Coffee Indulgence

Tired of the latest fad coffees? Something new is hitting tea houses and coffeeshops across the country. It’s bubble tea. This bizarre drink also goes by the names boba, pearl tea, milk tea, or bubble drink. It’s part drink, part dessert snack, and all fun!Bubble tea is far from the plain-looking tea you are familiar with. It comes in a wild variety of flavours and colours. Challenge your palate with peach, lichee, mango or passionfruit! There is also the more traditional green or black tea flavours. It can be served either hot or cold. My personal favorite is chocolate milk black tea, iced.

But the fun part of bubble tea isn’t the colours or the flavours, it’s the ‘bubbles’.

Big, black, balls of chewy tapioca are what make bubble tea such an interesting experience. These pearls are about the size of small marbles and they sink to the bottom of your cup. This tea is usually served with a gigantic straw just the right size for slurping up these gummy treats.

If that doesn’t sound too appetizing to you, many places that sell bubble tea do offer the wildly flavoured milk teas with or without the pearls. But don’t be a chicken, you should try it at least once. It’s not as strange as it may sound. The pearls sort of remind me of a melted Gummi Bear.

Bubble tea originated overseas in Taiwan and has only recent migrated to North America within the last 10 years or so. You can now find places serving bubble tea in most major cities, such as Los Angeles, Seattle, Vancouver, New York and Toronto. Many say that the local imports just aren’t as good as the stuff you get in Japan and Taiwan.

If you enjoy being creative in the kitchen, you can make pearl tea at home, but it’s not easy. The starchy tapioca pearls can be hard to work with. If you boil them too long, they dissolve. Not long enough, and they are hard in the middle.

Some of the more well-known locations that offer bubble tea are: Fantasia, TC Tea or the Sweetheart Café. It’s no surprise that these tea houses are all in California.

Watch for the next post which will show you how to make Bubble Tea.

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Knowing a great cup of coffee when you taste one is a quintessential part of a coffee connoisseur’s existence.We know that the flavor, aroma and strength of the brew is determined by the type of grind, the quality of the brewing process, the ratio of coffee to water during brewing and even before that, the quality of the bean, the blend, and the roasting process.

Coffee beans are roasted to develop flavor and aroma. The degree of roasting determines the mellowness, richness and bitterness of the brew.

Light or cinnamon roasting creates a light brown dry bean with a delicate flavor and aroma. To many, this coffee is best for drinking at breakfast with milk.

Medium roasting gives a stronger flavor, bringing out the unique characteristics of coffee beans. It produces coffee perfect for drinking at any time of day, with or without milk.

Full roasting produces dark brown beans with an oily surface. The coffee has a stronger flavor with a touch of bitterness and it’s great for drinking black, or with a little cream, after lunch and in the afternoon.

High roast is also known as Double or Continental roast. The beans are shiny, more oily and very black. The coffee has a strong bitterness and is served black after dinner.

Italian roast is also known as Espresso roast. This coffee is dark to the point of carbonization.

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Can you believe that researchers now say that - Coffee can kill pain? According to a LONDON Reuters press release last September 25, a study states it can, but only in women. Sorry guys! Life’s not always fair! “The London Times said researchers in London had asked a sample of men and women to plunge their arms into buckets of freezing cold water and keep them there as long as they could.” Sounds like torture English-style to me!

Then the researchers gave the volunteers coffee in the expectation that it would ease the pain. Caffeine increases blood pressure which leads to a lowering in the perception of pain.

Increased blood-pressure equals less pain - very interesting. But is that healthy? And is that really the reason??

I propose to you that the researches had the end result right, but the cause all wrong! Its the aroma, silly! That all-encompassing, delicious, roll-your-eyes-back aroma of a good, strong cup of coffee!!

Its the aroma that stopped the pain! The patients were just too busy sniffing the java to feel anything but pure joy and anticipation at the next sip of coffee.

