Science Friday - Bitters And Botany, Whale Evolution. Sept 27, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: September 27, 2019

Can conservation be concocted in your cocktails? Yes, according to the botanist authors of Botany at the Bar, a new book about making your own bitters—those complex flavor extracts used to season a Manhattan or old-fashioned. They experiment with an array of novel recipes using underappreciated plants found around the world, from tree resin, to osha root, to numbing Szechuan peppercorns. Ira talks to ethnobotanist Selena Ahmed and plant geneticist Ashley DuVal about their recipes, how you can make complex and flavorful tinctures for cocktails and other seasonings, and their not-so-secret ulterior motive to share the stories of how people have used plants—common and rare—for thousands of years. Plus, mixologist Christian Schaal talks about the art and science of combining flavors. Fifty million years ago, the ancient ancestors of whales and dolphins roamed the land on four legs. But over time, these aquatic mammals have evolved to live fully in the ocean—their genetic makeup changing along the way. Now, a group of scientists have investigated the changes in 85 different genes that were lost in this land-to-sea transition. Mark Springer, evolutionary biologist, discusses the genetic trade-offs that cetaceans have evolved, including an inability to produce saliva and melatonin, and the benefits they provide for a deep-diving, aquatic lifestyle. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Did you know that whales and dolphins and other cetaceans don't make saliva? That's what I said. Well, you know, makes sense, right, if you're surrounded by water? But they've also lost genes involved in blood clotting. Hmm. Imagine all the drastic changes that their wolf-like land-dwelling ancestor had to go through to become the streamlined ocean animals that they are today. A team of researchers was interested in figuring out how this evolution happened on a genetic level. They mapped out 85 different genes that were lost in this aquatic transition,

and their results were published in the journal Science Advances. To walk us through the genetic steps, whales, and dolphins had to go through to make it into the water. Meet Mark Springer. One of the authors on that study is also a professor of biology at University of California at Riverside. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. It is a pleasure to be here. That's our pleasure to have you. Usually when you're studying animals from millions of years ago, you look for fossils, but in your study, you look at molecular fossils.

You know, what does that mean? So in the genome, we have many different genes, and as you mentioned, the gene that's expressed in saliva, it's one of the genes in cetaceans that's no longer needed. But even though a gene is no longer needed, there are remnants of that gene that are still in the genome. It's just a dead gene or a fossil gene, if you will. And it has mutations that have been fixed in that gene and make it inactive. So it's a broken gene. It can't do its job. And we were interested in looking for different genes that are broken that formerly were functional and would have coded for different proteins.

and so there are now alignments that are available for many different mammals. And the alignment that we worked with is an alignment of genome sequences for more than 60 different mammals, including four different cetaceans. And we screened all of the protein coding genes for genes that have these inactivating mutations. And we were looking for genes where the inactivating mutations are shared by all of the different cetaceans. we ended up with this list of about 85. 85. These are genes that changed from when they were.

Let me go backwards from now. What are the closest living relatives or maybe not living relatives on land that are close to the cetaceans? So for a long time, it was not clear what the closest relative of cetaceans was. But in the last 30 years, we have learned a tremendous amount based on genes and all. also based on the fossil record. And what came from a study of different genes is that the closest living relative of cetaceans is hippopotamuses. And we think that they diverged from each other about 54 or so million years ago. And living cetaceans, there's two main groups of them.

There are the baleen whales, and then there are the toothed whales. And they have a common ancestor that they shared with each other. probably about 37 million years ago. So there's this transitional period from when whales diverged from hippos until we have the last common ancestor of the toothed whales and the baleen whales. And we were interested in the changes, the genes that were lost on that particular branch in the evolutionary history leading to whales. Okay, so give us an idea of what the steps were.

What happened to allow these land animals to become, ocean-dwelling animals? So we can learn about the different steps based on the fossil record and also from the genes that we find in the genome. So there are changes that occur with the skin. So the skin is much thicker, and the hair has been lost. Almost all hair has been lost in cetaceans. And that probably just sort of gets in the way and causes additional friction.

