You could very well be better acquainted with agave than you know. For a start, Agave americana is a cactus which, despite the Yankee-sounding name, flourishes in British gardens. I dare say it’s thrilling, indeed it was recently described by a colleague in this very newspaper as lending “spiky drama” to an otherwise common-or-garden backyard. But possibly more thrilling for the non-gardeners among us, the variety grown in Mexico and known as blue agave (pronounced uh-gah-vay) is the key ingredient of tequila. Now, if ever there was an alcoholic drink capable of producing its own dramas, spiky or otherwise, it has to be tequila.
Tequila has been getting cool of late, one key reason being that the stuff on sale (in Europe at least) is now controlled by an organisation rejoicing in the name of the Tequila Council, which insists that rather than yucky substitutes – like watermelon, ugh! – manufacturers now use agave. So if, like me, someone has recently handed you a glass of neat tequila that went down as easily as a good cognac, chances are you were given tequila made the traditional way.
But the big story about agave right now isn’t that that the slammer is so over; it’s that it is also good for us, as I discovered the last time I was in New York. I’d visited a friend’s apartment and asked for sugar in my coffee, only to be given instead a jar of golden liquid. What’s this, I asked. “It’s agave,” he replied, before asking with the instinctive condescension of one of life’s born early adopters, “Don’t you have it over there?”
Well, you can just about get it here, if you order online from health-food sites – because agave nectar is increasingly seen as the healthier alternative to sugar. Pressed from the wild (rather than the cultivated blue) plant, it is mostly fructose, which makes it so complex a sugar that the body simply doesn’t recognise it as one. Or, speaking in current dietary jargon, it has an extraordinarily low glycaemic index. Which means it doesn’t give us a sugar high. Which means that replacing standard granulated with my fancy-schmancy agave nectar might make me marginally less out of shape. Now, isn’t that thrilling?
You can bake with it. You can glaze with it. You can stick your spoon in the jar and lick it. No wonder agave was sacred to the Aztecs. The bad news? Like just about everything today, you need to check your agave is from a renewable source. Also, some experts believe that if you consume fructose after a blood-sugar-raising meal or with foods with a high GI, it might lose those virtuous low-GI qualities. So while it’s great with coffee first thing, it’s maybe not such a good idea after you’ve stuffed your face with pavlova. And the good news? Savvy barmen insist that agave nectar mixed with tequila is a marriage made in, well, Mexico. For the perfect margarita, mix 6 parts blue agave tequila, 4 parts lime juice and 1 part agave nectar, drink.
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Tina Gaudoin is away