He Ate Well

White, Green, Black of Tea

Make that white, green, greenish -- and black of tea. Here's a little background about tea, in case you were wondering: All true tea -- as opposed to "herbal tea," which isn't tea -- derives from a single plant, called camellia sinensis, a relative of the camellia flower. This one single plant splinters into countless varieties. Okay, that's it for biology. So how do you classify tea? At its most basic, it's about oxidation. Think, for example, of a nice, shiny apple. Take a healthy bite out of said nice, shiny apple, place it on the kitchen counter -- and watch. The bitten part will start to turn rust-colored, start to oxidize, right? Same idea with tea. "Color," or classification, is determined by the degree of oxidation.

With white tea, the leaves are picked and laid out to dry before they start to oxidize. Green tea starts wilting and oxidizing -- but the process is nipped early by heating the leaves. (In China that means cooking the leaves in a dry wok, while in Japan the leaves are steamed) Black tea is fully oxidized -- like the bite mark on the apple turning totally brown. Darjeeling is a black tea. So what about greenish tea? That's another name for oolong, which can range anywhere from almost green to almost black.

But, of course, it's not nearly so simple. Besides oxidation, add to the tea calculus the different leaves picked (from downy buds for white tea to two leaves and a bud for Darjeeling), different geography (from the "cliff teas" in China's Wuyi mountains to Assam teas on the plains of India), different plant varietals, different processes, different roasting, different people making it -- and on an on -- and you begin to glimpse a world as complex, rich and varied as that of wine.

Mount Everest

Okay, this has little to do with eating well but I caught a glimpse of Mount Everest from the window of my Druk Air flight from Bhutan to Delhi, via Kathmandu. There it is on the left, the pyramid-like summit wrapped in a swirl of clouds. Cool, eh?

Darjeeling Tea

When I visited India for the first time last year, I met an old fortune teller who assured me I'd be back -- in 2007. My apologies, dear sir, but circumstances disproved your prediction. I just returned from two weeks in the subcontinent, where I researched a story about Darjeeling tea for Saveur magazine. In the next few posts I'll talk more about this tea and the remarkable people who make it. But first let me answer, where in the world is Darjeeling?

If you look at a map of India, you'll see to the northeast (look top, right) that the country shoots out over Bangladesh to border Bhutan, Nepal and Tibet. Up in that corner, at the northern tip of the West Bengal state, in the foothills of the mighty Himalayas, is where you'll find Darjeeling. I traveled there with my friend and tea authority Sebastian Beckwith, a founder of In Pursuit of Tea. He visits Darjeeling every year to check out the crop and learn more about how the tea's made. I got the inspired idea to tag along with him this time to learn, too. We landed at the closest airport, a few hours away, and after visiting nearby Sikkim and Darjeeling town, hired a car to visit a tea estate called Goomtee, located deep in the foothills. We followed a steep, narrow "highway" -- more a casually paved one lane road with two lanes of traffic that wound up and around mountains covered in thick jungle. Along the outside edge of the pavement (or lack thereof) were sheer 2,000 foot drops, no guard rails. Cars, trucks, motorcycles and buses passed each other though a lingua franca of horn honking, complicated roadside choreography and countless games of Chicken.

Pig and Salt

I wrote this entry last summer -- and promptly forgot to post it! But I met an Italian woman living in Bhutan on my recent trip there, and when she told me she was from Fruili we got to talking about San Daniele's wonderful proscuitto. So here's a post from my Italy trip this past summer:

Here's the ingredients list for Italy's San Daniele proscuitto: Pig and salt, or more accurately, "Italian Heavy Pig" and coarse Sicilian sea salt. Okay, there's one more critical ingredient: charming San Daniele itself, or rather the village's unique microclimate between breathtaking mountain ranges in the country's northern Fruili region.

While Parma prosciutto may be more famous in America, here in tiny San Daniele they've been air-curing ham for, oh, since the middle ages. Both hams use pigs from the same areas but the two prosciutto taste different (the San Daniele is a tad sweeter) because of curing styles and, of course, geography. I visited this village and was lucky enough to check out a traditional prosciutto producer. Make that traditional meets high tech. The brightly-lit, immaculately clean facility was modern industrial, processing 6,000 hind quarters a week thanks to an array of robotic arms zipping and zooshing legs to and fro, conveyor belts auto-salting and pressing hams, winches, computer monitors, stainless steel racks, and walk-in coolers the size of basketball courts. What struck me, besides how fresh those pig legs -- with trotter attached -- looked when they arrived from the slaughterhouse, was how this producer was able to adhere to age-old curing methods while injecting 21st century moxie into the process. Despite the stampede of hams, just 25 people worked in the place, handling what the machines couldn't -- hand-trimming, inspecting, managing the curing.

After four weeks of being salted, ventilated and rested the legs are ready for air-curing. I boarded a freight elevator 20 feet tall for a ride upstairs to the curing room. The contrast was stunning. No clack and purr of machinery, no bright fluorescents, no air conditioned coolers. Instead, 60,000 prosciutto rested silently in a 16,000 square foot space, tied to the stainless steel racks hoof up and ten high. The huge room was dimly lit; the prosciutto gave off a rich hammy smell. Instead of A/C there were banks of ten-foot high windows on two sides of the buildings. Here's where technology gives way to a thousand years of tradition. To the east the windows opened to the peaks of Slovenia. To the west they opened to the Aviano mountains. The breezes swirling down from these two mountain ranges and meeting here -- exactly here -- in San Daniele is what infuses this prosciutto with its indelible magic. The hams peacefully waft in these mountain currents for nine to ten months until they're cured and preserved. Then they're ready to be sliced gauze-thin and enjoyed with a fine glass of Friulian Tocai.