Week Two: Vamos a Cocinar
This past week has been pretty busy, especially now that I’ve started my project in the lab. I’ve been working on creating a recipe for a traditional South-African fermented drink called maheu. It is a very simple drink with only three ingredients: maize flour, finger millet, and water. There are many recipes that you can find online for maheu, but no two are alike and they are all pretty vague. With the assistance of my coworker, Luisa, we have been trying to figure out the correct proportions of water to flour. Although it sounds straightforward, we’ve yet to achieve the desired consistency. Our first trial was very thick, and had to be eaten with a spoon.
At least now we knew what not to do. On Friday we cooked another batch of maheu that was much more successful than our first try. We decided to leave it to ferment over the weekend and we were planning to check on the drink tomorrow…however when I came into the lab this morning I was disappointed to find that a thick layer of hongo (fungus) had grown over my maheu! Trial #2 was another lesson in what not to do, but hopefully Trial #3 will finally result in an acceptable batch of maheu.
The reason I’ve been assigned to making maheu is because of the drink’s nutritional potential. Researchers are hoping that if maheu is cooked using Provitamin A maize, trends of vitamin A deficiency will decrease in areas where the drink is popular. This is important because vitamin A deficiency affects thousands of people worldwide, causing major health problems that could be addressed with a biofortified maize product. Once I perfect my maheu recipe, I will be able to run physical analysis tests on the maize as well as nutritional retention tests on the maheu.
Besides maheu, I was able to take a visit to CIMMYT’s field testing site in Agua Fría this Thursday. It’s about a three hour drive to Agua Fría from Texcoco, so I had to wake up at 5:00 am (my mom is probably shocked) but the drive was worth every minute. I’m not sure what I expected Mexico to look like, I guess just a lot of desert and cacti, but everything I’ve seen so far has been so different than what I expected. It was still early in the day by the time we reached Agua Fría, but already it was so hot. I had been warned about the heat, still it was a hard transition from Texcoco’s temperate 70 degree weather to 90 degrees, and that was only 9:00 am. We spent the next 3 hours dividing a field into equal sized squares with rope and then using homemade rulers, we evenly placed 27 maize seeds per 5 meter rows. Luckily we had a lot of help, but I felt like I was just slowing down the process.
After the three hours of working, I was very glad when lunch break came. The gloves I had to wear while handling the samples were full of sweat and my entire shirt was soaked. I tried my best to pay attention to a presentation about the work being done in Agua Fría to develop a breed of double haploid maize, but I was experiencing chills and I knew I needed to rest in the shade and drink more water.
Luckily we left shortly after and re-energized with cold drinks and pork tacos. Tacos can fix next to anything. Despite the extreme heat, I really enjoyed the work we did in Agua Fría and the people I was able to work with. I’m very excited to return in two weeks.
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Now of course my week wasn’t all work. I played basketball with some of the grad students, went to another zumba class with Joy and my roommate Halee, celebrated the last few days of a grad student with everyone in my lab
and went on an amazing trip this Saturday to visit the Izta and Popo volcanoes (which we never did see because of the fog).
During my third week in Mexico I hope to:
- make the perfect maheu recipe
- TAKE A SALSA CLASS(fell short on this goal)
- Visit family, fingers crossed