You were mentioning saliva. Well, when you're looking at a lot of these cetaceans, they're just swallowing food hole anyway, and so they've lost a lot of taste receptors. And pretty much every organ system, if you're looking at the kidneys, if you're looking at the lungs, if you're looking at various sensory systems,

the eyes, if you're looking at olfaction or the sense of smell, all of these systems are reorganized. And what's great about cetaceans, is that this is one of the most remarkable macro-revolutionary transitions in the history of vertebrates. And we have access not only to a wonderful fossil record now over the last 30 years, but also these genomes. And when we sort of take the genomic fossils and then the fossils that we find in rocks and put it all together, we can kind of piece together and learn about some of these steps.

So if you look at stations, one of the things that they do is dive, and sometimes they stay down a very long time. There's a beaked whale that has the longest recorded dive of more than two hours, and it was at a depth of almost 3,000 meters. So diving is, it's a very difficult thing to do. Mammals have lungs. They're not like fished with gills. And so one of the challenges that cetaceans have is when they are diving and they're down for a long time, they only have a limited amount of oxygen. And so one of the things that they do is that they reduce the amount of blood flow to the extremities of the body. And that's something that we call peripheral vasoconstriction, so the blood vessels leading to the periphery,

of the body are constricted. Well, a consequence of that is it's more likely that blood clots will form. And so a couple of the genes that we found were inactivated on this common ancestral branch leading to whales are genes that are involved with blood clot formation. And so these genes don't work anymore. And it makes it less likely that cetaceans will get blood clots during, diving. That's interesting. So that

yeah, you know, whales have flippers that appear very different than human hands, but the bones and the structures are still in there, right? What about whales that kept them that allowed them to move in the water? Did they have to lose genes

or gain genes or change the genes that allowed them to rejigger their hands or their limbs into flippers? There are a lot of changes in the sequence in the expression of some of the different genes, so some of the

the hox genes that are involved with the patterning of limbs, the sequence of expression is different. So we're not finding so much of the gene loss associated with the transition from a fully terrestrial animal with long limbs to

a whale where you have flippers and then you've essentially lost the hind limbs entirely. That seems to be mostly a case of changing the expression and the timing of expression of different genes. You found the gene that there was a loss of a gene for melatonin. Yes. Why is that important? Well, melatonin is commonly known as the sleep hormone, and sleep is very challenging for fully aquatic marine mammals. We don't have gills.

Mammals need to resurface regularly to breathe. So it's hard to sleep if you need to resurface regularly to breathe. And ocean waters can also be very cold, and if you fall asleep, you lose body heat. So in a thermally challenging environment, it's useful to not have to fall asleep. And so whales have this unique way of sleeping. And they put only one side of the brain to sleep at a time. And so it's something that we call unihemispheric sleep. And so they're alternating between the right side of the brain and the left side of the brain that they're putting to sleep.

So this allows them to do the things that they need to do, to stay warm and to breathe without kind of compromising their ability to sleep. But how does an animal sleep with only one side of the brain at a time, unlike us where we're sleeping with both sides of the brain? Well, the melatonin, this sleep hormone, it's produced at night much more than in the day. so it's kind of turned on at night and then off during the day. And it's associated with sleep. And melatonin, it's produced from what's sometimes called the happy chemical, which is serotonin. And there are a couple of enzymatic steps to get there. And both of the genes that code for these enzymes are broken in cetaceans.

So they don't work. So cetaceans can't make melatonin. And we think that this loss of these genes may have been important in facilitating this unihemispheric sleep that is characteristic of cetaceans. And so it was an important change in this transition to a fully aquatic existence that we see in cetaceans. What is there about this land-to-water transition that you find so fascinating? Why do you study it? What interests you about it? Well, it's sort of the reverse of what happened hundreds of millions of years ago.

So if you go back maybe 380 to 360 million years ago, our vertebrate ancestors were coming out of the water. And so that was one of the most important events in the history of vertebrate evolution. That's what gave rise to tetrapods. And now in the Cenozoic, we have a group whales that have really, returned to the water. So it's fascinating because it's a, it's a big macroevolutionary transition. And it involves sort of all of the different organ systems of the body and everything needs to be refashioned. So it's not just a matter of changing hair color or this or that. I mean, it's a sort of a whole scale sort of rearrangement of the entire body plan. So that's, that's why I

think it's so interesting. And also, because we have this sort of complementary approach where we can take fossils and we can also learn from genes and try and piece together everything that has happened. Thank you for taking time to join with us, Mark. Mark Springer, one of the authors on a study published in Science advances. He's also a professor of biology at the University of California at Riverside.

