Magical Tamarind

Species name: Tamarindus indica

Common name: tamarind

Location: Dominican Republic

Tamarind is a tree species in the pea or bean family that is native not to India but tropical Africa, and used around the world as a flavouring, a food, and a plant-based dye. There are actually many plant species used as "tamarind" flavouring, so if you want an authentic flavour to your food you need to make sure you get the right species! When ground, it's nearly impossible to tell real tamarind from the fake stuff, so always buy it unground to make sure you're getting what you're supposed to get.

Because the tamarind is part of the bean family, it does produce a pod that is the fruit of the tree, and the fruit is what is consumed. The very tough outer covering must be removed, revealing the reddish-brown squishy insides of the fruit. This can be mashed into a paste, and used in cooking. Depending on if the fruit is ripe or not the flesh on the inside has very different tastes: unripe fruit are very, very sour and used as pickling agents, and ripe fruits are much sweeter and used for flavouring main dishes and even desserts. Tamarind fruits are very, very good for you. They have very high levels of calcium in the ripened flesh, as well as surprisingly high amounts of various B vitamins. Both of these are unusual to find in fruits! My favourite use of tamarind is in a beverage; there is a typical Nicaraguan drink made out of chia seeds, lemon juice and tamarind juice that is this really odd brown colour and has slimy seeds floating in it. Sounds gross, looks less than appealing, but MAN is it ever good. I've tried re-creating it once but can't quite get the proportions right. I need a Nicaraguan friend to teach me how to make it!

Tamarind wood is also some of the most beautiful wood in fine furniture and other decorative products, with the heartwood (or the "old wood" on the inside of the tree) being a bright red without a stain. The sapwood is a reddish yellow, and stains much darker red when a "mahogany" stain is added. This wood is sometimes marketed as mahogany wood outside of Latin America and tropical Asia and Africa, but there is one major difference between tamarind wood and true mahogany: strength. The strength of mahogany trees is tremendous (and a "mahogany tree" doesn't really exist; like with tamarind, many species would be what we would call "real mahogany"), while tamarind trees are a bit wussy. If wood was needed for extreme strength like a bed frame to hold up a North American-style bed, this would not be your wood of choice. If all you're making is a decorative art piece and want dark red wood, this would be the wood for you! It looks amazing in jewelry boxes. While it can't withstand extreme weight, it is very durable and very dense wood so would be perfect for other furniture like tables and chairs. The ground fruit can also be used for another purpose in home decoration: it can be used to remove the tarnish on brass, copper and silver. Grind up some of the flesh of the fruit, apply to a rag and rub. When the patina or the tarnish is removed, rinse with water and you're done!

The medicinal uses of tamarind are long and also depend on the country that uses it. In Nigeria it is used to treat stomach disorders, in Indonesia and Malaysia it is used to treat malaria, in other countries in southeast Asia it is used to treat fever, and in India it is used to treat cardiovascular problems and digestive problems. Again, traditional Indian medicine (Ayurveda) is onto something with this plant; excessive consumption of this plant will lead you to notice its primary medicinal value: it is a very potent laxative. There are other claims that tamarind can delay the onset of the most severe symptoms of osteoporosis because it contains so much calcium, as well as claims it can reduce circulating levels of cholesterol. Neither of these have been shown to be true in human studies, but if you have a pet rat that you don't want to die of low bone density you could try feeding it some tamarind paste in its regular diet, and if you have a chicken you're especially fond of that doesn't watch what it eats, you could give it some tamarind paste to reduce circulating levels of cholesterol. Don't expect this effect to be translated into eggs; the yolks of eggs laid by chickens whose diets have been supplemented with tamarind contain no less cholesterol than those that haven't been fed a supplemented diet. Too bad.

I want me some sugar!

Species name: Saccharum officinarum

Common name: sugarcane

Location: Dominican Republic

Sugarcane is one of the most important crop species in Latin America. It is originally native to southeast Asia around Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, but has been transported all around the world and is widely grown in tropical countries. It is not only used to make sugar, but also as a food crop (black sugarcane can be eaten like a root vegetable), as a biofuel (in Brazil, sugarcane waste is burned for fuel and accounts for almost 80% of their power generation), and as a fermentable crop (to make rum).

