Butterfly pea jam?

December 19, 2016 9:10 AM

Can anyone enlighten me about a jam I ate at breakfast on Thai Airways? It was labelled "butterfly pea with lime".

I was on an overnight Thai Airways flight from Bangkok to Frankfurt. When the breakfast came round, there was a little jar on the tray about the same size as the small jars of jam or marmalade often served in restaurant breakfasts. It was labelled "Doi Kham", which I understand is an agricultural project set up by the late King. But the jam appears to be "butterfly pea with lime". Googling indicates that there is a plant called a butterfly pea, the flowers of which produce a blue colouring, but nothing about jam, except apple jelly coloured blue with the extract.
The "jam" didn't have any strong flavour (at any rate at that time in the morning at 40,000 feet) and the consistency was roughly that of plum jam. Under the cabin lighting I couldn't be sure about its colour, only that it was dark.
Can anybody throw some light please?

posted by Logophiliac to Food & Drink (6 answers total)

Best answer: It looks like "pea jelly" in general - here's one for purple-hull peas - really is a thing. As a jelly, it would be made with juice rather than whole peas, and given the typical anatomy of peas I would kind of think whole-fruit-type jam would be...peculiar.

But yeah, sure, I can see it. Peas have a sweet flavor profile, and honestly given the amount of sugar that goes into jam/jelly it barely matters what else is in there - lime was probably as much the predominant flavor as anything in what you ate. The butterfly pea is edible - it doesn't sound like anybody's jumping for joy over them, but since beans/peas increase nitrogen in the soil it might be a secondary agricultural product from peas grown as a cover crop.

You can pretty much make jam out of anything, if you try hard enough.
posted by Lyn Never at 9:28 AM on December 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

The flowers are edible for sure - I know, because some friends came back from Thailand with a gift of tea made out of them. It is BRIGHT blue when brewed. It looks like a comedy prop.

In fact, google "butterfly pea tea". It's really beautiful.
posted by greenish at 9:46 AM on December 19, 2016 [2 favorites]

Apparently butterfly pea tea with lime is a well-known drink in Thailand:

In Thailand, a syrupy blue drink is made called nam dok anchan (น้ำดอกอัญชัน), it is sometimes consumed with a drop of sweet lime juice to increase acidity and turn the juice into pink-purple.

I would suspect that some Thai company decided that making a jelly out of the beverage would be popular. At least one jelly has been sold in Japan whose color is derived from butterfly peas. If yours really had lime in it, then it might have been purple instead — the extract is a pH indicator.
posted by Johnny Assay at 10:21 AM on December 19, 2016 [2 favorites]

tea jellies seem to be a thing; i guess you could make one with above.
posted by andrewcooke at 10:31 AM on December 19, 2016

Response by poster: Thanks all. It also answers an old joke by a formerly popular African-American comedian: "How come there's no blue food?" Now there is.
posted by Logophiliac at 8:34 PM on December 19, 2016

I purchased some butterfly pea flowers on a lark and brewed them into tea, and I can report that they taste like plant. More like spinach than like peas - just a mild, slightly-offputting leafy funk. There's a reason it's usually either strictly a food coloring, mixed with lemon/lime (plus pH indicator!), or blended with something more flavorful like lemongrass.

For anyone who wants to play with some, this is the vendor I used - it only took a week or two to come in the mail.
posted by asphericalcow at 11:32 PM on December 19, 2016 [1 favorite]