We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're capturing flavors of biodiversity with help from some. botanists and a bartender. I have three flavors. Well, I've got a lot of flavors in front of me that I'll be testing out. We're going to be talking about the bitters and herbs and stuff. Join us after the break. This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Flato. Have you ever ordered an exotic drink at the bar? And no, I'm not talking about the ones with the little umbrellas in them. No. The ones I'm talking about have exotic flavors like turpinoline. That's the compound in pine needles that makes the... them very piney. Or limonine, the citrus flavor of oranges, lemon, and cardam.

How about camphine? What's that? That's the pungent component of ginger and tea leaves. My next guest wants you to get excited about tasting these and a whole host of other flavors that you may never have experienced. From plants you may not have heard of. And I want you to know this by drinking them. For example, the bitter ingredient in your cocktail bitters,

That's probably Genshin. That's a root used in Italian liquors for centuries. But you can also make them with OSHA. A root found in the Pacific Northwest that bears, you know, they use that medicinally also. Or if you like spicy flavors, try the Sichuan peppercorn, which also has a numbing effect. And yes, we're going to talk about botany at the bar, whether it's homemade cocktail bitters or infusions that have. nothing to do with booze and the science of flavor. And we want to know what's an underappreciated botanical flavor that you like? We've been asking all week on our Science Friday Vox Pop app. Ken

in Kansas, for example, have these suggestions. How about sumac seeds? I like to suck on them after they've come out and turned red. Another fun one this time of year is hackberries. They are sweet and tasty. Hmm, what about you? Give us a call. Our number is 844-724-8255, or you can tweet us at SciFry, 844-724-8255. Let me bring on my guests. Dr. Selina Ahmed, Associate Professor of Sustainable Food Systems at Montana State University in Bozeman, co-author of Botany at the Bar. Welcome, Selena. Thank you for having us, Ira. Great book. A lot of great recipes in there. Ashley Duvali, plant geneticist and co-author of Botany at the Bar. She's in Davis, California.

Welcome, Ashley. Thank you so much for having us. Well, let's start right at the beginning. Salina, what are bitters at their essence? Absolutely. Bitter is a really broad definition is essentially botanical extractions that pull out the flavor and therapeutic properties of plants. And people have been extracting botanicals from their surrounding.

biodiversity for centuries, actually thousands of years, in civilizations across the globe. And these extractions historically very much had a medicinal function as well as other attributes. For example, botanicals were extracted in ancient Egypt were used for medicinal properties such as for digestion, but were also used for other functions such as for promoting vivid dreams and were used topically as well as incense. And so doing field research in different communities around the world, we've seen different cultures extracting plants from their local biodiversity and really seeing these extractions as a common cultural thread

of cultures around the world and through time. And more recently, bidders have really come to be associated with cocktails for recreation. However, historically, cocktails really wore for therapeutic reasons, and the earliest definitions of cocktails always had bitters in them. Were there any two cultures that you both, Celine, and Ashley, focused in on, to focus on what their bidders were? Sure, Ashley, maybe you can start. Sure. One common thread that we all noticed doing research in very different parts of the world, Selena, working. quite a bit in China, Asia, and the Himalayas, myself in Latin America, Rachel, in Africa,

the Middle East, as well as Asia. We noticed that everywhere we would travel for our ethnographic surveys and field research, often the households would have bottles of roots and herbs infusing on their countertops, or when Rachel was in Togo and Senegal, the village chiefs would invite her in to join with her a cup of bidders. And so rather than them necessarily, necessarily being the focus of our research at the time. There were this uniting thread that seemed to pop up very persistently in all of the different places that we would go. And as a result of that, we started to use them as a tool to communicate our research as well as a way of kind of bringing back flavors from the field and capturing this less concrete, less tangible essence of what a plant or a landscape might taste or smell like when you're trying to communicate a more serious.

or dry topic of your research about that particular organism. I mean, if you go around the world talking to different cultures about what bitters and flavorings they're using, how do you narrow it down? You must find a whole lot of them. That's far into what we usually use here in the United States. Yes, absolutely. Selina?