White sugarcane is the primary crop species used for sugar production around the world (this isn't the case with sugar produced in northern climates; sugar in Canada and Europe is produced from sugar beets), and is chewed by children as a sweet treat. The canes are pressed either mechanically or physically using donkeys (rarely horses) to turn giant wheels of stone to press the juices into a big vat. The cane juice is boiled to condense the juices, and the molasses are filtered out from the rest of the cane juice. They can be added back in later in various amounts to make light or dark brown sugar, or left out to make white sugar. The filtered cane juice is heated to boil off the liquid and the purified sugar is left behind. Interestingly, this process was unlikely to have been "invented" in Latin America despite its widespread proliferation there. It is actually believed that the purification of sugar was first done in India.

Black sugarcane is very different from white sugarcane. It is not as sweet, and the centre of the stem isn't as woody. Superficially, it looks nearly identical to white sugarcane except for the colour of the stem. This variety of cane, however, is never used to produce sugar. Instead, the stem is peeled and cut into pieces and can be boiled and eaten like a very starchy, somewhat chewy and crunchy potato. It can be further sweetened (as ironic as it is to sweeten sugarcane) to be added into desserts. I've never tried black sugarcane, but people in Dominican eat it all the time as one of their traditional foods.

Sugarcane isn't just for making rum and sugar! Historically, sugarcane was a very important medicinal crop, and still is in Ayurveda in traditional Indian medicine. In fact, whenever you see the Latin epithet (the "second name" of a species) "officinarum," or a derivative of it, it means the plant was once used as a medicinal plant. In its medicinal use, young sugarcane stems are ground in a big mortar and pestle to produce a paste, and that paste can be applied on the skin to treat skin problems and to prevent infection. It might seem a little far fetched that this could be useful, but when you think about other very sugary products it actually makes complete sense. Honey, for example, doesn't need to be refrigerated (neither does maple syrup) because it is SO sugary. Very few organisms can grow in something that sugary not because it's so sweet, but because of the osmolarity of the substance. Osmolarity is a way of chemists and biochemists measuring how much water will move out of a cell; if a solution has high osmolarity it means that there is a high concentration of "stuff" (sugar, salt, another chemical, etc.) in the solution. Water always moves to equalize the solution with the cell, so water would move out of the cell and into solution (to try to get the ratio of molecules of solute to molecules of water to be the same). This means the cell will shrivel, and if too much water leaves the cell then it cannot survive. By drastically increasing the osmolarity on the surface of the skin, you make it a very hostile environment for pathogens to exist and so you may prevent infection. It can also draw water out of the skin and into the sugar creating a goopy mess; for this reason sugar is clearly not the favoured product to use for this purpose. This is the same idea that products like Polysporin operate on; if you read the ingredients label you'll see they contain a lot of salt to increase the osmolarity at the skin's surface, making it a hostile environment. Unfortunately, this is also the reason why your skin gets wrinkly and gross when you use too much of it too often. Skin needs the proper chemical balance, too!

Sugarcane can also be used to supplement animal feed; studies have shown that when piglets are fed sugarcane juice added with their regular soy diets grow faster and are susceptible to fewer pathogens than piglets fed a regular soy diet. Will sugary diets become the new norm in piglet feed? I doubt it. Pigs have the same reactions as humans to sugary diets. They get fat! This might not be a bad thing when you're raising piglets for their end product: consumption. If you want healthy pigs, weaning them off a high-sugar diet before they reach adulthood is very important; no one wants a fatty ham or a fatty tenderloin!

A miracle plant with a cure for everything?

Species name: Ixora coccinea

Common name: jungle geranium, flame of the woods

Location: Dominican Republic

The jungle geranium is an incredibly popular ornamental species in tropical locations because of how easily it's pruned into shapes. In tropical resorts, it's often the plant that makes up the "thou shalt not pass" barrier between the walkways around the resort and the grass and gardens beyond the walkways. It is native to India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka where it is said to be one of their holy plants.

One of the best characteristics about this plant that makes it so ideal as an ornamental species and even a houseplant is that it can tolerate hard pruning and it flowers on old growth, the previous year's growth, and new growth. This is often a problem for some plants like hydrangeas and hibiscus, where they only flower from the previous year's growth and so if you prune this off in the spring or fall you don't end up getting any flowers. Many gardeners get around this by giving the plant a hard prune once every 5 years or so and just sacrificing the flowers for a year (it will still grow up with green leaves, but just none of the showy flowers). It also flowers almost continuously during the year, but just at different intensities; the most flowers appearing just prior to and just after the rainy season. As an indoor plant, this species is often grown as a cultivar with orange or yellow flowers, or even flowers that change colour as they age. I have seen these plants in garden stores here in Canada and always been amazed by the flower colour-changing ability but never been interested enough to try to keep one alive. Maybe I'll give it a shot next time I see one!

