Hangovers, Health & Hydrotherapy

Here at Acquamara Towers, we are not afraid of hangovers.

That’s not to say we embrace them or run out to hunt them down.

Our fearlessness came from a very interesting experiment on an overcast Monday last summer.

Hydrotherapy at Forte Village Sardinia

Acquamara’s plucky assistant Clementine, arrived at work with a bit of a heavy head, rusty throat and a gnawing badger sitting on her tongue.

Having heard all the wonder cures surrounding salt water and rehydrating fluid, we plied Clemmie with a dilution of our very own Hebridean eau de vie – Acquamara seawater diluted 30% with water.

We already knew, anecdotally, that hospital porters regularly mix rehydrating fluid with orange juice to self-medicate of a morning-after.

In fact, we didn’t have to rely only on this flimsy reference.  

Herodotus (484BC) said:

“Sun cure and sea cure are sovereign remedies for most diseases and particularly for women’s ailments”

Euripides (420BC) claimed:

“The sea cures men’s diseases”

Hippocrates encouraged his fellow healers to make use of salt water to heal various ailments by immersing their patients in seawater

And in 1753, Dr Charles Russell published his seminal book “The Uses of Sea Water” stating:

“One should drink sea water, bathe in it and eat every product of the sea in which its virtue is concentrated”

How Can Salt Water Hold Healing Properties?

Healing Salts

The sea is rich in vital minerals.  In fact, it contains 83 elements of the periodic table.

French physiologist Rene Quinton discovered that seawater has an uncanny chemical similarity to our body’s inter- and extra-cellular fluid.

It could be said that we are the human sea and the amniotic fluid of our birth was pure seawater.

Quinton discovered that seawater is the only other naturally occurring fluid that contains all vital elements in our blood plasma.

“The living organism is a sea aquarium in which a few billion cells are bathing,” Quinton said, showing the parallels between a marine environment and our internal sea.

According to Quinton, taking a seawater cure will improve conditions like stress, fatigue, psoriasis, circulatory problems, cellulite and weight reduction, rheumatism and arthritis as well as acne and post-partum programmes.

Salt water also cures mouth ulcers, sore throats, skin ailments, cuts, stings, scrapes and removing splinters.

However, the Seawater Drinking Cure achieves its fullest effect by keeping to a healthy balanced diet in which, most importantly, no ordinary table salt must be taken!  You won’t be surprised that we say fair enough to that,  and that you should only flavour food with seawater!

And The Hangover?

As for Clementine’s hangover cure?

Well, I’m glad to say it was an instant success.  She was right as rain within 30 minutes and quite stunned that the remedy had been so simple.  Seawater is, after all, a natural alka-selzer.

Needless to say, table salt is not an effective replacement.  And all seawater doses should be diluted with ordinary filtered water to maximise benefits.

As we say in The Hebrides, here’s to your very good health …

Slainte!

PS. What is your view?  Where do you stand on salt politics?  Do you think more restaurants / food outlets / retail environments should change to seawater? I’d love to know what you think.

Seafood Chowder Recipe. May we suggest …

Seafood Chowder Recipe.

May we suggest you use Acquamara as the ‘poaching liquid’ for a real seaside taste http://ow.ly/3gQXa

Ducks Chef Jonny enjoying making the most of Acquamara splashes

The first time Jonny Dunbar tasted Acquamara, he was transported back to his childhood. Growing up in Aberlady, summer holidays were spent gathering mussels on the shore, building a fire and boiling them in a pail of seawater. “It is such a nostalgic taste for me,” he says. “It took me back to being a wee boy.”

As head chef of the two restaurants at Kilspindie House Hotel in Aberlady, Ducks and Donald’s, Jonny has become one of Acquamara’s most vocal champions. At first he used it for poaching fish and boiling potatoes. “Basically, I was reading the back of the packet”. His first breakthrough was with asparagus. After years of cooking it in butter, he tried boiling it in Acquamara. He was astonished, not just with the taste but also with the texture. It was firm with not a hint of mush. After that, Jonny set about experimenting in earnest. He added seawater to the gazpacho on the summer menu, to the three types of bread the kitchen makes fresh every day and to the porridge served to hotel guests for breakfast. He has found a way to incorporate it into the hot water crust on a raised pie. It is used as a curing liquid before he smokes his own salmon.

