Fopinions February: Foods & Beverages

[extrapenguin]

Today's Fopinions February is for rheasilvia, on foods and beverages! For my opinions on beverages, please consult my icon. :P

Foods
I hate sweet things, so my favorite dessert is not having a dessert. Bar that, fruits are nice. Whenever I bake, I minimize the amount of sugar, so my various cakes etc are quite unsweet despite being what they are. (I don't bake that often, though.) Almost always the main course tastes better than the dessert. *g*

Tastes I actually like are savory and spicy, savory the most. I've listed my top 5 dishes elsewhere, but in general I like garlic, ginger, black beans, and various umami-tasting things. I also really enjoy the taste of meat, especially duck. I have on various occasions tried vegetarian/vegan food, but at least here it tends to be utterly lacking in umami/savouryness/heft in taste, so I'm not a fan. I love stirfries and rice, and find local Finnish food to be really bland-tasting.

Beverages
Again, I hate sweet things, so anything sweeter than orange juice is right out. Alcohol-wise, I like gin with tonic water or orange juice, which inevitably leads to bartenders being very very confused. Beer sucks. I hate coffee. This is the place where they revoke my Finnish citizenship. Water is nice, and I drink water with my meals.

My favorite drink of all is tea! Here, too, I prefer the more bitter ones to the tastes-like-water ones, and I'm not into white teas or any tisanes. I'm also not into oolongs, since they tend to be a bit too sweet. (When I speak of tea, I mean Camellia sinensis leaf infusions. Nothing else can compare to my one love.) I'm currently on an unflavored teas kick, and like Yunnan black teas, (incl. Fengqing Dragon Pearl), Assam black teas (which I should look at again, hmm), Zhen Mei green tea, and Lushan Yunwu green tea. I'm more into Chinese teas than Japanese ones.

My current tea setup is a liter-strong ceramic pot inherited from a great-aunt, plus a metal strainer to hold the tea leaves. At some point in my life when I will stay in one place for over a year I would like to own a gongfu set (explanation) so I can be a fancypants civilized penguin and impress any potential guests with my OTT tea obsession!

Comments

[extrapenguin]

With tea, a large component of the taste is also the water! Finnish water doesn't have that many calcium ions etc, so it'd obviously taste different to limestone country water.

Finland is if not the top, then at least in the top 5 countries when measuring coffee consumption per capita. There's no real tea culture, beyond maybe in the very far East near the Russian border/in the regions of Karelia given away after the Continuation War.

[rheasilvia]

The water quality varies widely here depending on the specific city's water supply - fortunately I live in an area with excellent and delicious water. I used to work in a place where the water had an incredibly high calcium content (a single drop of water in the sink would leave a little crust), but we filtered the water before using it for beverages. Not perfect, but it does work. :-)

Coffee... I tried. We never managed to warm to each other. ;-)

The tea culture in Germany is regional, but very strong where it does exist - there's actually a tea ceremony, and the people from the East Frisian region actually have the highest tea consumption per capita in the world. Pretty impressive, considering the competition. ;-)

[extrapenguin]

a single drop of water in the sink would leave a little crust
WHAT WHAT NO WTF. How. I mean, I know how, but ... how. Was it considered officially legally drinkable???

I, too, have tried coffee, but it keeps tasting like how I imagine dishwashing water would.

[rheasilvia]

Oh, absolutely! We have high requirements for water safety, and the water is safe to drink everywhere in the country. In Cologne it just doesn’t taste good, because it comes from the Rhine (although it is of course extensively purified). So many people have water filters installed in their house, or use little Britta filters.

The horrid Cologne water is legendary though – it even has a hilarious satirical song that’s still very popular at Karneval – „Dat Wasser vun Kölle“ (The water of Cologne). Check it out (and ignore the scary Karnevalssitzung footage or it may traumatize you): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En-g9gLh1QM

Sung in local Cologne dialect „Kölsch“, as a response to a local politician responding to complaints by claiming the water in Cologne was good. They’re basically saying how everyone from the goldfish to the washing machine is asking god for water and all of Cologne is thirsty, because „the water is good, oh yeah“. ;-)