I’m just tagging along on this one.  I would say that juice is the wrong word though.  This is a nice little mongrel of an agua fresca, poised between a straight fruit agua fresca and a melon seed horchata (click on my categories for lots and lots on these subjects).  Real household economy in the good sense.

Canteloupe Juice

I am taken back to English pubs in the west country before urbanization and gastropubs hit, when there was bread and cheddar and scrumpy.  Scrumpy, a local cider, alcoholic of course, actually very alcoholic sometimes, had that tingle that taste.

But I’m drinking tepache. So what’s tepache?  It’s a Mexican drink.  If you are a visitor, you might see it on the outskirts of towns, a wooden barrel with TEPACHE in wobbly red letters, under the awning of a little cart, or in a market as here, with the 30 cent offering in plastic bags and  and the rather more expensive in plastic glasses.

The signs say “Tepache 100% natural de piña”  or made from 100% natural pineapple.  It comes from the signature barrels under the table.  It’s been sweetened, I think with piloncillo, raw sugar.  It’s tasty but a bit sweet for my taste.

Tepache is also commonly made at home.  It’s not difficult and it’s actually a great trick for using up that mountain of trimmings and core that always result from preparing pineapple.  You just take the lot (making sure of course that you washed the outside before trimming), put them in a glass container (plastic is not good for this), add water and wait four or five days.

This is day one.  Day two sees bubbles, day three and four the jar looks increasingly murky, and perhaps even develops bits of mold on the top.  Never fear, carry on, strain the liquid and throw away the pineapple.

What you have is this: a nice glass of unsweetened tepache.

Tingly, sour, refreshing I much prefer it to the sweetened version.  And so reminiscent of scrumpy.   But it seemed to me just coincidence–a Mexican pineapple drink and English cider–until I was pulling everything together for this post.

I went back to the original recipe that Dr. Ramiro González of  Guadalajara gave me.  Along with his note that the enzymes in tepache made it excellent for drinking with heavy food, he added, words to the effect that it could also be made with apple or quince peel, something I have never seen in a Mexican cook book.

And then I remembered the bottle of cider from the north of Spain that I buy in the wine store chain Europea occasionally when I am homesick for scrumpy at the ridiculous price of US$ 7 a bottle.

.

Bingo.  there is the barrel.   We’ll never know.  Did the Spanish find an indigenous pineapple drink that they liked because it reminded them of cider?

Or did the northern Spanish cider drinkers begin making their drink in the New World, first with the familiar apple and quince that could be grown in the mountains of Central Mexico, then as an economical way of using all the pineapple brought up from the hot country on mules and hence very expensive.

Influence or convergence?

Anyway, tepache is great stuff.

And PS.  If you leave it a bit longer, you have a nice mild pineapple vinegar.

I enjoy ginger beer, and once I located excellent ginger roots, first in Mexico City’s Mercado San Juan, then, on occasion in Pátzcuaro’s mercado, I experimented with making iginger beer.

Besides the basic recipe, covered on my kitchen blog, http://mexkitchen.blogspot.com/2008/05/ginger-binger.html

(Aside: IMO, apound of sugar ma be far too much sweetener for a gallon of water. I also prefer to use light or medium brown sugar, so that the ginger beer has a golden color when finished.)

I also started making spice infusions or syrups, with, for example, a base of piloncillo syrup plus dried tangerine peels, freah lime, cinnamon sticks, Sichuan peppercorns, and small, dried red hot chiles and more ginger.

After the first fermentation of the basic ginger beer, I keep it refrigerated about 12 hours. After drinking off about a pint, I add a little of the spiced syrup to the fermenter (a 2.5 liter refresco bottle), then top it with purified water. Then it’s left out for a second fermentation. At that point, it really hits its stride.

Saludos,
Mike

A final note.  Go to this Wikipedia article and you will find out all about the real ginger beer plant and ginger beer fanatics.

Just a couple of weeks late, here’s a very special agua made just once a year for Viernes de Dolores, the Friday before Good Friday.  Although officially this day is in memory of the many sorrows of the Virgin Mary, in Guanajuato it’s one of the biggest festivals of the year.  The photo above shows a traditional altar with an image of Mary, cut paper, sprouting wheat, white cloth, aromatic flowers and herbs, and gold-painted bread rolls (bolillos) and oranges.