The staff at the restaurant were, at first, puzzled. To put it mildly. “Everyone thought I was mad. How can you get so excited about seawater?” Once Dunbar organised taste tests, with the same food cooked in plain water, water with Maldon sea salt added, and Acquamara, they got it. Now he has included Acquamara in some of the restaurant’s standards, Jonny is exploring the wilder shores. It is now popping up in sweet dishes, such as salted caramel, and in the jelly that surrounds his potted crab. “Instead of clarified butter, I am using Acquamara jelly.” This has been a fiddly on
to get right – the dish includes other salt-loaded ingredients, such as capers – so the trick is to use just the right amount of seawater to avoid overpowering everything else.

What he would really like to perfect next is Acquamara foam. “I would like to serve a meaty fish, such as halibut, with samphire (when it’s in season), mushrooms, a light beurre blanc and seawater foam on top.” Easier said than done. Jonny has shaken, stirred, pureed and otherwise agitated Acquamara with seaweed, and Acquamara with stabilising solution, in every permutation possible. He has come close to creating foam but, instead of the white wave-like froth he is looking for, it has come out an unattractive purple brown. Jonny wants to enhance a dish and give the customer a visual reminder of a beautiful beach on seaside walk, not evoke the washback from a heavy storm. So the search for the perfect foam continues.

The feedback coming in from customers is encouraging Jonny to keep experimenting with Acquamara. He does not find it any more expensive than the ingredients it replaces, and gives him a point of difference to other restaurants.
“Before, I would have poached salmon in court bouillon,” he says. “I would use leeks, carrots, spices, white wine vinegar, white wine … I”d be adding all these ingredients to add flavour. Now I poach it in Acquamara and it’s certainly no dearer. I used to use between 10 and 15 litres of white wine a week. That has dropped to five.”

Dunbar is such a fan of the product that he finds himself torn. “On one hand I want it to take off and be the best thing ever. But I also like that we have it and not many others do. I know that I can’t, but I would like to keep it my little secret.”

Too much ado about too much salt!

When we are talking to people about Acquamara, and the idea of cooking with seawater, it never takes long for the salt question to rear its crusty head. Isn’t seawater terribly salty? Dangerously salty?  They look shocked and anxious, as if we were suggesting boiling asparagus or poaching salmon in the run-off from Sellafield rather than the pristine water of the North Atlantic.

Salt has become a bogey ingredient, implicated (along with processed carbohydrates and saturated fats) in the catalogue of health problems which put the UK near the top of the world unhealthiness league and see our NHS stretched to busting point. Salt has become inextricably linked to hypertension, or high blood pressure, which increases the risk of heart attack, kidney disease and strokes.

This has led to a whole industry of salt substitutes, low-salt cookery books and horrible, tasteless reduced salt processed foods. Many cereal boxes, for example, proudly proclaim “Now with less added salt!”. This makes them sound like the good guys, whereas food manufacturers only add Titanic amounts of salt – according to the British Nutrition Foundation, 76% of the salt in our diet comes from processed food – to make their cheap, bulk ingredients eatable. (This is also true of sugar and many of the fats that are also, and more accurately, implicated in our national health crisis.) Reducing the amount from a lot to quite a lot may give them a strong marketing hook but it is unlikely to make an enormous difference to the quantity of salt in our diets.

And the whole low-reduced-anti salt campaign is a red herring anyway. The vast percentage of the population can eat salt with impunity. The American Vogue’s food writer Jeff Steingarten, a man who takes every health edict and scare story with a hefty pinch of salt, broke down the figures.

Researching the subject, he discovered that 20% of the American population developed hypertension, the high blood pressure. Of that 20%, a third of them are extremely sensitive to salt. When they eat it, their blood pressure rises. When they cut it out, their numbers go down. That works out at 8% of the population.

