A Trip to the Thai Distillery

It’s a big one, near Ayutthaya, and I was a little leery. They do some distillation and solvent extraction on demand and so our Thai lotus is done there.

I needn’t have worried.

For one thing, it was women. And while some, if not most of the best distillers I know are men, men tend to take themselves incredibly seriously. It doesn’t mean they are jerks, necessarily, but you always have to watch them carefully, which they love of course

But here we had 2 lovely women, who started out professional enough, and were certainly knowledgeable and always delightful, but soon our group enthusiasm won over and we were picking flowers in the gardens, making tiny bouquets, taking photos, swooning in happiness, dancing around…..all the things that ylang ylang and champa and limes can make you do if you’re happy about it.

Thailand has done some experiments recently, with ylang ylang and rose! The ylang we will have in the store, as soon as the wheels of commerce begin to turn. There is not a lot of it, and it’s a delicate, almost hesitant ylang ylang, a little timid perhaps, a bit shy, but wonderfully sweet and full bodied, as though unsure of usurping the place of the Malagasy Dowager Ylang Ylangs! We’ll still keep those, for sure, those sweet sisters are our ylang ylang family, 1, extra, and complete, but there’s always room for one more, an adopted friend.

Thai rose I shouldn’t even write about because we will not be carrying it…not my fault! It proved too expensive to cultivate. Cultivating roses for essential oil is as much of a commitment as getting married, and more so in many places. It’s really, impossibly, undoably, expensive. Pity, because the rose concrete, which I smelled, was very nice. I had been prepared to feel pity for it, a poor tropical lowland rose, but it was robust and beautiful. Couldn’t pay its own expenses though, and the land has gone on to other things. Sad, but no need to dwell on it.

We’ll be carrying Winter Lemon as well. Please remember that none of these oils are in the store now, and they have not even yet made the first slow grinding steps out of South East Asia. I will write a newsletter about them when they do come. As it is, I can’t thoroughly describe any of these oils because I either don’t have samples, or they are packed. But the winter lemon had a bright sunniness about it, like the eagerly absorbed winter sun in a place like Vancouver or Moscow.

Thai Lime is another lovely, and we will have this regular Citrus Swingle, which smells like a Christmas Party (everyone found this uproarious) and also the Kaffir lime, Citrus hystrix I think. It’s a really strange looking citrus, almost like it was once a bigger one, and then got squished down, but actually looks more like a brain, or the tracks a worm might leave in sand. There’s a whole lot of other things going on in there beside that limonene, let me tell you! It’s the Greek Chorus of citrus! And we’re going to have the leaves too, maybe, which smell closer to the peel than petitgrains usually do, kind of like a wild west version of the peel! Maybe we’ll call it Cowboy Lime!

Perhaps someone has noticed, perhaps not, but we don’t offer Chinese oils at Enfleurage.


We have a ginger from there, because it took a long time to get the Vietnamese one last time, which, incidentally, is made with fresh rhizomes (as opposed to everyone else, including the Chinese, who make it with dried.) But that’s the only Chinese oil and we have taken liberties with ginger in the past. We used to carry one just one CO2, and yes, it was ginger. I don’t know why ginger is singled out for this, and it’s not just the fresh thing because we also have an unusual Anise, also from fresh fruit, also from Vietnam, but I am getting way off the subject. All I want to say it that……we’re going to bring in another Chinese oil. Osmanthus! It’s been like a silly quarrel! Can’t remember what happened, why we stopped it. I think our Osmanthus supplier disappeared and I have never been comfortable buying essential oils from any Chinese companies (please, no accusations!) But even though the origin of these flowers (those little tiny adorable sweet olive flowers!!) is Chinese, we will get it here, and it is lovely…I nearly cried, it’s been so many years!

One of the most exciting oils for me, and I am thrilled to welcome him back, is Plai! Our plai guy disappeared; such is the case with so many small distillers. But now we are going to have this strong and assertive plai! He is like a tiny General! Plai immediately comes out, and declares himself. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is something he’s never heard of! He’s always a variation of the papaya lying on the sandy bank of the Mekong in the middle of the afternoon! And he likes it there. Maybe he’s the papaya at 3 o’clock, and maybe at 4. Maybe he has the peel on and maybe not. I will know more when he comes, because I was enraptured, entranced, just to smell him again, but had so many oils to play with, that although I kept coming back to the plai, I did not sit quietly with him.

There is another new Basil, Hairy Basil! The botanical name (which I am suspicious of anyway, as regular readers will know,) might be Ocimum americanum. I didn’t think there was any way in hell I could get talked into yet another basil for that store. We already have exotic basil, linalool basil, holy basil, verbena basil, and goodness know what else, but this one is do damn American smelling, and I mean it in the best possible way. He is reliable and strong, and smells exactly like basil should smell, pure, unvarnished, middle-of-the-road, apple pie, yes ma’am, tip your hat basil. He’s like a Sunday afternoon barbeque, a Harley Davidson, an Iowan cornfield basil. He’s a straight and true, unadorned, what-you-see-is-what-you-get basil. He is the Navy Seal of basils!

Not my fault here either; I call them as I smell them.

