(upbeat music)
- [Steven] Two kinds, or same?
- [Eric] The same, but this is a--
- [Steven] Big one?
- [Eric] Want more...
- [Steven] This is even smaller.
- [Eric] Yeah.
- [Steven] What stage is the best stage?
This stage?
- [Eric] This stage.
(wheels and hooves clacking)
- [Steven] There's somebody sleeping on that one over there.
- [Jared] Aha, someone's sleeping on the top!
It's funny when you're trying to like,
pull your car out,
but there's a caravan of cows
going through. - They was taking
the skin of the rice
and turning into bricks.
- [Jared] Oh, okay. - Yes.
- [Jared] So they're carrying rice skin
so they can make bricks out of it.
Eric is going to show us how to open a kola nut properly.
Said if we were to do it, we'd cut a finger off.
Kola nut is a full of caffeine.
It's related to chocolate, from the same family,
so it's got theobromine in it as well.
This thing will really perk you up.
- [Jared And Steven] Wow!
- [Jared] Look at that. - [Eric] One step!
- [Steven] That's beautiful. - [Jared] Split it in half?
- [Eric] You take this. - [Steven] Okay.
- [Jared] You take these little pieces.
- [Eric] And then you open like that.
- [Jared] That pulp on the outside is edible.
- This is the "Cola" from Coca-Cola.
I'm going to try this peel.
It has almost no flavor.
- [Jared] Okay, is it sweet?
- [Steven] No. - [Jared] No.
- [Eric] This is not for eating, but this is for eating.
And you have different color.
- [Jared] We have one that's like, very dark red,
one that's pink, and some will probably be white as well.
All in the same pod.
And how do you, what do you do with the nut now?
- [Eric] This is the best. - [Jared] Okay.
- [Eric] And to eat it--
- [Jared] You take a bite. - [Eric] Yep.
- [Jared] When you bite it, do you just like,
chew it in your mouth? - [Eric] Yeah.
- [Jared] Do you spit it out, or do you swallow it?
- [Eric] It's up to you, if you want
to throw it away or eat it, no problem.
- [Jared] Okay, so you can
just keep it in your mouth, you chew it.
How long do you chew on that before
you spit it out or you swallow?
- It's up to you. - [Jared] Okay.
You can keep it in your mouth for like an hour, if you want.
I see, and it just keeps giving you more energy.
- All right, I'm gonna take a bite.
- [Eric] Do it.
(nut snaps)
It's hard. (laughs) - Yeah, that hurt.
(crunches nut)
It's pretty bitter.
- [Eric] Does it taste like chocolate?
- It-- It-- No.
It tastes like I bit into the seed of an avocado.
- [Jared] Oh, okay.
That's not a shining endorsement.
Alright, so I'm going to take out one of these seeds.
You don't know what color it's going to be
until you open it.
I'm hoping for red, for the dark red.
I got a pink one.
- [Eric] Yup, pink one.
- So I'm going to try a little bit of the outside.
(Steven and Eric laugh)
Yeah, I saw online, a video, someone was like
"It's sweet, and you can eat it!"
Not this one.
- [Steven] I think some kola species are
used a dessert fruit in West Africa.
There's a lot of different ones, but not this one.
- [Jared] It reminds me a little bit of unripe jackfruit.
It's got that texture to it,
but it's got like a bitter, vegetable taste to it.
Okay.
Here we go.
(nut snaps)
Just has a bitter, vegetable,
like a bitter potato taste.
And this thing will make you like,
go crazy.
This thing gives you has a lot more caffeine in it
than coffee.
And it's got theobromine,
So there's a little bit more energy
from another angle as well.
And just this on this trip alone,
we've had kola and we had coca.
So we've had the make-up of Coca-Cola, how it used to be
These days, they do not use real Cola in Coca-Cola.
and they don't use real Coca in Coca-Cola.
They have a derivative of those things,
but not the straight up stuff anymore.
- [Steven] This one I think is stronger,
'cause it's much darker.
- Great.
- [Steven] I don't know if you want to try a stronger piece.
- Nope.