These are put up in the entrances to public buildings, offices, and as in this case private houses.

People also offers family, friends and passersby water ices (nieves) and this agua.  It’s often made in huge containers such as clean, five gallon paint cans or tamale steamers.  But here’s a small scale version for an ordinary water pitcher.

Begin by grinding up a raw beetroot with a little water in a blender.  Some people just chop it but that does not give such a vivid color.

Then chop into 1/4 inch cubes a cup of strawberries, half a small papaya, half a small cantelope, a couple of oranges, and a couple of bananas.

Then finely shred half an iceberg lettuce.   Half fill your pitcher with water and stir in half a cup of sugar until dissolved.  Strain  the beetroot water into the pitcher.  Then add the lettuce and the fruit and stir until mixed.

Of course as you can see, the fruits float to the top so give it a good stir before serving.  It should be neither very sweet nor very acid, the flavors coming from the ingredients.   You don’t need a spoon but there’s nothing to prevent you using one if you want to.

I have loved the rich fruity aroma of guavas and the sweet pulp ever since I first tasted them in Nigeria too many years ago to think about.  Not everyone does.  My husband will sniff and say what’s that smell? in a disparaging tone any time I have them in the kitchen.  His loss, I’m afraid.

They make a lovely agua but it does require some messing about with strainers.  So this first agua de guayaba is a quick cheat.  It’s not as good as an agua made from fresh fruit but sometimes people turn up and you need to offer something in a hurry.  And to my mind it’s still lots nicer than a canned soft drink.

Juice companies in Mexico offer “nectar” as well as “jugo” (juice).  Nectar is thicker and appears to have more of the fruit pulp as well as added sugar (of course).  Here I’ve emptied a bottle of Nectar de Guayaba into a pitcher.  The drunken tilt comes from perspective problems in my small apartment kitchen in Mexico.   I will simply top that up with water and there’s my near-instant agua de guayaba.

By the way I had mentioned I was talking about agua fresca on the Splendid Table.  Last night I finally had a chance to listen to the program.  Lynne Rossetto-Kaspar and her producer Sally Swift did a great job of reporting the effervescent Mexico City culinary scene.  Here’s the download link.

http://download.publicradio.org/podcast/table/2009/02/28_splendidtable_64.mp3

But an agua made from apricot leather is clearly part of the wide-flung family of fruit waters and you run across it in Middle Eastern cookbooks. I was reminded of it when skimming one of my favorite Eastern Mediterranean cookbooks Sonia Uvezian’s Recipes and Remembrances from an Eastern Mediterranean Cooking.  It would be worth buying for the wonderful evocative historical illustrations she has pulled together though there is much, much more than this, including a mention of what in Mexico would be called an agua fresca or an agua de sabor (flavored water) made from amardine, aka apricot leather.

Amardine (as I am sure you all know is simply a thin layer lightly sweetened apricot puree dried until it is leathery). Here are some pieces stacked against a glass on my kitchen counter glowing like stained glass in the wintery sun.

Apart from eating it on its own, Uvezian suggests soaking it, and then mashing it or blending it, adding a little more sugar and having it chilled as a drink or a breakfast dish (presumably less diluted).

And here I’ve done just that.  I soaked a couple of pieces all night in water.  In the morning they were soft enough to beat up with a fork.  The drink did, as Uvezian suggests, need a little more sugar.  And I think I prefer this rather thicker than the average agua fresca, more the consistency of what Mexicans would call a nectar.   That brings out the apricot much better.  In fact, I’d take this in preference to all but the best fresh apricots.

(And if you are wondering about the pitcher, it’s one I got free from Nestlé when I bought a couple of big cans of full milk dried milk powder, called Nido here, for making yogurt.  I’m rather fond of it.  The corny cows remind me of the anthropologists’ joke about a small boy who found a pile of condensed milk cans.  “Look Mom,” he said, “here’s a cow’s nest.”  More practically it measures a liter, fits into the fridge, holds a perfect amount of agua fresca for a couple of days, and–so rare–pours without splattering everywhere).

But back to the business in hand.  This is a great addition to the agua fresca repertoire.  And if you can prevent yourself eating up all the apricot leather, Uvezian points out it can also be used to flavor soups, stews, and ice cream, or dipped in beaten egg and fried.  Now there’s something I have to try.