Yeah, absolutely. So there's about 360,000. species of flowering plants and out of that about 25,000 have been used for food and medicine throughout history so you can really begin to understand the huge breadth of biodiversity and plants that really come into play in making these bidders from around the world and you know some some bitters have many and recipes that we create have many plants in them maybe 10 or 20 or 30 whereas as other bitters really might just be a single ingredient, and really understanding the variation and complexity of flavor of just one botanical species

is also really rewarding. So why are we talking about bitters? And what is there about bitters and not sweet or salty or sour flavors, Ashley? Well, that's a great question. And I think that a lot of the plants that we've observed being used, in bitters in a traditional context are having a different pharmacological or medicinal effect. There's a number of different chemical compounds with known therapeutic effects in different ways that have bitter tastes. It's actually one of our more highly evolved senses. We have about

25 different bitter taste receptors as opposed to just one or two for sweet or salty or sour. So on the taste side, it has a lot of importance on the botanical side as well. This is a very diverse class of compounds that plants typically use as an aversion strategy. It's in many cases it's a signal to not consume a particular part of the plant. Don't eat me. Right, exactly. Don't eat me. Stay away. Stay away.

Hey, okay, a lot of people interested with their own ideas. Let's go to the phones to Gabriel in Palo Alto. Hi, Gabriel. Hi, Ira, thank you very much for having me on. Go ahead. Yeah, so when I was a kid growing up in Mexico, we used to have eucalyptus-flavored chewing gum that was sold commercially, and I haven't seen it in over 20 years, but I remember it was delicious. It was literally just eucalyptus flavors. Was it a bitter flavor?

It was kind of minty-oily. It wasn't bitter. It was, and they used to mined. makes it also with peppermint. So they had eucalyptus or eucalyptus peppermint. Wow. Ashley, Salino, have you heard of that? Not the chewing gum, but we love to use eucalyptus.

In fact, we have several cocktails that use different species of eucalyptus. You usually only see maybe one or three around the world, but there's a wide variety of them in Australia. And in fact, one of the oldest fermented beverages from Australia was made out of eucalyptus gum. So it has a long tradition of use in alcohol and bitters. Let's go to Andrew. I'm sorry, go ahead. Also, just to tap on, so bitters have a bitter taste,

and sometimes that's the dominant taste profile, but there's also hundreds or thousands of volatile aromatic compounds, such as the turpenoids found in eucalyptus, that give bitters a much more complex flavor than just bitter. Let's go to Andrew in Cleveland. Hi, Andrew. Hi. My wife and I enjoy growing

what are called ground cherries. And they're a plant from the Tomatillo family. They grow these little tiny versions of Tomatio, sometimes as big as like a basic marble-sized fruit. And they're ripe when they fall to the ground and kind of a papery husk. And the fruit inside is a yellow to greenish berry, and it tastes like the best way to describe it

is sort of a baked pineapple. If you can imagine like a very sweet tropical flavor but also carrying kind of this savory, bready flavor that you would get from something that was baked kind of in croix in a dough. And they're very easy to grow. They recede themselves very easily. If you plant them, you will never be without them. Thanks for telling us about that.

Are you familiar with that? Sure. Faisalis, there's some different species, and it's a fun one. I think actually there have been some efforts to grow it more commercially now, and in the last couple of years, I've started to see it on shelves and specialty stores.

So that is one of the crops we're kind of keeping an eye on as being another potential underutilized food that is gaining some traction. Well, I have in front of me three different, I have herbs, dried herbs and bitters, and that you guys have provided with me. And I'm going to try the taste. and see what they taste like. The first one I have is raisin in the sun. I'm sure you're familiar

with that one. Let me give it a taste. It doesn't taste like the raisin or a sun. It's kind of a woody taste to it. If I would describe it, what should I be tasting? Well, this blend was actually one of our attempts to recreate or put a new spin on an old classic because as much as we tried to steer people away from the very common bitters varieties that are available today, we also acknowledge that there's some recipes that you just can't make without that certain blend. And so this is sort of a reformulation of a paste shodes, and this is an important bitters for a Sazerac cocktail. I could see why that would, from the taste of it.