(Steven and Eric laugh)
Not even a little bit.
- [Steven] Show the inside.
- [Eric] This is when wait a little,
wait five minutes like that,
you want watch it grow yellow.
- Pink one oxidizes to a brown color.
The red, the dark red one does not.
That's kind of interesting. - [Eric] And this is the best.
- I mean this is not-- - [Eric] The pink is the best.
- The best is the pink?
- [Eric] Yup. - Not the red?
- [Eric] Not the red.
- Best for energy. - [Eric] Yeah yeah.
Okay.
Eric's saying that you want to eat the pink one.
T\he pink one's got the most energy in it.
The dark red one or the white one, not so much.
It's not awful.
I would prefer a cup of coffee.
So this thing is awesome.
I mean, the pod itself on the outside
looks like a calzone. (laughs)
You break it open and it's got
these really cool seeds on the inside.
It's related to chocolate, it's related to Durian,
it's related to okra.
- [Steven] Cotton. - [Jared] And cotton.
It's related to Baobab!
That's pretty neat. The sort of thing where I think
you can probably get used to it.
I prefer this over betel
by far.
Betel nut tastes terrible.
This one, much nicer.
I wouldn't be eating this for fun,
but if you want that stimulant,
if you really want to have an all nighter or something,
then, sure, pick up some kola nut.
So Steven, Eric and I are now driving out
after having our kola nut.
It's been like, I don't know,
10 minutes or something since we had it.
We're noticing a couple of things.
One, water tastes sweeter.
We were just drinking water,
and it has a saccharin, sweet kind of flavor.
Not like sugar, but sweet.
More like aspartame or something.
I'm getting a sickly sweet kind of flavor
when I drink water.
Stephen says that it reminds him
a little bit of Coca-Cola.
I say that's a bit of a stretch,
but I can see what you mean.
It's like a little bit bitter, a little bit sweet.
I mean, if you were to mix that
with other ingredients then sure.
Coca-Cola, It's got like a little bit of the,
a little bit of like herbaceousness that
you get from Coca-Cola, maybe.
Also, energy levels are up.
Not as energetic as betel nut made me feel.
Betel nut made me feel energetic right away.
This is making me feel like
I just drank a cup of coffee.
It's not an unpleasant energy,
it's like a slow going kind of energy.
But definitely there, definitely there.
And Stephen, you're feeling it too?
- [Steven] Yeah, you know, it's a lot smoother,
it's pretty smooth energy.
- It's not like, hard. - [Steven] It's not like khat,
where you feel like you got all this
ball of anxiety in your throat.
- Yeah, Steven did another stimulant
called khat and that one gave him a lot of anxiety.
- [Jared] Hey, say hello to America.
- Hello America! (group laughs)
- [Jared] Yeah, so he's doing Ethiopian drug, that's...
What does this do?
This is kind of like an energy thing.
Get a little energy boost.
Don't eat too much, man.
Similar to betel, I guess.
Coca is another stimulant that is not,
it's \a little bit more slow going,
if you eat it slowly, like one leaf at a time
as you're supposed to, it's kind of just
a slow going kind of energy.
Like tea maybe,
But is used to make cocaine!
Fun times.
But this one, yeah.
It's not unpleasant.
This is not like a terrible thing.
I mean, we only ate it and spat it out,
maybe if you keep it in your mouth,
it'll keep you like bup-bup-bup-bup-bup
eventually going like that, but, yeah.
It didn't seem bad at all.
I'm feeling pretty good.
But, you know, if my heart explodes or something,
I'll make a video about that too.
This here, I've been told,
is called bissy tree,
which has a fruit on it that is used as a medicine.
- [Woman] Poison, when you're poison,
fish poisoning.
- [Jared] So if you eat a bad fish.
If you eat a poison fish, this is supposed to help you.
This one's blossoming.
It's got a few fruits that have fallen.
This is when you see this germinating.
And it looks a little bit like kola nut,
so I wonder if this is kola nut,
or maybe a relative of it.
This
is bissy tea.
Which is just kola nuts
that, I believe, have been ground and then dried out.
