickiness of the rest of the recipe, but that's another blog entry to come.

Flora's Chocolate Pie

The Crust:

1 cup flour, 2 egg yolks, 3 scant tablespoons milk, 1 teaspoon baking powder, 1/2 cup sugar, 7 tablespoons butter, 1 teaspoon lemon rind.

Mix all these together to form a ball, wrap in foil or plastic or wax paper and refrigerate while making the chocolate filling.

The Filling:

4 squares of unsweetened baking chocolate, 2 cups of sugar, 3 tablespoons flour, 4 eggs, 3 cups milk, large piece of lemon rind, 1 teaspoon vanilla.

Melt chocolate in a double boiler.  Heat milk and flour until lukewarm then and add melted chocolate, sugar, beaten eggs, and lemon rind.  Stir and cook until thickened.  Remove lemon rind and add vanilla.

Pour chocolate filling into pie crust and bake at 375 degrees for 30 minutes.

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The take away here is chocolate is not evil. We won't discuss Ho Hos. These sorts of things are not chocolate. They are escapees from an alien universe. Remember to keep chocolate  out of reach of your pets. For them it's  poisonous.  You, however, can eat it  if it makes you happy, but remember that draining a bit can be good, the roto-rooter approach perhaps not.

Who knew

Coffee Cupping Everyman Espresso 2-13-09

I was going to write about chocolate given the Valentine's Day holiday, but then Friday I finally made it to a coffee cupping. A coffee cupping, in case you didn't read the article linked in the last post, is basically a coffee tasting. I went to the one at Everyman Espresso sponsored by Counter Culture Coffee.The time was right and it was near my office. When I got there there were several people writing on clipboards and sniffing glasses of ground beans in a very knowing manner.  I had missed the instructions part so I just sniffed. There were various stages to the sniffing, dry, wet and after a process called "breaking". After the sniffing there was the actual tasting part which was followed by a discussion of the findings.

It became clear to me once again how hard it is to describe a taste. About the first sample people mentioned highlights of cinnamon and fruit and notes of blueberry.  I thought, "it tastes like coffee."  For the second sample caramel was mentioned and notes of asparagus. I thought, "it tastes like coffee." The last sample was thought to be more earthy with musty accents and notes of dried cherry.  I thought, "it tastes like strong coffee."

Who knew - here I was coffee drinker since my parents used to mix some in my milk and I had no idea all that was going on in that dark brown brew. I knew the coffee was good, but unfortunately I could neither hear nor taste any notes. Someone reassured me that it was difficult to discern the various components at first, but that one did develop a coffee palate over time.  I doubt that that person knew I had a brick of Bustelo concealed in my bag. 

Description and what we choose to describe is interesting. Coffee can have notes of blueberry, but do  blueberries ever have notes of coffee? Does coffee actually have all flavors and when did we start discussing taste in terms of auditory sensation?  Perhaps with the truly wonderful we are at a loss for words.

 I think I finally get the "tastes like chicken" joke.

Time Flies

 

Bullet train, near Nagoya, April 2006

Ok there's been a lot of eating in the past year - of all different kinds of things in all different kinds of places. It's been a bit overwhelming and I've been having a hard time figuring out where to start the blog entries, so of course I haven't. But now coffee in hand, I think I'm ready. Coffee, yes, Qi in a cup - elixir of the gods, much maligned substance of naturopaths and herbalists all over. Coffee - can it really be so bad?

I think not and am not alone in that opinion.  As it turns out coffee contains a number of compounds, antioxidant phenols, generally regarded as good for you. Coffee affects the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) systems of the Liver, Gallbladder and Heart. It is warming, bitter and ever so slightly sweet. Yes, it's a  stimulant but so is the Rachel Maddow Show. Sometimes it's good to stir things up and clear mental cobwebs.

At the right dosing (generally 1-3 cups a day) coffee can be a good thing. Coffee consumption has been associated with reduced risk of liver diseases including liver cirrhosis, liver cancer and gallstones. Extracts of green coffee beans have been shown in clinical trials to reduce both blood glucose and Body Mass Index.

As a bitter substance, coffee "opens the heart" (One wonders why the bitter/heart association.) At large doses coffee can blow the heart wide open (like many other things that are beyond the scope of this blog). Agitation, insomnia and palpitations can happen.  Some people, the sensitive, the really really worked up and the very deficient should limit their coffee intake. As with most things one size does not fit all.  Coffee drinkers should make sure to get enough minerals in their diet since coffee acts as a  diuretic and can drain these from the body. The roast, preparation and type of beans all effect the coffee's impact.  Dark roasts, for example, actually have less caffeine and acid than lighter ones.

So yes, for most of us it's OK to drink on. Just remember that a little coffee will move the Qi, a lot will move it to Kansas.