It's really interesting. Let me move on to what I have, the second one here called Toba, Toba. Chai. Let me try the Tobachai. Oh, that's distinctive. That's very nice. I could see that as a mixed drink if you're using it in mixed drink. So the Tobu Chai has a lot of different botanicals that were historically used in Ayurveda to stimulate appetite as well as boost immunity, such as clove and black pepper. And so it is a really nice sort of spice addition to our cocktails, but sometimes we also use it sort of as liquid seasoning in other culinary elements in our kitchen, such as for salad dressing or marinerades.

It's too bad where I'm using this in seltzer water and not in, you know, something. Not in a cocktail. Well, I would be, I'm such a cheap drunk, I'd never get out of it. Get the rest of the show done. All right, third one, third one I'm going to do is citrus grove. That is a little, that is a little citrusy. Hmm, that's a nice flavor. I could see you, taking all these home tonight.

Tell me about that one. Yeah, the origin of that blend came out of requests, actually, from our bartender and mixologist community that we regularly bounce ideas off of. While most of our blends are based around themes and botanical stories, this one's actually revolving around diversity within a species or a clade. And one of the complaints that we were hearing is that there are. really aren't very many good citrus bitters out there that are complex and layered. And so we wanted to bring in more citrus species. There are many species that are hybrids between orange and lemon, Mandarin, pommelow. And so we tried to capture as many, cumquat, as many different variants of a normal citrus bitters to add different layers to what would normally

be maybe one species and an extraction. Interesting. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday, from WNYC Studios, talking with Dr. Sleena Ahmed and Ashley Duval about the bitters. If people want to try this themselves, your book has great recipes in there for making different drinks. How hard is it to come by these ingredients? So that really varies. We have some recipes in our bidders book or just bitters recipes in general that are very common that you may be able to get at your local supermarket. or different ethnic grocery stores in your community. And more and more online, a lot of these ingredients are available for some of the more complex

bitters recipes. And then we also really encourage people to explore their local biodiversity and, you know, really using the bitters recipes that exist sort of as an inspiration to create your own formulas off what may be available to you locally in your surrounding land. landscape. So people can make their own plant flavor concoctions and you get an idea of how diverse biodiversity there is out there. Yeah, absolutely. We really see bidders really as this link of cultures and really for people to sort of taste their biodiversity and have this relationship to their ecology through bidders. We have one last listener who sent us in an audio

clip John from Columbia, Maryland shared his favorite hiking snack. My favorite leaves to eat are pine needles. In fact, pine needles have more vitamin c ounce per ounce than orange juice. I also love steeping pine needles in my hot chocolate.

Mmm, delicious. I would have never thought of that. Pine needles? Yeah? Absolutely. The First Nation communities in Montana where I live have long-used pine needles for exactly for their nutrients, and more and more we're starting to integrate pine needles into our

recipes. So, yeah, definitely has a lot of turpenoid chemistry. That's delicious, but I have not tasted it with hot chocolate, and that's going to be on my list of things to do. Now, is it safe to just go out and pick these on your own off a tree? I mean, could you be getting into trouble with some kind of species of pine tree that's deadlier, you know, just you don't know much about the botany there? Well, with all of the foraged ingredients, we recommend people do their due diligence,

even with species that may be common or they may have a good familiarity with them. We still recommend always making sure that you've keyed it out to the species level. And that means not just shooting a picture with a naturalist based on the single leaf. You've got to look at the flowers, the morphology, and be sure, because there are plenty of examples of close relatives to one another that have very different properties. For instance, Chinese star anise is edible. It's one of the most common and popular spices, and it's relative Japanese star anus,

which is only differentiated by two additional stars on the dried dehiscite fruit, is potentially lethal. It has strong levels of eugenal and other chemicals that are known to be carcinogenic. And so even with sourced things, you have to watch out for adulterance, but definitely when foraging, know your flora. We have a lot of people who have their own suggestions on the phone.