There are other small groups who should not eat salt, such as babies under the age of one, whose kidneys are not mature enough to cope with a full bag of Kettle Chips. People suffering from congestive heart failure, liver disease and kidney disease are also on the list. But, as the forceful Mr Steingarten puts it, the other 92% of the population are being fed an aggressive anti-salt message to benefit a small number of people who should already have  been told by their doctors that they are forbidden to eat salt. The rest of us can enjoy it with impunity.

That does not mean that a fish supper or family pack of Reece’s Peanut Butter cups is ever going to qualify as health food. But it does mean that salt is not the enemy. The most sensible advice for anyone worried about their salt intake is to stop eating ready meals, breakfast cereal, biscuits and sliced bread, as well as the obviously salty processed meats, nuts and crisps. That is where the 76% of salt referred to earlier hides away.

It is far, far better to add salt while cooking fresh food from scratch than to add it at the table. Cheap table salt is horrible stuff, stripped of its natural nutrients (and these include names familiar from the supplements shelf: magnesium,calcium, chromium, manganese, iron, zinc and selenium) and treated with forrocyanide and silicates to prevent it from caking and clogging in the salt cellar. But any salt, added at  the table, will only make food taste salty. Whereas food cooked in with salt – or, of course, in seawater – takes on the flavour in the cooking process. Rather than becoming a dominant note, salt does the miraculous job of pulling all the other flavours together, providing the bass note above which all the others can sing.

An example? The potato. A potato cooked in unsalted water is a miserable, tasteless creature. With salt sprinkled on, it becomes a miserable tasteless creature with a hefty layer of salt on its exterior. But a potato boiled in a 30% solution of Acquamara, for example, is something delicious. It tastes like a potato and needs nothing more.

The health police have got this one seriously wrong. For the small percentage of the population who must not eat salt, this is a serious issue and they need all the help and information and clearly-labelled foodstuffs they can get. For the rest of us, why on earth would we want to avoid eating something that intensifies the pleasure of food?

A non-stop diet of processed food is bad in so many ways – salt is the least of it. Its over-reliance on salt and other taste enhances such as monosodium glutamate stultifies the palate and can make simple, fresh, carefully-seasoned food taste bland in comparison. But  it doesn’t take long to readjust. Salt is a natural and important part of our diet and the best way to enjoy it is in home made food cooked with good quality ingredients.

We think that using Acquamara takes this a stage further. Seawater adds a complex range of minerals as well as introducing salt at the cooking stage. This is why so many people comment that it doesn’t have a strong taste of its own, it just makes everything – such as our friend the potato – taste wholly of itself. Sadly 8% of the population can’t enjoy this. For the rest of us, there is no reason on earth why we should worry about enjoying something so simple and delicious and healthy.

An Afternoon at Ondine

August is a wildly busy time for Edinburgh restaurants. The bank holiday weekend is the last mad hurrah before the circus leaves town and everyone settles back down to normal. But even by those standards, Sunday in Ondine was crazy.

Happy customers!

Arriving for lunch at 2.30pm, every table in the restaurant was full. And not with German backpackers stretching out a bowl of soup. These were multi-generational groups enjoying what, in the old days, would have been called “a jolly lunch”. I spotted journalists, a glamorous boutique owner and the manager of one of Glasgow’s coolest restaurants among the diners. No table was without a wine cooler. The waiters whizzed around with trays of fizz and steaming bowls of mussels, the air was thick with briny smells and the sound of people enjoying themselves. We bagged two of the last stools at the bar.

Why all the fuss? Roy Brett, Ondine’s chef-owner and great champion of Acquamara, had invited Richard Kirkwood, his former trainee who is now head chef at London’s prestigious J. Sheekey, to set up shop in Ondine for the weekend. It was a stroke of genius, bringing in regulars to try something new and Londoners who recognised the name. And, of course, it was a great showcase for Acquamara, as Richard and Roy are both converts to the seawater cause.