This plant isn't just loved for its ornamental value; it's also an important plant in traditional Indian mediciine called Ayurveda. The flowers, leaves, roots and stem are all used, often as a tonic or a tea, and consumed to treat a big list of ailments. The fruits of this plant are also edible but (from what I understand; I've never tried one or even seen one) don't taste very good. Biochemically, this plant has incredible amounts of chemicals that are believed to have some sort of health-improving effects: lupeol (anti-inflammatory), ursolic acid (used in the cosmetic industry but also inhibit cancer cell growth), oleanolic acid (antitumor and antiviral properties), sitosterol (a plant sterol that can reduce blood levels of cholesterol), rutin (blood thinner and anti-inflammatory), anthocyanins (anti-aging), kaempferol (analgesic), and quercetin (antiviral, anticancer, anti-inflammatory). While none of these chemicals have been shown to have these effects on large-scale human trials (most are at either the mouse testing or cell-line testing stage), so far all research has been shown to be promising. While this certainly is not an endorsement to go out and eat kilograms of this plant every day, perhaps Ayurveda is really onto something with this plant. We'll have to wait and see.

The Magnificent Mango

Species name: Mangifera indica

Common name: mango, Indian mango, common mango

Location: Dominican Republic

The mango tree, the largest fruit tree in the world, is native to India and Pakistan, but was brought very early in the domestication process to the Philippines (the native mangoes to India and Pakistan were once thought to be a different species than those in the Philippines, but now we know they're the same species with different locally selected features through traditional breeding). I was under the impression that "mangoes" were a single species with some variation in fruit characteristics due to traditional breeding, but it turns out that there are over 70 species in the Mangifera genus, about 25 of which produce edible fruit that are "mangoes." The Indian mango is the most commonly grown in the world, and other species are grown on a much more localized basis. This genus is in the family Anacardiaceae, which is probably a very unfamiliar name. It will be very commonly known once you know the common name: the Cashew family. It also has some other, not so nice members: poison ivy and sumac (a very popular ornamental genus). Both of these species can produce intense skin irritation and rashes, and some people being so sensitive to poison ivy that sumac (sometimes called staghorn sumac) and mangos produce the same effect. The cashew is only the seed of the cashew apple (which does look remarkably like a mango!), so it is unlikely that someone with a hyper-sensitivity to poison ivy would have the same result with a cashew.

You'll have to excuse my poor photograph of a mango inflorescence; the wind was blowing quite hard and it was nearly impossible to get the flowers still (I was even pulling on the bottom of the branch in the photo to try to stabilize the flowers...). I hadn't had any rum that day (yet), I swear! :) The flowers are usually quite inconspicuous, but the sheer number of them make a mango tree in full flower a sight to behold. Almost the entire tree turns yellow, and the scent is also quite impressive. Each flower, if pollinated, could become a mango. Some trees produce 20 mangoes per "bunch" during their peak in productivity! With hundreds of bunches on a tree, that's a whole lot of mangoes.

Mangoes are incredibly important fruits around the world for a variety of reasons. In India and Pakistan, the fruits are not only eaten (and if you go to an Indian restaurant, count the number of dishes that contain mango in some form!) but the mango tree leaves, skin of the fruit, and fruit itself is used in their traditional herbal medicines (called ayurveda). It is believed that the mango can clear the digestive tract that is blocked due to vatta or heat. This might sound like a bunch of hogwash, but if you consider how spicy some Indian food is (in other words, contains "heat"), the addition of mangoes to that dish, or eating them on the side, has a real calming effect on the taste buds and the esophagus leading to the stomach. In North America we wouldn't give these digestive issues the same fancy terms, but if you want spicy food to taste less spicy, eat it with a mango! To Hindus, the perfectly ripe mango is regarded as a symbol of high attainment and perfection, and Lord Ganesha is often depicted holding a ripe mango in either his trunk or in one of his hands. The mango itself is the national fruit of India, Pakistan and the Philippines, while the tree is the national tree of Bangladesh.