844-724-8255. We'll be back with Selena Abbott and Ashley DeVal. Authors of Botany at the Bar. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking about the science of flavor.

Botany, you can drink and tasting biodiversity with botanists Selina Ahmed and Ashley Duval. They're both co-authors of botany at the bar. And you can see some recipes and an excerpt from the book on our website, ScienceFriday.com slash bidders.

I want to bring on one more person to the conversation. A professional drink maker, a mixologist, who helped you pair these flavors with the cocktail recipes. Christian Shaw, a mixologist and beverage director at Zebulon in Los Angeles. Welcome

Welcome, Christian. Hi, Ira. Pleasure to be here. Nice to have you. As someone who makes drinks for people used to more, shall I say, conventional ballots, how do you take something completely new and make it into a balanced drink? That's a great question, and it was a challenge that was posed very often with creating the drinks for this book, because we have some very esoteric ingredients we're working with. I think it's, you know, it's really identifying the ingredient and then going to see, what does this taste like? What does this smell like? What does this remind me of? We worked with something called Azuane in the book, which is a seed, actually a fruit from Africa and the Middle East. And so I didn't know anything about it. So I had to really get in there and say, what does this remind me of?

So I heated some up in a pan. I was like, okay, this kind of had some coriander, cumin, oregano-type notes to it. And then I started cycling through what liquors I could pair it with. And gin and vermouth were the first things that came to mind because both are infused with botanical ingredients common to what Ajuwon tastes like. So then going from there, what type of drink can I make with it? And a gin drink is either going to be something with martini base or something a little lighter gin and tonic-style drink. Wow, you know, you have such experience with making these drinks. I have a phone load of people who have all kinds of suggestions here.

I'm going to cycle through as main as I can and then get your comments on. Let's go first to Lisa in Winterhaven, Florida. Hi, Lisa. Yes, my question is about Jerusalem artichokes. Go for it. Essentially, many of us, we love the fresh, crunchy flavor of the Jerusalem artichoke, but the flatulence is a problem. Is there something that we can pair the Jerusalem artichoke in our digestive systems

to keep having that horrible flatulence? Bet you weren't expecting that question today. Actually, you'd be surprised how often these issues come up with bitters-making. That was one of the primary uses of bidders, in fact. That was a usage of it. It's actually doing what it's made for. Well, I would suggest pairing it with some other known carminatives and ingredients to relieve flatulents and have some complementarity between them.

Cumin and cardamomone. Fennel. Okay. Let's go to Houston to Colby in Houston. Hi, Colby. Hi, Ira. Hi, there. Go for it.

So I've been playing with Carraway. and cumin in my drinks. I've made a caraway liqueur, kind of a riff on the Danish Acovet. And then I tried making a cumin bitter that turned out

really nicely, paired well with pineapple rum, of all things. Christian, are you surprised by that? No, not at all. I mean, I think human has a very under-explored it's a very under-explored flavor in cocktails, and I think that

There's definitely a world of things you can do with it. I could see it. I totally agree. I could see it in rum. I could see it in Muscal. Yeah, I think it's a great idea. Whiskey as well. Yeah.

Let's go to Lisa in Kenville. Hi, Lisa. Hi, this is, it's Curringville, California, and that's all right. We're at 3,000 feet, and we, as a group of older women, pick elder berries and make jam, but we also make a tonic. for winter that's a syrup that we use. But it seems that elderberries are very, they don't taste good when you just pick them. They're never sweet, and we have to use sugar with it.

Or honey, is there any suggestion to help it be sweeter? Hmm. Christian, you have any ideas, Ashley? I mean, I think that's a very, I think ripe elder berries are a very bitter, sort of tangy fruit to begin with. I think adding, I mean, the only way to balance that I could imagine is what they're already doing. Agave could be another sweetener they might want to play around with. You can place off of some of the taste modulations as well, so salty can suppress a little bit of that bitterness,

and then sweet and bitter tastes can cancel each other out as well. So I think finding a balance that has a sweetener that might be. be sweeter than something you would normally use, would be toned down a little bit in a combination like that, monk fruit perhaps. Ashley, you also encourage people to find plants local to their areas and try experimenting with them. How do you go about doing that? What's the best way?