Richard, Roy and Chef Director of Caprice Holdings, Tim HughesRichard and his crew put on a greatest hits version of the regular Sheekey’s menu ,the hardest bit was choosing what to have. It’s obvious that Roy and Richard share culinary DNA; many of the dishes were positively Ondinesque.A platter of mixed oysters came with adorable tiny wild boar sausages. Spicy hot sausage is a traditional accompaniment to cold, salty oysters (Roy normally serves his with chorizo) so this was an intriguing variation on the theme. The oysters were sensational - the French Fines de Claire were my favourites - and the wild boar chipolatas were the dinkiest things I’ve ever seen.Mussels cooked with Acquamara

Mussels cooked in Acquamara has become a Sheekey staple so I had to try it. The mineral hit is palpable, and sets off the juicy bivalves perfectly. It was all I could do to repel invaders with my fork.

Crab on toast, another Sheekey favourite. Mmmmm. A mound of white meat shards, a base line of tender brown meat, crunchy toast and a nippy little salad. The octopus carpaccio, something I have long coveted from Richard’s regular menu, was a revelation. It is so pretty, a plate of overlapping purple-edged morsels of the most tender yet meaty flesh. A scallop and shrimp burger was a new category of patty. Caramelised on the outside yet squishy and moist within.  How on earth did he do that?

Roy provided the answer when he emerged from the kitchen, slightly dazed, around 3.30. With 100 covers for lunch, it had been a long service. Used to running the kitchen he had been, he said, “Richard’s bitch. It’s been yes chef, no chef all day.”

The burger, in its raw form, was so wet that Roy raised his eyebrows. This was never going to work. But a bit of clever business with greaseproof paper keeps the mixture together just enough to sear the outsides. Even the Scottish chef of the year can learn something new.

I would also like to suggest, very politely, that he keeps hold of the recipe for the honeycomb ice-cream. A whisper of salty caramel, some huge rocks of honeycomb, the odd chocolate boulder, a little jug of molten chocolate sauce, all mushed up in a giant cocktail glass full of soft toffee-coloured ice-cream.

Around 4pm, with lunch service finally trickling to an end, Roy and Richard had time for a beer and a big deep breath. They pronounced the event a huge success. It was. Richard should come back to his roots more often.

J Sheekey, Ondine and Acquamara

Richard Kirkwood, head chef at top London restaurant J Sheekey is coming to Edinburgh for Scotland’s first ever pop-up eatery. Here he is in Scotland on Sunday‘s Spectrum magazine (22/08/2010) talking about his experience as a chef and his new-found discovery of the joy of simple, natural flavours. Lucky for us Roy Brett of Ondine was ‘his first inspiration’ so when Brett suggested he try a splash of Acquamara in his signature dishes Kirkwood gave it a go. ‘When I was younger I had these mad ideas about Michelin stars and how many sauces I could put on a plate and that kind of thing. But now I like natural flavours. We cook with seawater. Roy Brett at Ondine put us on to it and we don’t use white wine anymore. It’s healthier and it tastes fantastic.’

Acquamara Beyond the Fringe

What a treat for a wet Monday – a tasting session of delicious Franco-Scottish dishes, prepared by Acquamara champion Fred Berkmiller at his charming L’epicerie in Edinburgh’s Broughton Street.

Chefs, journalists and some of Fred’s suppliers turned their backs on the delights of the Edinburgh Festival to sample a selection of dishes prepared by Fred to show off Acquamara to the uninitiated.

We started off with juicy mussels cooked in a half and half mixture of Acquamara and Thistley Cross Cider. (Talk about keeping it local – Acquamara is bottled at the Thistley Cross plant in Dunbar.) Once we got the hang of eating boiling hot shellfish from a flat paper plate – using napkins, napkins and more napkins – an impressed hush descended on the shop.

Just as the conversation picked up, platters of steaming fish emerged from the kitchen. Fred paired poached Arctic Char with a fricassee of fresh seasonal greens: spring cabbage, asparagus spring onions. The fish was melting but, of all the treats that Fred offered us, these vegetables were my personal favourite because they showed how seawater brings out the best in the humblest ingredients.

