Açaí & Maqui Berry Powder.

A spoonful stains the wood the moment it touches it: a deep, near-black purple, the color of berries picked at opposite ends of a continent. Stirred into a morning bowl, it turns everything the shade of dusk.

Two very dark berries are ground together here. Açaí comes from a slender palm rising out of the Amazon floodplain, where riverine communities ate it daily as a thick, savory paste long before it reached export markets. Maqui comes from a shrub native to the temperate rainforest of Patagonia, and the Mapuche of southern Chile fermented it into a ceremonial wine. Both berries are freeze-dried within hours of picking, which holds their color and their more fragile compounds intact in a way sun-drying or heat-drying cannot.

In their home regions both are valued chiefly for that deep pigment. This is a food, not a medicine, and no substitute for medical advice.

Details

• Ingredients: açaí and maqui berries, freeze-dried and powdered
• Origins: Amazon floodplain (açaí); Patagonian temperate rainforest (maqui)
• Taste: tart, faintly grape-dark

How to use

Stir a tablespoon into a smoothie bowl or yogurt; it is better mixed into something than eaten alone. A little dusk-colored ritual for the start of the day.