Well, I think there's lots of resources for people that are interested in getting out to nature. Native plant societies in different communities often take hikes and certainly guide books and and different resources to learn about your local flora are good ways to get started. But if it's something that doesn't exist in your area, make a meet-up group, find like-minded friends, get a key to plants and have some fun with some drinks,

dissecting flowers. Well, let me get to the practical aspects of this. Let's say you want to experiment on your own. What kind of bar tools do you need or cutlery or grinding devices? How do you do it? Give me an idea. What would be? Christian, how would you do it? Are you talking about just finding a botanical and then making an extraction of it? Yeah.

Yeah, I think really, you know, going back to what we were just talking about, depending on where you are, you could really just go to your local park. Like, I could walk out my door in L.A. here and go into the park, and I can grab eucalyptus, rosemary, Ardineasia, California. And then what I would do would be go home. And I, you know, say I wanted to take the eucalyptus that I've had, if I had some vodka at home, just straight vodka, and a blender, I could take some of the eucalyptus, put it into the blender with the vodka, blend it, taste it, and then see where it was at. If you wanted more eucalyptus, you could add more. You start with a little.

And then filter it out. And then immediately, within five minutes, you have eucalyptus infused vodka. Wow. Not very hard at all. Let's go to Lorena in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida. Hi, Lorenza. Or is it Lorena? No, it's Lorena. I'm sorry. No, you're fine. I'm originally from Peru, and this is something I haven't had here since I moved to the States. Two drinks. One was Warana with whiskey, that is very common over there. And then another drink that I had over there, it was Pisco with Camu Camel, which is a Amazon. It's something that grows in the Amazon of the room. And it's something that you have to develop the taste. You grow the taste because it's kind of bitter at the beginning, but then the more you eat it, the sweeter it becomes. But I never had that here in the United States since I moved here in 2006.

But whiskey and what a night is something I can only find in Miami Beach. Because they have more, I guess, North Americans over there, and they export Juana from there. but that's the only area where I can actually find whiskey with Guarana. Interesting. Thanks for sharing that with us. Salina, Ashley, have you heard of that? Yeah, actually, two of those ingredients went into one of our blends,

the Amazonian forest farmer, Guarana and Kamukamu, both being native to the Amazon estuary. And they're actually really hard to work with in a bidders, but I think in some other drinks like a Pisco, you can get that balance right. Camacamo is extremely acidic, Guarana is very bitter. We have a tweet and an answer to the flatulins question. Why am I not surprised? It says, Shalene tweets, my mom has always used ashawain, if I'm pronouncing that correctly.

Oh, wow. To balance the flatulins caused by taro. It may work for Jerusalem artichokes, too. A little bit of advice there, Christian? I think? Well, that's the ingredient I was just talking about. Yeah, so that's great. Let's, a lot of, is there something you have yet to try?

Let me ask all three of you that you would like to try to see how well it works. Are you still hunting for a plant that you haven't tried yet? Selena, Ashley? So most of the plants that we try are plants that we've encountered in our ethnobotanical research or doing workshops with different people or working with mixologists. So I would say that I've really been privileged to try a lot of different flavors. But what I really haven't tried is combination off a lot of different flavors. So I think I'm excited to continue working with people like Christian to really take some of the ingredients that we're putting in bitters

and see how they can be experienced in new ways with some of the flavor innovation that he's doing. and other mixologists are doing through combining different botanical profiles and different cocktails. I want to ask my own question, and then I have a question from the phones. Are olives considered ingredients for bitters at all? I mean, olives are used in drinks, martinis, whatever. Would that be considered an ingredient, or am I just? So any botanical can essentially be, that can be extracted, can be considered an ingredient for our bitters. So bitters, we've primarily been talking about in being extracted in alcohol,

but, you know, bitters are also extracted in water like tea and tizane, in vinegars. And so something that, like the salty water that, you know, olives are sitting in can be considered a bitters extraction. Dirty martini. Let's go to a vox pop from Matt in Austin who loves one very bitter flavor in particular. The flavor that I like is the bitter flavor of quinine, which I know comes from the bark of the Sincona tree. I will drink tonic water, even if I don't have gin as a mixer. Hmm. I think you found three people who'll do that also.