Then there was the Guava Leaf. This one I don’t know about. At first this oil was completely sweet, too good to believe, almost like a strange kind of guava candy, even a little too sweet at times, but still complicated and very interesting, very likable. As an hour passed though, he changed, with darker notes, woody notes, bitter notes, complicated textural tones and soon nothing of the original sweet fruit was there, leaving me to wonder if I had smelled it in the first place. I could not recognize this latter aroma with the one I had first let out of the bottle, dropped onto the tester strip. It was a complete surprise, and completely untrustworthy. Perfumers will probably like it but it’s going to take a lot to get used to him, and be able to predict his movements well enough so as to work with him when other oils are involved. All in all, this oil was all over the map, kind of like my ex-boyfriend. You think you’re getting one thing, and whammo, you get another! But in a bottle of essential oil it could be interesting!

The last oil I want to speak of is one that my staff will kill me if I buy, I know it. Because we had it long ago, and it was around forever. It was one of those oils that smelled interesting, but not pretty, and enough of a culinary treat that it was marked forever. That oil is “lesser galangal.” But here in Thailand he is called “fingerroot” and that sounds better, so we’ll go with that. This oil also has nothing in common with that sad little bottle of wishful thinking we have had for years. He was quite complicated too, but whereas the guava leaf turned into something entirely different than what I thought he was, the finger root is just a complicated and interesting oil. He seemed a little boring and rooty to begin with but only a few seconds in he was flipping out new tendrils of scent faster than a three card monty dealer. Sharp, sour, mossy, sassy, muddy! I kept coming back to him, going in for one last sniff, one more time, ok, one more…..

I guess that’s all I have time to write about, not so much the trip as the oils I tried, and in some cases, the plants were outside, happily represented. I even had a big misconception cleared up. I was always under the impression that yellow champaka was bakul.
Not logical, I know, but I had been shown this by someone who has a reputation as an essential oil guru. I never questioned it too much because I don’t live near yellow or even white champaka. I rarely see it. Bakul are these little teeny tiny wiggy ones. They are a little bigger than osmanthus (of course!) but probably 1/6^th the size of a jasmine petal……

Some Fish Eat

One of the things I like the most about Buddhist temples is that no one can be harmed within. That goes for fish as well. Can’t touch ‘em. Some fish apparently know this and they tend to stick around.
Tiny businesses can crop up with this opportunity.
Here is one, selling bowls of fish food. And this attracts more fish. These pictures were taken in Ayutthaya, Thailand, as we hurled two bowls of fish food into the river. That’s all.
The people I was with really like fish.

Lotus Harvest

I went, yesterday morning, to some lotus ponds where the lotus we buy for Enfleurage comes from. First of all, since I know there will be a few people who are just itching to discuss this, let’s get it over at the beginning. There are lotuses and there are water-lilies. Lotuses are Nelumbos and they come in pink (which are also called red) and white only. They open at night, but don’t necessarily close during the day, I don’t think. Some do. Anyway….

Lotuses have those big, extremely edible and fantastic seed pods, and water-lilies don’t. Lotuses can apparently regulate the temperature of its flowers, like warm blooded animals do.

Water lilies are not even related to lotuses. They are Nymphaea. They don’t have the big interesting seed pod but they are delightful anyway and water-lilies come in many colors, like blue. Both lotuses and water lilies smell boldly technicolor, bright and strong and floral in weird ways, and although they smell similar, they do smell different from each other and even color to color.

But, that said, unless we are having this exact discussion, we refer to blue water-lilies as blue lotuses. Sorry, I know it bugs a few people, but that’s the way it is. It’s easier and cuter, a double whammy.

Pink lotuses open at night, as I said, and blue ones and white ones open in the daytime. (White water-lilies I assume open in the say and maybe the white lotuses open at night.) It’s hard to know since they don’t necessarily close at all.

All the lotus ponds I visited were mono-chromatic, at least for the most part. I did spot a couple of pink volunteers in the corner of the blue pond, etc. But the majority are all pink, all blue, all white.

Since the lotuses are picked primarily for drying and eating, pesticides are not used. Instead, catfish troll beneath the surface eating worms, bugs, and any other bottom dwellers.

The lotuses are harvested by guys going out with big floating buckets. The harvesters don’t have to go out in little round boats like they do in India’s lotus harvest because even though there are some snakes, there are “not too many.”

This is winter here in Thailand and that doesn’t mean cold—it means there is a breeze, but the flowers don’t like it so much and so there are not too many lotuses out, compared to the summer.

I have to admit I was skeptical in the past. I had never seen enough blue lotuses (waterlilies) to accept that blue lotus oil could be available on the open commercial market but now I get to eat my words, which would taste better with a crunch of fried lotus root to go with.

We ended the day with an overnight to a remote little rural resort, saturated with incredible night blooming flowers and thousands of orchids. Right outside my window was completely insane Quisqualis, not even creeping but somehow turned into a large bush growing out of an anthill. Once the sun was gone all hell broke loose. I was dizzy all night as thousands of fat and assertive blossoms exploded in drunken glee. Oh yeah.

