“I am going Nuts” introduced a misunderstood little gem, the Nutmeg, and expounded a little on its preparation.

Pure myristicine without safrole, elemicin, and likely unknown ones inside nutmeg, does not result in the same effects as freshly ground nutmeg. Ground powders lose their best molecules to evaporation and oxidation in air. Thus, it is best to use fresh nuts.

Some people asked to be more specific about the preparation. The remarks on reddit.com (beats me why redditors never comment here but stay on reddit?!?) also reveal difficulties with grasping that mood lifting dosages of a quarter or half a nut are all that I can recommend. People rarely enjoy higher dosages.

Let me today clarify the preparation mentioned the last time around and postpone the article about nutmeg extraction to next week. Below you see a usual, drab communist China kitchen. I removed the dead dog and the remains of a tortured Christian from the counter and arranged all the necessary: A wooden cutting board, a large knife, a fist size rock, nutmeg nuts, and two pouches of soybean milk powder.

The 500 gram bag contains 102 nuts, so every nut is about 5 gram. One nut is halved and quartered and then further shredded, all done with the knife. Hold the nut and knife firmly while cutting it almost like you would a quarter of an onion, not chopping but slowly rasping down along an exposed inner surface of the nut, best using the part of the blade close to the handle while the tip of the knife rests on the board! Otherwise, the pieces will jump all over the kitchen.

 

Grind the heap of rough cuttings with a rock, using your weight to push it down hard onto the wooden board resting on solid support. You can also use an electrical coffee grinder. Or you just use a rock – half the time, nothing to clean.

 

Now add maybe a third of a one-portion pouch of soy bean milk powder and grind them together. The powder soaks up the oils, helps to grind the nut finer, will mask the taste, and keeps the oil from coming out of the emulsion when the drink cools down later on. A pouch of three-in-one instant coffee works almost as well, but soy bean powder works better. The consistency is just right to suspend the bigger pieces left over from careless grinding; the taste is milder than with the added bitterness of coffee.

 

Now it is divided into two portions via a totally wrong application of Alpha Meme’s Divide and Join Portioning (DJP©). Yes, 1 nut, 2 people, no cup’s (it is bowls here in China), so here only half a nut per person (because we know the nuts and are used to it - so you better start with even less). Then the heaps are added to the rest of the milk powder …

 

… and boiling hot water is added. Mix it through to avoid clumping, like here in the picture with the most advanced grab, poke, twirl, super-adjustable fork ever invented: chop sticks.

 

Bon appetite and do not forget to drink it very early in the day, certainly not in the evening, as explained before.

Next time I will get to the problem with the nuts being often diverse and therefore somewhat difficult to dose precisely. The answer is nutmeg liquor, which I prepared yesterday, but the liquor is still separating from the nutmeg mud suspension, which needs a few days, so keep tuned.

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