"ecuador" news and stories

As you folks know I really enjoy premium spirits. I'm a quality over quantity kind of guy, and was brought up from a young age to really enjoy life and all it has to offer. I was taught that when we celebrate we should pull out the champagne, when we want to relax then sip something sublime. The thing is that most mixers just don't do justice to a fine liquor.

For the past few months I have been seeking out premium mixers, especially tonic water and hard to find ones like bitter lemon. I finally narrowed down the field to the top few, but none were what I would call premium. I then caught news about some new mixers coming to market. Several are just in test stages and one that seems very promising is in the pre-production phase and will be coming out later this spring. (Yes I will have a review and interview with the creator)

I had heard about Fever-Tree premium mixers from the UK but they haven't been available in the US. For the past 18 months they have been taking Europe by storm, but with always a limited availability. Well now things have changed and they are coming to the US market. I was sent some samples to try a few weeks ago, but a severe bout of the flu had me on my back for almost two weeks. Finally, with great anticipation, I felt well enough to open them up, and I am so glad I did.

A team of archaeologists has recently made a discovery that, while it probably won't make it into may children's picture books - unlike many of the discoveries about past civilizations - could very well make it into a cookbook someday. They discovered the remains of the world's first home-grown chili peppers in what is now western Ecuador. The discovery derailed the long-standing belief that residents of higher and more arid areas, like what are now Peru and Mexico, were the first to grow chilies by more than 1,000 years. There is no question about the time frame for the existence of the chili plants that were identified by "microfossils from grinding stones and charred ceramic cookware" because there has been so much study done of the pottery that "the dates [are] all very tight."

This discovery shows that chili peppers were one of the oldest domesticated foods in the world. More research is planned to try and discover exactly how the people living in villages in Ecuador at that time used the chilies.

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One of my current obsessions is single origin chocolate. Like wine, chocolate can have terroir. Cocoa beans from various areas have strikingly divergent tastes. It's not necessarily something you would notice on a casual basis but taste two different single origin chocolates together and the difference becomes apparent. I'm currently tasting the Ocumare which uses criollo cocoa from Venezuela and the Guaranda which usues forastero arriba cocoa from Ecuador. The Guaranda has a more standard rich dark cocoa flavor while the Ocumare tastes sweeter with rounded spice notes and a slightly perfumey taste that was startling at first but is increasingly seductive. For novelty and eating on its own I prefer the Ocumare but because the Guranda is more traditional it would work better if it was used in a recipe or being eaten with wine.  Both use a minimum of 71% cocoa so they are definitely intense and full of  all those healthy flavoniods that make eating dark chocolate the new nutritional must. I found my Chocovic at Trader Joe's.

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