Read The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks Online
Authors: Amy Stewart
Tags: #Non-Fiction
The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (34 page)
LEMON VERBENA
Fresh lemon verbena is not the sort of herb generally sold in grocery stores, so it's worth growing yourself if your climate allows it. It is sensitive to cold and dies back to the ground at the first frost. If covered with straw, it can survive temperatures down to about 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Just leave the branches on the plant through the winter, cutting them back in spring when new leaves emerge. Some cold-climate gardeners take a cutting in fall and nurse it through the winter, planting it outside in spring.
Apart from protection from cold, lemon verbena needs very little care. No special fertilizer is required; like many herbs, it actually prefers poor, well-drained soil on the dry side. Plant it in full sun; if it gets any shade at all, it won't be as flavorful. The flavor is extracted from the leaves, which reach peak essential oil content in the fall. It grows to the size of a small tree in frost-free climates; otherwise it reaches eight to ten feet tall in a season and produces flowering stalks covered in tiny white blossoms.
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full sun
low water
hardy to 15f/-9c
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Licorice
: The dried root of a european leguminous plant with pinnate leaves and spikes of blue flowers; an extract of the root used in medicines, liquors, and confections; a candy flavored with licorice or a substitute such as anise. Also applied to various plants used as substitutes for true licorice.
LICORICE: AND NOW FOR A CHEMISTRY LESSON
The licorice flavor in pastis and other such spirits can actually come from several different, and surprisingly unrelated, plants. What each of them have in common is anethole, a licorice-flavor molecule with some unique characteristics. It is soluble in alcohol but not in water, so licorice-flavored drinks are generally higher in alcohol content to keep the anethole molecules from breaking out of solution. But when more water is addedâparticularly cold water, as is the custom for drinking pastis and absintheâthe anethole separates from the alcohol and forms a milky white or pale green cloud in the drink, called the louche in the case of absinthe.
The reason the anethole doesn't simply float to the top in an oily blob when water is added (as, say, olive oil or butter might float to the top of a bowl of soup) is that anethole has what chemists refer to as a low interfacial tension. Imagine two drops of water next to each other. If they get very close together, they will easy merge and become one drop of water. Water drops have a higher level of surface tension and tend to merge readily. On the other hand, picture two
soap bubbles. They might stick to each other but will not necessarily merge together to form one larger bubble. That's because they have a lower surface tension. The low surface tension of anethole slows down the speed at which those droplets come together to form one oily mass. That means that pastis or absinthe will stay uniformly cloudy when water is added to the glass, as the anethole breaks loose but resists clumping together.
Some distillers use chill filtration to remove any of these large, unstable molecules that would otherwise cloud the drink in the presence of water or even cold temperatures, which is why some licorice-flavored drinks don't get cloudy. And some oily, plant-based flavor molecules happen to be transparent, which means when they break out of suspension they don't cloud a drink the way anethole does.
ANISE
Pimpinella anisum
apiaceae (carrot family)
T
his small, airy herb, native to the Mediterranean and southwest Asia, looks very similar to its close relatives fennel, parsley, and Queen Anne's lace. The tiny fruits it produces, commonly called aniseed, contain high levels of anethole and are widely used in liqueurs, vermouths, and the yellow Italian aperitif Galliano. Anise is sometimes called burnet saxifrage, although it is neither a burnet (a small plant in the rose family) nor a saxifrage (a low-growing alpine plant that thrives in rocky soil).
ANISE HYSSOPAgastache foeniculum
lamiaceae (mint family)
I
n spite of its name and its anise flavor, this native North American mintlike herb does not actually contain significant quantities of anethole. Its flavor comes mostly from estragole, another flavor compound also found in tarragon, basil, anise, star anise, and other herbs. While it can be used by distillers, it is more likely to be used as a mixer. Its name is somewhat misleading, as it is neither an anise nor a hyssop, both plants also used for their licorice flavor.
FENNELFoeniculum vulgare
apiaceae (carrot family)
T
his tall, striking perennial herb with fine, lacy foliage and bright yellow flowers is used in a variety of cuisines throughout the Mediterranean, North Africa, and Asia. The bulb, leaves, and stalks are all edible, but it is the fruitâoften called a seed, although the seeds are actually found inside the tiny oblong fruitsâthat is used to flavor absinthe, pastis, and other liqueurs.
A cultivar called Florence fennel (
Foeniculum vulgare
var.
azoricum
) is grown more for its bulb, but it also produces seeds with higher levels of anethole and limonene, giving it a sweet, lemony flavor. Another variety, sweet fennel (
F. vulgare
var.
dulce
), also has higher levels of these flavors and is used for essential oil production and distillation. The dulce variety has the added advantage of having very low levels of eucalyptol, which would give an unpleasant medicinal, camphor flavor to spirits. Fennel pollen is also high in these oils, although difficult to collect in any significant quantity.