This is how kola nut is usually taken in Jamaica.
When I was in Jamaica at an Airbnb,
the lady had a kola nut tree in her backyard.
She said that it was used for fish poisoning,
but just in general, it's used for food poisoning
and if you have a cold or something like that.
If you have congestion, they give you this.
Which I guess makes sense,
because this thing is like
jack full of caffeine and theobromine,
so it's going to make you feel good.
It's going to make you feel less sick
because it's going to give you a punch of energy.
Not sure how good it actually is for you,
if it's a really a great idea to
have a bunch of caffeine if you're sick.
I would think that you should be sleeping it off.
I'm honestly not too sure about
the medicinal stuff about this,
but I am curious about what this tastes like.
This is something that you can find.
I've seen this for sale before in New York city,
at some of the markets around here
that have Caribbean products, they sell it in little bags.
You can get even tea bags of it, I think.
But this was actually from that tree,
so this is going to be pretty fresh.
She said that this is enough for like
one or two servings.
What I've been seeing online
is to use about a teaspoon per
mug.
A teaspoon into this percolator.
Actually, I'm going to throw a little extra in there too.
We'll add another half in there.
Next I'll add
(hot water splashes)
one serving of hot water.
I'm gonna wait about 10 minutes,
so it gets nice and infused, and then we'll give it a try.
Now, while that's brewing,
I should point out that there are
two different things that will come up
if you're searching online for kola nut.
There is kola nut that I am having right now,
which is the relative of chocolate,
and that is from the genus Cola, C-O-L-A, like the drink.
There's also bitter kola.
That's actually a Garcinia, and Garcinias,
if you've watched my channel for any length of time,
you've seen me come across
a lot of fruits that are like that.
That would be like a mangosteen,
or the Achacha, Garcinia cambogia.
There's a lot of popular ones out there.
Bitter kola though,
I believe is the seed of the Garcinia.
It's a specific Garcinia species that
you crack the seed open
and you eat the kernel of the seed as a medicine, and...
Haven't done a whole lot of research on it, honestly,
this isn't that video.
That's going to be probably a future video,
hopefully at some point.
But yeah, bitter kola is a thing,
it is not this thing.
There's kola, and then there is bitter kola.
And since I've been in Africa for so long,
and I know there's a lot of fans out there
who are just watching this channel to see my cat,
here's my cat.
Do you want some
kola tea?
Do you want some bissy tea?
She wants to be put down, okay.
So there she is.
Okay, it's been 10 minutes, so...
Huh.
It looks kind of like apple cider.
Doesn't really look like tea.
It's got an orange color to it.
Interesting.
I was expecting this to be kind of like,
I don't know, like coffee,
Thought this would be like a coffee substitute,
but hmm...
I'm not sure about that.
Smells medicinal, definitely smells medicinal.
Like a Chinese herbal medicine shop.
It's all right.
It's not bad.
It's very mild.
I was expecting this to be kind of like a strong,
bitter taste, like coffee, but it's not.
I mean it's vaguely tea-like,
but it's mostly like
if you were to go into the woods,
take a bunch of sticks,
some soil,
brew that.
It doesn't taste like Coca-Cola.
But it maybe has
slightly
the herbal flavor that Coke would have.
So maybe if you like to brew your own sodas at home,
and you want to use kola nut in your Coke.
Sure, sure.
It would give it a little bit of an herbal taste.
It's not bitter, you know, the nut on its own is bitter.
When you do it this way, it's not.
This would blend very well with stuff.
Put this into a tea to get some more caffeine,
or blend it into
even
a juice or something, it'd be fine.
This would be okay cold.
It's just, you know, fairly innocuous, herbal taste.
Not bad at all, not something
to go out of your way for for flavor,
but definitely not a bad way
to get your medicine or your caffeine fix.
Yep, so I think that's all I have to say about Cola nut.
Hope you enjoyed, hope you learned something
and I'll see you next time.
Well, I really hope you enjoyed that video guys.
If you did, you may want to check out
the video that is below me right now,
that should be good too.
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