"carribean" news and stories

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?

There is an ingredient listed on the cocktail menu at Union which receives more quizzical looks, more gasps of surprise when sampled and generates more chatter than anything else we do in the bar. The complexities of it's aroma and flavors are hard to pin down, though everyone tries. This witches brew of cocktail goodness is popping up in scratch cocktail bars all over the nation, and in the well-stocked homes of cocktail aficionados all over the globe.

I'm talking about falernum, the nectar of the tiki gods.

What falernum used to be and what it has become are totally different. Since the beginning of the tiki boom in the 1930's, falernum has been used as a sweetener used primarily in tropical and Caribbean cocktails. Produced commercially rather sporadically in Bermuda, Barbados and the U.S., it had been, until recently, hard to get consistently. Keeping in line with the notion that you crave the most what you can't get, frustrated bartenders and cocktail historians began tinkering with recipes to produce their own.

As I wrote several weeks ago, a pig pickin' is a North Carolina tradition involving a pig, a converted petroleum drum cooker, a bunch of charcoal and a whole lot of time. But a pig pickin' is not the only way to cook a whole hog - cultures across the world have been spit roasting, grilling and burying pigs in hot ash for thousands of years. In many places, pork is the cheapest meal available, making pig roasts an affordable way to have big festive meals for the whole community. Here are a few whole hog traditions from around the world:

Hawaii: Possibly the most famous whole pig preparation of them all, the kalua pig is a staple of the Hawaiian luau. The pig is "dressed" (gutted, the outer layer of skin and hair removed) and salted and placed in an imu - a banana leaf-lined pit filled with hot stones. The pig is covered in more dirt and left for hours until smoky and falling apart tender.

Cuba: Cubans love their lechón (suckling pig), a Christmas Eve tradition. Pigs are often cooked in backyard roasters made from bricks or cinder blocks. One popular version of the homemade roaster is called a "caja china" (a Chinese box), a rather coffin-like device in which the pig is placed on the metal-lined bottom and a tray of coals is placed on top, cooking the meat through indirect heat.

Italy: At the annual Sagra del Maiale festival of pork, Italians grill whole pigs over a food fire and lovingly dis-articulate them to feed the whole village. Skin becomes crispy and meat is buttery soft and succulent. And not a big of the porker is wasted - even the ears and trotters are fair game. Not headed to Italy any time soon? Some Italian restaurants in NYC and other cities have their own Sagra del Maiale.

The Philippines: The image of the golden-skinned pig spinning on a spit over a roaring fire is a reality here in the South Pacific, where Filipinos adore stuffing the pig's belly with herbs and spices, impaling it horizontally, and roasting it until the skin crackles and the meat is meltingly tender. The dish, known as lechon baboy, is a festival day favorite.

. . . and I know a few of you do during the dog days of summer, here's an alternative to that ubiquitous coconut libation.

The original Painkiller has its genesis in the wonderfully named Soggy Dollar Bar, on the island of Jost Van Dyke in the British Virgin Islands. Since there is no dock for sailors to tie up to, they are forced to swim to shore. Of course, the money gets wet so the proprietors had the novel idea of stringing up a clothesline to air-dry the money. So there you have it, the Soggy Dollar Bar.
The owner, a British expat named Daphne Henderson, became locally famous for a cocktail she dubbed The Painkiller. Though it's recipe was kept secret, the rum she used has it's own interesting back-story.