I've held a reputation for having a questionable culinary palate for a very long time, in my family.
One of my first real decisions in life was to start saving my broccoli from dinner, to go with vanilla ice cream, which my parents--especially my chef father--will never stop periodically bringing up in conversation. I'm pretty proud of it, really, because it shows a willingness to take risks and openly embrace unpopular aesthetic likes from a very early age. When the 11th Doctor (look it up) discovered that he wanted "fish fingers and custard" as his first meal, everybody said, "Hey Lindsay! He's you!" and I felt pretty proud of myself.
The second family anecdote about my having a questionable palate is less-flattering.
I was approximately eight years old at the time, and I REALLY, REALLY wanted to do that thing with a coconut that you sometimes see on television, in which a straw is stuck directly into a whole, otherwise unopened coconut, and the straw is then sipped from. Cartoons did it. People on Gilligan's Island did it. It seemed like the way to go, really.
Eventually, despite repeatedly declaring the whole exercise an unnecessary waste of time and money for a good long while, my eventually father relented, and picked up a whole coconut from the grocery store. Fidalgo Island, where we lived, is nearly the most northwestern point in all of the continental United States. The weather there is virtually identical to the weather in Vancouver, BC, the place in Canada where most of my favorite American television is/was filmed. So, in our shadowless, silvery-gray lit corner of the looks-like-The-X-Files world, coconuts were pretty far from local, and were neither fresh nor cheap. So I can almost empathize with my father's protests about cost and quality, except ARE YOU KIDDING?!? WHO DOESN'T REALLY NEED TO KNOW WHAT THE THINGS ON TELEVISION ACTUALLY TASTE LIKE?!?!?! Pfft.
Anyway.
In our tiny kitchen, my father took out a hammer and a nail. He took the intact coconut, drove a single nail into it, pulled the nail back out, stuck a straw into the hole where the nail had been, and handed it to me.
I took a sip, made a face, and reported that I didn't particularly like coconut water. My father told me that this was because I was a child with an unrefined palate, and that I hadn't developed a taste for coconut water yet. Moreover, he'd spent the money to buy it, so I had an obligation to keep trying.
I kept sipping from the coconut, and I kept trying my very best to force-mature my taste buds into liking the flavor. But I didn't. I couldn't. The effort just wasn't working!
After some significant begging, I was able to fiiiiiiinally convince my younger, but more credible, sister to try it. She made a sour expression similar to mine, and verbally confirmed to our dad and me that there was indeed something singularly unpleasant about the coconut. While my father could dismiss my flavor reports easily (I liked broccoli ice cream as a little kid, after all), my sister's reaction was enough to make him finally take the straw, and try it himself.
My father's reaction was huge!!!
He spit the coconut water into the sink the moment that he tasted it, shouted "It tastes like jet fuel!!!!!" and cracked the coconut open to figure out what was wrong. On the inside, the coconut was completely lined with black and green mold, where white coconut flesh should have been.
As his mind reeled in humor and disgust, my father (and following his lead, my sister) started to make fun of me for sipping from the coconut more than once. They have continued to make fun of me for this, whenever either one of them remembers to do so, even though over twenty years have passed since this incident took place.
Luckily, this unpleasant, formative, childhood experience has given me an intensified understanding of the contemporary hipster take on coconut water:
Coconut water is gross, but it's not as gross as it could be.
I KNOW THIS TO BE TRUE, FOR I HAVE TASTED AND SURVIVED ACOCONUT WATER HELL, AND ITS SPECTRE HAUNTS ME TO THIS DAAAAAYYYYYYYYY
And that brings us to today's food blog challenge!
On the left, we have O.N.E. brand coconut water, and on the right we have Vita Coco brand coconut water.
I...I don't actually have an eloquent description of the flavors handy. Sorry about that.
I can report that I'll definitely drink the Vita Coco stuff, and it's not THAT gross. It's really not. It's pretty alright. In a pinch, I will straight-up chug several consecutive cups of it, and be grateful for the opportunity to do so. Just, take my advice, and don't buy it when it's been cut with something like pineapple juice. Just...just don't do that to yourself. (Unless your palate is different enough than mine that that's what you're into. In which case, just do your thing.)
However, the O.N.E. brand coconut water actually tastes pretty good. Like, "good" good. Like, the flavor is literally pleasing. Literally. Literally.
Instead of enduring it's ingestion, primarily for the health benefits (*cough* "hangover/puffiness cure" *cough*), I actually pay attention to the flavor, and drink it at a slow, mindful, even meditative pace. I don't use this particular brand of coconut water to wash foods down with, because the flavor is delicate, worth paying attention to, and it gets masked too easily.
I have absolutely NO IDEA AT ALL why these two brands of coconut water differ in any way. I can speculate, but speculation makes for very sloppy writing, by itself.
While I'm at it, why not ask why I typically like the flavor of standard, grocery store brand jugs of bottled distilled or drinking water, or Seattle's badass tap water, significantly more than I like the Arrowhead brand of bottled water, or (less-bafflingly) more than the nasty/gross tap water in Southern California? These questions would require at least a modicum of journalistic effort to execute, and journalistic effort is not what you're getting out of this blog post, at this time, Dear Reader.
It just is what it is.
It is what it is.
