|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
| |
|
 |
| |
All eight of the products pictured share the same formula title - Rehmannia 6 / Liu Wei Di Huang Wan – all contain the same ingredients in the same proportions. Rehmannia 6 is a popular herbal “sauce” widely used as a nutritious flavoring in many Chinese culinary dishes. It’s also used in Traditional Chinese medicine. One of the pictured glasses contains a traditionally handmade version and the remaining seven were made from popular herbal extract concentrates manufactured in mass-production factories. We simply added water back to recreate the tea from which these concentrates were originally made. Four of those seven had been tablets or capsules, one a granular, and two fluid concentrates - one from a little dropper bottle. Can you spot the one that’s traditionally handmade?
It’s the darkest one. It was traditionally handmade and it retained all the potency markers: the strong tastes, smells, and in this case, a very dark color; because nothing is blacker than the herb Rehmannia - not even a black hole or a black cat. The mass-manufactured one next to it displays a good color but possesses a weak, stale flavor with a hint of rancid oil. The feeble one on the other end (a tincture) -great quality herbs, too weak (in case you need your tea to be stronger than the tea at a Chinese restaurant).
Mal-practice: Some chefs as well as herbal practitioners buy the cheapest mass-market herbal brands, then simply increase the volume used. First of all, if we dissolve those items in water they more than likely will taste like sawdust tea (not kidding - try it). But more ominous is this: Factory processing, particularly the prolonged cooking necessary to remove all water from the tea, can cause each individual herb in the recipe to lose potency or change character to varying degrees. The result? . . . Imagine choosing the correct herbal combination for a recipe or a patient and then randomly changing the proportion of some herbs and eliminating others (excessive cooking “sterilizes” some herbs). The actions of such a mix would be highly unpredictable and would not correspond to the ingredients listed on the label or to its traditional application. It’s chaotic hit or miss. A chef with advanced culinary expertise (or an equally gifted herbalist) may choose the herbal combination precisely suited to the task - but that’s not half the way there . . .
. . . "If the garlic has no flavor, the dish will fail.” |
 |
| |
| |
| |