Next up was a shoulder of pork, brined in Acquamara for four days and put on the stove by Fred early on Monday morning. By the evening it had acquired an appetising, crusty exterior. The smell greeted guests as they came down the stairs in Broughton Street and the taste did not disappoint. Fred paired the meat with plain potatoes boiled in Acquamara.

It’s not a conventional desert, but Lea Harris, who is hard at work writing recipes for this very website, contributed a dish of salted caramel almonds as a sweet note to end our tasting session. She could tell us all that she has been working on sweet as well as savoury dishes using sea water. Bring on the cupcakes with the salted caramel buttercream!

It was fascinating to meet people who are already converted to using Acquamara, such as Jonny Dunbar, chef at Ducks in Aberlady, and potential new converts such as Stuart Hazell, a top-notch freelancer currently working at the Old Meldrum Hotel. And everyone has their own ideas about how to use it. Jonny is adding it to his bread. Robin Peck, from poultry suppliers Gartmorn Farm has been picking Fred’s culinary brain, and is keen to try brining his duck legs in Acquamara before making a confit.

Jean and Norman Inglis, Acquamara founder Andy Inglis’s parents, now use a lot of seawater at home. But Norman had the only negative recommendation of the evening. Andy delivered them some Acquamara in a lemonade bottle. Norman added it to his vodka. It was he said, vile. He was left sucking his cheeks. He will stick to adding it to porridge from now on.

Acquamara hits London!

Acquamara has arrived in London, in an exclusive deal with the famous J Sheekey Oyster Bar in Covent Garden.

Richard Kirkwood, head chef at J Sheekey, decided to introduce it into the Oyster Bar menu first,and Acquamara founder Andy Inglis was lucky enough to be there, sitting at the bar, watching (and smelling) mussels being cooked in his product, Hebridean seawater, wondering how it was simultaneously possible  to feel that he coudn’t have been further away from Berneray, and to feel so close…

Sheekey’s is, he decided, the natural home for Acquamara: full of worldly and cosmopolitan  people who know and appreciate their food. There is a distinctive gourmet buzz about the place, with  convivial banter about the top quality seafood on offer between customers and knowledgeable, attentive chefs and waiters.

The chef de partie, Thomas Maynard, had a permanent big smile on his face as he worked with Acquamara, squirting it out of what looked like a plastic sauce bottle as he prepared the mussels. He did a perfect job of letting customers know about the seawater revolution that is happening down below in the J Sheekey kitchen. The restaurant has many regulars and a menu that had previously appeared sacrosanct. Some of these customers were alarmed to see their old favourites and Sheekey standards being tampered with, but all the reactions were positive.

Andy was particularly gratified to hear that the word had spread to from the Oyster Bar to the even smarter, formal restaurant next door, with special request orders for mussels done in Acquamara coming through from next door a few days later.

Some customers who mentioned to Thomas how much they had enjoyed their razor clams  – cooked the old way, without Acquamara – were politely told that if they liked that, wait until you taste how we are planning to do that dish next week.  A few minutes later Thomas sent over a sample of razor clams done in Acquamara for them to taste. The reaction was immediate and unequivocal. It turns out that the customer was a micronutrient scientist. He raved about the clams, and identified magnesium and zinc among the complex tastes the seawater gave to the dish. This is, he said, how seafood should taste, with the flavours our taste buds are looking for and craving.

Eating at the J-S Oyster Bar normally feels a bit special but the chefs and waiters claimed there was an extra buzz on the week they introduced Acquamara onto their menu.

Andy certainly thought it gave the place a special something, from the fresh seaside tang of the vapours coming from  mussels being steamed on the bar’s hot plate, to the buzz as customers chatted about the new, fresh clean taste to their favourite dishes. Richard Kirkwood, an Edinburgh lad, had a big smile on his face. Turns out that he is substituting Acquamara for white wine in several dishes  – the steamed mussels, ocean cured organic trout and mixed shellfish and samphire salad. And as well as tasting so much better, Acquamara costs less. Which is guaranteed to make any chef happy.