For more photos please visit the Enfleurage Facebook Page

Completely Out of Control

You’d think I was coming off 1 year in the Sahara the way I reacted. But it was just 7 weeks in Salalah. I don’t feel deprived in Salalah; there are no foods I crave. It’s perfectly fine. I don’t even shop at the little store catering for expats.

But I went to the big Gourmet Market in the Bangkok Emporium today. Now, I’m from New York, and we have considerably well stocked supermarkets there. But let me tell you, Whole Foods, Fairway, Zabars…none of can touch that Gourmet Market, especially when you’re coming from Salalah. My God I bought fresh Passion fruit and Beet juice! Cherry blossom infused green tea! Little chive cakes that are to die for. They’re glutinous and then get fried to order. Then they cut them up with scissors. Just packed with chives too. And those little coconut thingies, like the milk, or cream, fried in tiny iron coconut treat fryers.

I had a treatment today, and if you are in Bangkok or heading here, I heartily recommend Urban Retreat Spa and there are a few of them. I go to the one at Phrom Phong. The therapists are excellent. I usually see Phet, who is well-named, and today I saw Pla (which I thought was the word for fish, but never mind.) She is also excellent. I had a whole body scrub that was so necessary I can’t even explain, and now my skin is so soft! I should do this all the time. Normal women do. But for some reason I usually don’t manage it, preferring unpleasant things I guess. I really don’t know. Then I had an hour and half massage.
Tomorrow I’m going for an hour just on my head and neck and another hour on my feet!
It’s not the cheapest place in Bangkok, and I doubt men will get happy endings there, so if those are your concerns, then go to Nana. But it’s still really well priced, no matter what economy you’re coming from. So if you want seriously good bodywork, then try Urban Retreat Spa. There are also branches at Asoke and Phrom Chai.

Also today I visited the Thailand Creative Design Center, up on the 6th floor of Emporium, the main reason in fact, that I was at the Emporium. They seem to be an excellent resource not only for their well-stocked library, specializing in books on all types of art and design, but also for their resource and information center, as the title implies.

It’s a shock and a half, being here after Salalah, it’s just very…..very..…plentiful. Kind of like Mauritania.

Urban Retreat Spa

Thailand Creative Design Center

Mauritania

The Wonders of Ain Garziz

There I was, out at Ain Garziz the other morning, looking for a glimpse of the Rock Hyrax, a fat, cute and irritable little beast about the size of badger I think, yet related to elephants. We sell the poop, concentrated as an absolute and then diluted in alcohol, at Enfleurage, under the name “Africa Stone.”

I think the poop (and pee) we have in the store comes from southern Africa, and I suspect that the only reason it was collected in the past is because it could be collected, as the hyrax uses latrines instead of just pooping everywhere it goes, like horses or dogs. Or elephants. And I guess if you live in someplace like the Kalahari, it makes sense to try everything you can.

So the local people traditionally used hyrax effluvia for medicine, and no, I don’t know for what exactly. I read they also used it for perfume but this is too much for me to think about.

My attention was drawn to the presence of hyrax by Mr. Muhammed Shanfari, who trolls the Dhofari countryside taking excellent photos and then posting them on the internet. His flicker account will be listed at the bottom of the post and also in the “links” column to the right. He’s an encyclopedia of knowledge, and can rattle off names of obscure (to me) plants and animals in Latin, Arabic, English and Jebali. He’s got lots of pictures of our delicious and hardy Dhofari lavender too.

So, there I was out at Ain Garziz, looking for the hyrax, and of course also for lavender but where to even begin looking. Supposedly they are both, lavender and hyrax, everywhere. But I was feeling a bit grumpy, despite the lovely morning, since I am still in a holding pattern, after an eternity in one. I do get little nibbles of delight, as the future gets dangled in front of my eyes, and then disappears into yet another holiday, and then it’s back to watching for a small animal, whom I know the existence of through his poop, and standing idly in the sunshine.

No one was around, except a few technicolor birds and I figured eventually a hyrax would scurry down the rocks in front of me. But then my phone rang and I took the call, plonking down on the nearby bench and bending down over my knees while I listened to some explanations. Although what he said was probably quite interesting, I completely forgot to listen because everything at my new eye level was lavender! It was all lavender, lavender for days, sprouting out of every rock, clinging to every crag, gathered happily in the dust, waving tiny purple flowers about, hoping to catch the eye of a bee I guess. It seemed that lavender had snuck in one night and replaced every other plant with itself in some kind of demented frenzy.

I was happy about it. And hopped over the balustrade to examine closer. This being Salalah, the land and the weeds and every flower is owned by someone, and so I didn’t gather a great wracking armload of lavender to go throw in the still, although I wanted to. But I did take a couple of tiny little wisps of lavender and rush home to put them in pots. They remain there, upright and hopeful after three days. Inshaa Allah they will be there, and happy and alive when I return from Thailand.

Here is Mr. Shanfari’s photo stream on Flickr.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shanfari/

The photo of the lavender at the beginning of this post was taken by me, and it's a soft and green, plump little coddled one, grown in a greenhouse near Muscat. The Garziz ones are tougher, more wily and fiercer.