A digestive tea you can pocket: cumin, fennel, aniseed, chamomile, and mint steeped strong, then set with agar into small sugar-free gummies. Each one carries a light dose of psyllium husk, a soluble fibre that swells into a gel, so a midday handful gives you the whole herb hit plus a gentle fibre top-up. Sweetened with nothing but a pinch of monk fruit, they lean on the carminative herbs rather than sugar. The set is the fussy part: the agar has to reach a real boil to gel, and the psyllium thickens the moment it hits the warm tea, so you weigh both precisely and move fast into the moulds.
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5 compounds carry this recipe. Here is what each one does and, where we have it, what it actually looks like.
The licorice-sweet oil shared by fennel and aniseed, and the classic carminative note: it relaxes the smooth muscle of the gut, which is the old case for a cup of fennel after a heavy meal.
The warm, green, faintly bitter aldehyde that is the smell of cumin, and part of why cumin has a long reputation for settling a heavy stomach.
The soft, faintly floral alcohol that carries much of chamomile's calm: gentle, anti-inflammatory, and antispasmodic, easing the gut rather than stimulating it.
The cooling compound of mint, an antispasmodic that relaxes the gut wall, and the reason peppermint is the other classic settle-the-stomach herb.
The soluble fibre that makes psyllium swell into a gel with water. It adds gentle bulk and slows digestion, the quiet 'diet support' behind the gummies, and the reason they have to be taken with plenty of water.
This recipe is part of a set: follow the thread through the blends it uses and what it's served with.
In a booth in Oxford, twenty people bit into potato crisps while a microphone outside their mouths fed the sound back through headphones. Turn the high frequencies up and the same crisp is rated fresh. Turn them down and it is rated stale. Most of the panel left convinced they had been given more than one product.
Add water to arak and it clouds instantly, with nothing stirred in and nothing added to make it happen. The physics has a name, a 2003 paper behind it, and a second career manufacturing drug-delivery capsules.
