"Jamaica" news and stories

Alabama-born LeNell Smothers defines herself first and foremost as a bartender, but she's been called many things -- most recently, the proprietress of LeNell's liquor store. She's owned her own whiskey label, called Red Hook Rye, and has been recognized by her home state as an honorary Colonel. Other interests include gin, sin and men.

My first truckload of household goods from the States arrived in Mexico this past week. As soon as the refrigerator powered on, we headed to the market for groceries. First stop was a stand labeled "Semillas," meaning "seeds," where we found nuts, spices and dried hibiscus known as "jamaica" heaped tall in metal tubs and baskets. Tired of the boring jamaica we've found in restaurants -- over diluted and often made with jamaica concentrate -- Demian and I were excited to make a big batch of deep ruby red, tart jamaica as one of the first things to put into Casa Cóctel's refrigerator.

Alberta Straub, aka Miss Flighty, is a bartender committed to organic, natural ingredients in her drink making. She introduced me to making cocktails with jamaica. Miss Flighty loves using it as a replacement for cranberry juice and has been quite the evangelist for jamaica's refreshing, inexpensive and kidney-cleansing benefits. Jamaica is one of Alberta's bar essentials and she proved to me how delicious and versatile it is. Now it's a bar essential for me, too.

Discovering the taste of Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee was like finding an extraordinary gastronomic treasure. It's perhaps the most distinctive coffee I have ever tasted, because of its amazingly well-balanced flavor - sweet, smooth, and mild. As much as people love Starbuck's coffee, I can't cope with its bitterness. The best part about this Jamaican coffee is that it lacks bitterness.

From the lush misty Blue Mountains of Jamaica , this coffee is harvested at elevations between 3,000 and 5,500 feet. This species of coffee was introduced to the Caribbean as far back as the early 1700s by Mathieu Gabriel De Clieu. The species originates from southwest Saudi Arabia. The cultivation reached its peak in the early 1800s, and today it's one of the most sought-after and expensive coffees.

You can purchase Blue Mountain Coffee from several sites online including: Brainy Bean, Jablum, and Coffee Beanery. The average cost, not including shipping, is $36 for a 16 ounce bag.

Chocolate comes from pods, such as the one photographed above. When I arrived in Jamaica, my first stop was to see Dennis, a fruit and spice vendor in Ocho Rios. After he showed me raw unsweetened morsels of cocoa, he took out a large cocoa pod. A pod contains 20 to 45 seeds, also called "beans", fixed in white pulp.

Each of these seeds contains a large amount of fat (40–50% as cocoa butter) and the active ingredient theobromine, similar to caffeine. Theobromine is what makes chocolate lethal for dogs. There are two cocoa varieties in Jamaica: Forastero and Criollo. The harvest takes place in the fall, between September and November. The beans are taken from the pods and processed extensively.

Tasting an unprocessed cocoa bean makes you realize how much sugar is added after being processed. The cocoa beans we tasted had a strong bitter flavor similar to that of a coffee bean. This has to do with the presence of theobromine, which like caffeine gives you energy. We purchased some of the beans and ground them with coffee beans to make a tasty energy drink - mocha coffee. I am curious to know other ways one can use unprocessed cocoa beans in cooking. If you have you ever used them, what sorts of dishes were they for?

When I think of my mom, two things usually don't come to mind: beer and Frank Zappa. Which made it odd earlier this week when I opened an email to find she had sent me the following quote: "You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer."

Now, I'm not a big Zappa fan and have never heard this quote. I'm guessing that puts me in Group A of two possible groups, with Group B consisting of huge Zappa fans who have heard this quote a million times. But the quote did get me thinking that there are a number of countries that I associate with one specific beer. Yes, I realize they have more than one beer, but every time I think of said country, one specific beer immediately pops into mind trumping all others.

Please don't get me wrong. I'm not saying these are the best beers each country has to offer, or even a list of my favorite international beers, but for this week's Slashfood Ate beer edition, I present the 8 countries that through experience and marketing I most associate with one specific beer.

See the list after the jump...

Though I am personally not a big fan of seafood in general and shrimp in particular, I know that I am in the minority on this one. Most of the world's population loves shrimp. This fact plays out in a bad way in Jamaica.

For years, people in the mountains of Jamaica were able to catch giant shrimp in the rivers there. They would catch them in the old fashioned way, which was, of course, slow and difficult. And, just like throwing dynamite into the ocean to catch fish in Asia, someone came up with a quick new way to catch a lot of shrimp quickly for some fast cash. They dump some kind of poison into the river, instantly killing the shrimp (and everything else), which then float to the top. They're easy to catch that way.

The good news is that a lot of local people have joined a movement to stop this crime. They're taking steps to catch perpetrators, educate local judges (so offenders won't be simply released), and stop the poachers from selling their ill gotten gains at the market. Hopefully they'll be able to put a stop to this before the shrimp is gone for good or the environment is permanently damaged or both.

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