accidental discovery: walnuts can make things purple?

So I’ve made this recipe belonging to a buddy of mine about five times without any anomalies and consistent flavour. It’s a simple method using an immersion blender, comes up a creamy golden brown, with a little separation continuing after a cloth-straining (no big deal as it’s blitzed into a creamy drink). It’s walnuts, honey, vanilla, water.

Out of nowhere this week, and originally to my absolute horror, as I began blending the walnuts into the honey it began to turn purple… and then black. What the hell had I done? What new element had I introduced? It was practically inky and the foam on top was cement grey-purple.

Turns out this is one the coolest accidents to come my way. It was an acid that is commonly found in the skins of walnuts, called gallic acid. After a bit of google searching I ended up on baking and beekeeping forums, and the wikipedia page of an ink used between the 15th-19th centuries, and this is what I’ve got:

• A problem for bakers is having their walnut breads turn purple because of gallic acids found in the skin.
• A highly sought after and quite rare type of honey that occurs naturally is dark purple. Many apiarists believe this is because of high acidity in the soil in the vicinity of hives.
• Iron gall ink was prepared using iron salts and tannic acids from oak gall nuts (where the name for gallic acid is derived.) A well prepared iron gall ink would gradually darken on the paper to a dark purple colour.

I totally triggered a chemical reaction accidentally. Perhaps the honey contained something that interacted with the walnuts? Maybe I didn’t bring the water entirely to the boil?

Now where do I find this actually purple honey, though?

concept development

I’ve been reading a lot lately about chefs and bartenders who develop recipes by seeking inspiration from other creative spheres. I stumbled across this blog post today, (Meadowlark). The writer spent some time creating a drink to match an album by Sufjan Stevens. The drink was fairly simple, but I was immediately struck by the depth of research that went into creating it. She spent time looking at the artist’s inspiration, and used that to inform her own creation. Each ingredient was reasoned, and the recipe read well because of it. (btw, I noticed that huge amount of rosewater too, but in an earlier post she has a recipe for ‘rose water’ which is actually more of a petal tisane, which would definitely work at that volume.)

In this article from last month on Punch, Drew Lazor explores different approaches to concept development (How To Develop a Concept Cocktail). I’m smitten with Chantal Tseng’s ‘limited edition’ menus at The Reading Room, in Washington D.C, that revolve around the book she’s reading that week. She uses narrative, geography, characters, and the author’s persona to inspire her ingredients.

Cerebral stuff isn’t necessarily the way to go every time, but I’ve always found that the best names and recipes (of my own) are always tightly knit together by a solid concept that drew inspiration from a clear source.

A recent recipe comes from, at first, a pretty vague space that slowly developed into a combination of dew drops on winter green, Fern Gully, the flavours I associate with the word “nectar”, and how sweet and clean I imagine this water tastes to this little guy:

I truly believe it would definitely taste like Dolin Blanc

The idea hung about in my head and in a few variations for about a six months. By the time I got around to making it, I’d spent so long messing with the concept and had such a clear idea of how I wanted it to taste that it took less than 20 minutes to nail down a recipe. The drink ended up as a light, clean, carbonated thing with a hint of sweetness that is balanced with tartaric and malic acids to give the impression of a sparkling wine.

Who knows if people are going to taste the idea of a fairy with a dewdrop cupped between their tiny, webbed fingers. I doubt it, and I’m not going to tell them that they have to. I’d be delighted to hear that someone has drawn that conclusion independently, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that having a concise and well developed concept helped to develop a good recipe.