Absolutely. I do that. What is it? What is it about that flavor that's so interesting? What makes it interesting? Well, we'll Go ahead, jump in there. Christian, you want to, do you find an interesting flavor?

Quineine, yeah, definitely. And I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of bitterness, bitter flavors that are, you can make liqueurs into, with quinine or with gen chin. There's a fantastic liqueure called Chinatina, which is made from orange peals and Chinchona bark. and I would recommend that to our caller who just called in. Very aromatic, spicy, and bitter. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking about all kinds of bitter flavors.

Let's go to the phones. There are so many of them. Let's go to Holly in Mystic, Connecticut. Hi, Holly. Hello, Ira. Hello there. Thank you. This is the first time I've ever gotten through to you.

So I've spent a lot of time doing culinary research in the Middle East. And I have one vivid memory of a rather posh luncheon with a bunch of women in Bahrain. And it was a household that did not imbibe alcohol, but they were very keen on trying all kinds and preserving all sorts of traditional recipes. And one of the things they did in their kitchen was they burned frankincense, that is, the resin of Boswellia, which is indigenous to southwest Arabian Peninsula, and they would burn it and use it to scent the unglazed interiors of terracotta water vessels in which they would store water to keep it cool,

and the water itself would have the light flavoring from the frankincense. So it's sort of like drinking high mass, and really an interesting flavor. and an interesting way to get it. Saline, ever heard of that? Yeah, there's a lot of archaeological evidence that's been found in the Middle East that has shown resins such as frankincense that has been found in vessels. And historically, it was, frankincense was also infused in wines with honey for that flavor profile.

Do you think that making these lesser-known ingredients more popular help protect them or the people around the world who rely on them economically, or does it create more competition, Selena, for a limited resource? A little bit of both. I think if you don't use it, you lose it. And so it's really important to begin to sort of value certain species so we can be more cognizant off their value in our landscapes and in our ecosystems. However, certain plants, when they become very, get a lot of commercial attention,

including many of those that are used in bidders, such as Yellow Jensian or Jenshin Lutia, they can then undergo harvesting pressures of over-harvesting. And so there are sort of responses to that in thinking about good harvesting practices, sustainable harvesting practices, and then sort of domestication and cultivation of some of those species that are threatened in the wild. And so I think definitely understanding our biodiversity is really important through bitters. And really, you know, unlike foods where we're really just consuming a handful or a few handfuls of species, for most of our calories, with bitters you can really explore many different types of flavors.

And, you know, as we've seen with the different callers that are calling in, different people have different preferences. And so, you know, and we're consuming these plants in such smaller amounts. And so there really is, by having sort of different preferences and consuming them in smaller amounts, there's less harvesting pressures, you know, for that biodiversity loss and hopefully more reasons to conserve that biodiversity. Christian, do you have any bitter you want to experiment with tonight? I'm going to play around with something called sous, which is a genton-based liqueur from France. Okay, send us a tweet or something about how that turns out. I want to thank all of you for taking a tap to view with it today. It was Kristen Shal, a mixologist, and beverage director for Zebuline in Los Angeles.

Slina Ahmed and Ashley Duval are authors of Botany at the Bar. This is a great recipe book of all kinds of drinks. You've done a wonderful job, illustrations, and making those recipes. It's really an unusual book, and we have an excerpt from the book on our website at ScienceFriety.com. slash bidders. Thank you all for taking time to be with us today. Thank you very much. You heard some of our listeners on our Vox Pop app. You can also join them.

If you want to hear your voice on Science Friday, you can download the app. It's called Science Friday Vox Pop. And we've got a question there for all of you, breadbakers. New question. We need help perfecting your proof. Do you need that kind of help or refining your rise? And a few weeks, we'll be talking with a baking expert about bread hacks and alternative flowers and grains,

and we want to know what do you need help with? What do you need help with? Let us know on the Science Friday Vox Pop app everywhere, wherever. Wherever you get your apps, you can find it there. Have a great weekend, trying out all those bidders tonight. I'm Ira Flato in New York.