And the puzzle?  Mexico makes lots of fruit leathers, guava being a particular favorite.  But I’ve never seen or read of any of them being made into agua fresca.  I wonder why.   Perhaps it is that there is a lot of fruit available cheaply year round.  But would this have been the case before modern transport?

• the dried flowers keep for ages so they are always on hand in your pantry (about twice life size)

• they are cheap.  Prices vary but let’s say US $5.00 a pound.  1/4 lb makes 4 liters or about a gallon of agua fresca for a little over a US dollar
• 
• it’s easy to make. Just add the dried flowers to water, simmer for about 10 minutes and drain off the colored water.  Add sugar to taste.  Discard the flowers or keep them for other uses.

• if you don’t have much room in your fridge, you can make a concentrate and just add water as necessary
• the agua keeps for several days, even up to a week.  Most fruit aguas, by contrast, are best drunk the same day

• it’s a mild diuretic and makes your weight drop in a very encouraging way if you are trying to lose weight

• it looks gorgeous

• 
• it tastes wonderful whether without or with sugar

• the soaked and discarded flowers have lot of other uses

• and it has centuries of history behind it.

But I have yet to figure out why almost every day the most visited posting is one on a curious local drink of the state of Guanajuato called cebadina.  Indeed it’s really not even my posting because if you visit the link my friend Bob Mrotek did all the leg work. He concluded that although the name of this drink suggests it had its origins as a kind of barley water, it is now tamarinade or jamaica or even kool aid with bicarb added.

Well cebadina is on the march. I was in our local shopping town, Leon, a couple of days ago, and there was a new branch of La Cebadina in between Home Depot and Centro Max just across from Costco.

Here’s the counter. On the right, a jug of bicarb. On the left my fizzing plastic glass of cebadina.

I have to tell you, if you are a fan of alka seltzer, you’re just going to flip for cebadina. If not, well . . . Mexico has lots and lots of other drinks.

It’s interesting to see that Venezuelan chicha is what Mexicans would call horchata and not the various kinds of maize chicha found in other parts of Central and South America.

The ubiquity and variety of drinks called horchata leads one has to conclude that the Spanish were really homesick for their horchata when they arrived in the Americas. I would have thought that there would have been places where chufa would grow. Perhaps not. Another little mystery.

Anyway, over to Mariana.

“In Venezuela, horchata is a traditional beverage, along with Chicha which is more popular (there are several versions of chicha, but the most common is chicha de arroz, made with rice or rice flour, milk, sugar and seasoned with cinnamon).

I live in Maracaibo, a large city, and I remember that being a child, my mother took us to a famous place to have “cepillados” (shaved ice cones), and there also they sold chicha and horchata, this last being sold only in few places. My mother always asked for horchata. I tasted it, but since the flavor is a little bitter, I didn’t like it.

As a grown up, and as with coffee, I learned to appreciate its flavor and now I really love its fragance and untuosity and find it very refreshing in our very hot wheather. Happily, nowadays’ boom of “light” and “healthy” food has made horchata to be popularized, so there are many street vendors who sell “integral” (whole) food (like whole-wheat pastry empanadas), who are offering horchata among other “natural” beverages. (by the way, this is a very recent trend in street-food vending in Maracaibo).

HORCHATA RECIPE (not really sure about proportions because we use to make it “al ojo por ciento”. I can get exact proportions for you afterwards. Anyway it’s a matter of taste. If you prefer a stronger flavor, add more sesame seeds or less water)

1/2 cup of sesame seeds
1.5 lt. of water
sugar or raw cane sugar (in Venezuela we call it “papelón” or “panela” is like the “piloncillo”) at taste.

If using papelón, you can either grind it by hand, “shave” it with a knife, or you can make a syrup by placing it in a pan (of a size just to fit the papelón), adding water just until covering it, and placin it in low heat until the papelón melts.

Slightly toast the sesame seeds, allow to cool
Put the seeds in a blender with a small quantity (1 cup or so) of water. High-speed grind them.
Add the rest of the water and the sweet.
straw it fith a fine straw or a cloth. press to get all the liquid possible
serve cold

(The remaining pulp can be added to breads, pancakes or arepas, it’s a great source of fiber and protein).”