In Sheekey’s basement kitchen, the are working on including Acquamara in some more recipes. They are considering changing their sautéed octopus, one of the restaurant’s signature dishes, as well as their broth. This was one of the few dishes we were allowed to photograph – so here it is to give you a taste of the high life. They used Acquamara to cook all the seafood shells first thing in the morning. Parsley, clams, mussels and prawns are added later. At a staff tasting, everyone commented on the strong, delicious, natural, flavours.

Not bad for a product that has been on the market for less than two months.

Trip to Berneray

Last weekend, Team Acquamara’s John Henderson took photographer David Morrison up to Berneray to take pics of the source of Acquamara.

The ferry from Uig to North Uist is short and sweet so after a plate of fish and chips they were off at the other end and time for photos to take advantage of the late evening light. John  described it as stunning when we spoke to him afterwards ‘The clouds had parted enough to let the sun slant through, casting a rich, colourful light across the machair and the crofts dotted around the landscape.’

After a good night’s sleep they met Team Acquamara’s Andrew Rodger and took some new portrait shots for the website before heading to the beach to capture the beautiful aquamarine clear Atlantic waters. The rest of the morning was spent artfully arranging boxes of Acquamara among the sand dunes and politely telling Dudley to ‘get out of the shot!!!’.

A quick break for lunch at Andrew’s croft followed by another trip to the sea-edge. During this photo session they didn’t notice that the rising tide had caused a length of pipe to slip into the water. Andrew manfully stripped to his boxers and plunged into the icy water to retrieve it (these shots will be available by subscription only!).

Another escapade involved some straying sheep, most of which were safely guided to the appropriate field. One sheep wasn’t so happy to be herded and saw an opportunity for escape, luckily (or not so luckily for the sheep) David rugby tackled the sheep to the ground much to the surprise of the shepherd, Dudley and John!  Snapper had turned trapper!

The next morning, before they left,  came the rain that Andrew had predicted for the previous day. How lucky they had been!  Bidding Andrew, his two sons and Berneray a fond farewell, they boarded the ferry for a wet and stormy trip home.

A successful adventure by all accounts and you can see some of the results here of how well David did of  working with Team Acquamara’s John and Andrew, the landscape and the light to really capture the beauty of this area and the source of Acquamara.

The first wave (!!)

So, we have finished the first week/wave (I warned you about puns!) and things are going well. We have been covered by lots of press that is mainly positive, if slightly sceptical.

We encountered many of these sceptics at Earthy Food in Edinburgh (http://www.earthy.co.uk/) but most were silenced by our blind taste test. We had potatoes and asparagus cooked in tap water and sea-salt vs the same cooked in Acquamara. An overwhelming majority not only noticed a distinct difference but also preferred the food cooked in Acquamara.

Our tasters included a professional chef who said the vegetables were ‘better seasoned’ and had ’layers of flavours’ when cooked in Acquamara.

We were also giving away free sprayers so Acquamara can be sprayed on salads. This is a great use of the seawater that means you can easily control and thereby cut down on salt in dressings and means that you don’t get the grainy texture, or ’landmines’ of salt on your salad.

Interest and online orders have been coming in from all over the world so we look forward to some feedback, particularly from Italy where Acquamara has been described by bloggers as potentially being ‘pasta water’. For example they recommend spaghetti cooked with Acquamara to have with clams (spaghetti alla vongole) http://tinyurl.com/398e9ol

There is also some exciting news from Berneray, where Andrew Rodger was told that a French chef on a salmon sourcing trip around the Outer Hebrides  had been eagerly asking where he could get some of this seawater he’d been hearing so much about!

Speaking of foodies we have some recipes for summer dinner parties at http://tinyurl.com/2vx78pr The poached salmon salad is a great, simple recipe that is easy to cook and will wow your friends! We also have a recipe for vegetable and seafood tempura which is fantastic finger food for all occasions from garden parties to World Cup get-togethers. Enjoy!