Now I realize that study after study has been done about the effects of coffee on the human condition and that all to often, one study cancels out the results of the study before it. http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/coffee/ The Institute for Coffee Studies can tell you all about any coffee study you ever wanted to find out about. Their scientists are members of Vanderbilt University’s faculty and all of their publications appear in peer-reviewed scientific journals without censorship by funding groups, and ICS research programs are regularly reviewed by leaders in relevant scientific fields. “Large-scale population studies over the last half-century have carefully documented the health benefits of coffee consumption. In fact, recent epidemiologic studies, independently replicated, show that coffee has protective effects for suicide, liver cirrhosis, and colorectal cancer. More recently, preliminary studies suggested that coffee consumption helps reduce cardiovascular mortality and could have a positive impact on Parkinson’s disease.”

See what I mean! A coffee study for everything! But I think I’ll take this pain-killer one to heart - of, course with MY interpretation of the cause!! How ’bout it?? Any one else have a coffee aroma story to share. Tell me I’m right - that the smell of a good cup of joe can erase anyone’s pain!

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(NaturalNews) A new study finds that just the smell of coffee alone may provide important antioxidant benefits all the while soothing your frazzled nerves. Humans have been consuming coffee for a thousand years and for a lot of us, the aroma of freshly brewed coffee is as good, sometimes better, than the taste. Now we learn from the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry that the pleasure of smelling coffee might provide for humans a powerful antioxidant that protects nerve cells from stress related damage.

The study was partially funded by the Winter Institute Program of the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation and the Japan-Korea Industrial Technology Foundation.

Han-Seok Seo, study leader of the Seoul National University in South Korea and his colleagues conducted their tests on four groups of adult male Wistar rats stressed from sleep deprivation.

The aim of the study was to demonstrate influences of roasted coffee aroma on rat brain functions and evaluate the impact. After testing, the impact was conclusive; roasted coffee bean aroma changes the mRNA and protein levels of the rat brain. This showed for the first time that valuable proteins with healthy antioxidant properties, which are important in protecting cells from stress, were found in the brains of the coffee-sniffing rats.

We don’t know if ancient cultures tested aroma impact on rodents, but we do know that bottles of medicinal aromatics discovered in tombs were widely used by the ancient Egyptians. Writings have been found from other ancient cultures indicating that the Greeks, Romans, Chinese and Hebrews used aromas for healing.

One of the fastest growing fields today in alternative medicine is aromatherapy. A holistic treatment using botanical oils that are inhaled or massaged into your skin, these oils work on the brain and nervous system by stimulating the olfactory nerves.

Of our five senses, the sense of smell is the most complex and unique in structure. A major pathway for information to be distributed to the brain is the limbic system where emotions and responses of the body are processed. It is the hippocampus, a part of the forebrain, which is responsible for short term memory.

The effect of scent on the human mind and its implications have not been fully researched yet, but brain scientists are now confirming what herbalists and aroma researchers have long believed; a good aroma evokes our deepest emotions. Alan Hirsch, M.D., neurological director of the Smell and Taste Research Foundation in Chicago agrees.

Smell, odor, scents are powerful tools for bringing back memories or eliciting emotional responses which ultimately affect our overall health. Experts are learning that when odor is paired with a learning task, that recall will be 50% improved. The implications of this for children with learning difficulties or brain trauma victims are promising.

Zoladz and Raudenbush (2005) have examined the effects of cinnamon and peppermint odor on participants and found improvement in their ability to pay attention, their recognition & working memory, visual-motor response speed, mood and energy.

Another similar study was conducted by Barker, Grayhem, Koon, Perkins, Whalen and Raudenbush (2003) to assess whether peppermint would actually increase the alertness of clerical workers in an office environment. The overall improvement in typing accuracy, speed, increased performance and ability to alphabetize improved significantly.

In 1996 another group, Kliauga, Hubert, and Cenci, studied the improvement of participants who proofread pages of text with misspelled words and found similar results of significant improvement.

New buildings in Japan are designed using an innovative HVAC system that incorporates calming lavender and rosemary scents to soothe waiting customers, whereas employees in banks are being kept alert with stimulating aromas like lemon and eucalyptus.

While researchers unravel the complexities of aromas and the link to our physiological and emotional behavior, we know there is a definite link up between the nose and the brain and it smells pretty good.

In Good Health,

Deanna Dean

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