Why I won’t be sleeping tonight

“The fudge is the life.”
Bela Lugosi, Dracula (1931)

En route from the bedroom to the dishwasher, Karen’s not-quite-finished dessert became a bit lighter. In eight or nine paces, I, Diet Boy, managed to polish off several teaspoons of molten Dreyer’s Chocolate Ice Cream and a heaping congealed teaspoon of Mrs. Richardson’s Hot Fudge.

If I don’t drug up on Benadryl, I’ll be up until 3 or 4. The culprit? Theobromine, a close relative of caffeine. Like caffeine, theobromine is a mild stimulant. Also like caffeine, it has a whoppingly long half-life (6 to 10 hours). So if like me you are sensitive to it, eat your chocolate early.

Let’s take a closer look at theobromine.

And you thought you’d never have to see one of those again, huh? It gets more interesting. Here’s the structure of guanine, a key component of DNA (it’s the G that always pairs with C, cytosine):

Do ya see it yet? Do ya? The structures are awfully similar. One could, with little effort, imagine a genetic code in which caffeine and theobromine are key players. Imagine further that we were incapable of synthesizing these compounds (which is, in fact, true: our bodies don’t make caffeine or theobromine, more’s the pity). Do you see where I’m headed with this?

Theobromine and caffeine would be vitamins — essential nutrients we cannot synthesize for ourselves.

Chocolate and coffee would be the bottom tier of the food pyramid. One could live on One-a-Day Vitamins and tiramisu.

Perhaps I had more of a point when I first got rolling, but isn’t that point enough?

D.

Gastronomy Domine III

High time we got back to food. For you relative newbies, I’ve previously discussed the Ultimate Coffee Experience (including Vietnamese Iced Coffee and Indonesian Crappucino) and the Joy of Liver. Today, let’s visit the food that tastes you back.

Beef tongue.

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Gastronomy Domine II: You don’t know what you’re missing

It’s cold. It’s slippery. It’s a disk of fleshy goodness that comes from one of the ocean’s ugliest creatures, the monkfish. It’s ankimo, better known to you hakujin as monkfish liver, and it’s one of my favorite sushi dishes.

My sister-in-law won’t eat it. The fact that she’s some sort of environmental toxicology-type person should, I suppose, make me worry every time I swallow a fat mouthful of ankimo, but hey, you only live once. And besides, a little mercury never hurt me before.

I suspect that most people’s first encounter with liver is the beef liver steak, pan-fried and smothered in onions. No small wonder then that people shy away from the Noble Gland. Beef liver is too strongly flavored to be pleasant in any form. Definitely an acquired taste.

But, what about chopped chicken liver? This, too, can be mismanaged. Make it too dry, too dense, and with too much raw onion, and you’ll have the culinary equivalent of stucco.

My chopped chicken liver is an adaptation of the Commander’s Kitchen recipe. Great cookbook, but don’t follow their ‘chicken liver spread’ to the letter; you’ll end up with liver fudge. By weight, this sucker is one-third butter. Ugh.

When I want chopped chicken liver, I begin a few days in advance. I roast a duck. Rendered duck fat is flavorful and (unlike butter) a liquid at room temperature. (That’s what makes the end product so much lighter than the usual deli fare.) I saute onion and garlic in duck fat, then I add my chicken livers. Once they are thoroughly cooked, I add salt and pepper to taste, along with a grind of nutmeg. I deglaze the pan with brandy or cognac, then add Worcestershire sauce and Tapatio hot sauce. I pour the deglaze over the livers and let them cool; then I process the crap out of them.

In its consistency, the end product is far closer to thick whip cream than it is to mud. It’s a near-perfect Atkins food, by the way — pure cholesterol, but hardly any carbs. Serve it on celery sticks and you can even feel good about eating it.

Liver: you know you want it.

D.

Gastronomy Domine I*

Ever seeking the ultimate coffee experience, Karen bought a roaster. We already fork over $$$ for 100% Kona, but that’s not good enough for my lovely arabicatroph**. Now she can buy green Kona beans and roast them herself.

I’m not sure I understand this. Isn’t Vietnamese iced coffee already the ultimate coffee experience? Imagine a cup of liquefied Dreyer’s coffee ice cream with all the punch of a triple espresso. It doesn’t get much better than that . . . right?

Wrong. Turns out I’ve been drinking stale coffee all of my life. While green coffee beans will stay fresh for many months, roasted beans start losing it within two weeks of the roast. Hence the desire to burn one’s own beans.

The desired end product is something between a full city roast and a full French roast. You want it just past the second crack stage. Yes, that’s how I love my beans: with two cracks***.

Theoretically, if we start with 100% Kona green beans and roast ’em just right, we’ll get the perfect cup of coffee. Well . . . maybe not, since these Jamaicans claim their stuff is better than Kona.

And then there’s Indonesian crappucino.

This is not an urban legend. (Technically, it would be a third world legend, but it’s true.) The world’s rarest, most prized, and most expensive coffee is Kopi Luwak, which owes its distinctive “earthy, musty, syrupy, smooth and rich [flavor], with both jungle and chocolate undertones” to its passage through the bowels of the Asian palm civet, Paradoxurus hermaphroditus. Mmmm, musty and chocolatey. Only William S. Burroughs reaches such rhapsodic heights in describing the smell of bowels.

What? You don’t believe my Kopi Luwak story? Here’s a link at Nature.com. (The quote above comes from this Nature News story.) Thousand-dollar-per-kilogram coffee wouldn’t ordinarily rank a Nature News piece, but the story has a more serious side, as it covers Canadian food scientist Massimo Marcone’s efforts to reproduce Kopi Luwak under alternate circumstances. He reasoned that in Ethiopia, a different species of civet coexists with wild coffee beans, and thus:

“In a forthcoming issue of Food Research International, Marcone describes how he brewed coffee from beans that he personally picked out of the faeces of African civets (Civettictis civetta) and compared it with a mug of Kopi Luwak.”

Now, that’s dedication.

So here’s what I’m thinking. We have a bag of green Kona coffee beans. We also own two cats, one of whom will eat anything . . .

Knowing Karen, she will be content to roast her Kona green beans and call it the ultimate coffee experience. But I know better.

D.

*If you need an explanation for this title, you’re either too young, or too old; in any case, this joke loses all humor in its explanation. Sorry, kids (gramps), ask your 43-year-old father (son).

**Just because I shun neologisms in my writing doesn’t mean I can’t do ’em. By the way, a quick search will show you that www.arabicatroph.com is available, so if you’re an obligate coffeaphage, you might consider setting up a website.

***Hey, Maureen: betcha didn’t think I could sexualize coffee beans!