The Best Tisane I've Ever Had

Expletives and herbal tea don't often go together, but I'm pretty sure I muttered one after taking a sip of this after last night's dinner. Made from freshly plucked anise hyssop and cilantro flowers, it was the best tisane I've ever had.

For those who poo-poo herbal tea in favor of true tea, know that equally complex flavors are possible from plants besides camellia sinensis. I didn't fully believe it myself, but this tea was the most powerfully flavorful thing I've put in my mouth this year.

Like garlic scapes, the flowers of herbs are a double boon. A culinary asset on their own, removing them also make the parts of the plant that you really want to eat (the bulb of the garlic and the leaves of the herb) more productive. The flowers of the anise hyssop were a shade of purple that would look at home in a Monet, but once hit by the hot water they became pale. I took comfort in knowing that the purple was now somewhere in the liquor, and that I drank a color.

The hyssop is incredibly sweet and of course very licorice like, and the cilantro flowers are, unsurprisingly, a very floral incarnation of the already cool and lovely cilantro. Together the two were sweet and deeply aromatic with just a hint of savory, no stronger than an association.

We spend so much time comparing the flavors of tea and wine to other things like flowers and herbs. So why not go straight to the source and just drink the flowers and herbs?

Or, as a friend of mine one said, if people want things to sell like hotcakes, why not just sell hotcakes?

The Worst Tea I've Ever Had, By Far

My apologies: I had no intention of leaving "Meat Thing" up for a week, but after a nasty head cold and some technical difficulties (hence there being no photo with this post), I'm back in the blogging saddle. And what better way to kick things off than with a tale of some truly terrible tea.

I was delighted when I recently received a gift of loose, black tea labeled Fahari Ya from a friend who had lived and taught in Kenya. But when I took a sip, I wished customs had mistaken the tea for drugs and that my friend had been incarcerated when trying to reenter to the country. That way I never would have drunk the stuff.

It was, by far, the worst tea I've ever had. Hands down. I'd take a stryofoam cup of Lipton brewed with hot water from a gas station that tastes like bad coffee over it any day. Bitter to the point of being acrid, astringent to the point of being caustic, I couldn't even swallow it.

Thinking that perhaps this was an acquired taste, I cleansed my palate, broadened my horizons, and took another sip. My gag reflex didn't go off as bad as the time that putty starting running down the back of my throat when my orthodontist took a mold of my teeth at age thirteen, but it was a close second.

I tried different brewing temperatures and various steeping lengths. No cigar. (Though tea made from a cigar would probably have been more palatable).

The last thing Kenya needs is for me to dis its tea, but I just can't help it. Maybe the lingering head cold is making me bitter, though I'm nowhere near as bitter as the tea. In fact, rather than even calling it tea, I'm going to lump the stuff with ipecac in the realm of emetics.

Don't drink it.

Teatulia's Tulsi Tea

I've had a few readers complain that Tea and Food is much more food than tea, and they're right. One reason is that it's more important to eat food than drink tea, so one tends to overshadow the other.

Another reason is that I might focus on the same variety of tea every day for a month, but I'm not going to blog about it more than once. But rest assured that when I try something new, unless it's Lipton French Vanilla, you'll hear about it. For instance, Teatulia's Tulsi Infusion Tea.

You might recall Teatulia (then known as Tetulia) from my two-part post back in June, but if you're too lazy to click on the hyperlink, here's the short version: they're an extremely socially and environmentally conscious company, and they make great tea. Support them.

This morning I finally had the chance to try their flagship blend, an infusion of the Ayurvedic herb tulsi with their standard black tea, both sustainably grown. It's a tea unlike any other that I've tasted, and its unusual flavors drew me right in. Tulsi is also known as holy basil, and in some parts of India it is considered to have almost magical properties, as this excerpt from the blog Health is Wealth will attest:

A few leaves dropped in drinking water or food-items can purify it and can kill germs. Even smelling it or keeping it planted in a pot indoors is said to prevent the whole family from infections, cough and cold and other viral infections. It has been an age old custom in India to worship it twice daily, water it and light lamps near it, once in the morning and once in the evening. It was, and still is, believed that it would protect the whole family from evils and bring good luck.

On this ten degree day, it certainly did have a warming and uplifting effect that went beyond the usual warming and uplifting effects of c.m. The flavor of the herb was similar to that of the sweetest, most licorice-like Thai basil, and it was nicely balanced with the earthy pucker of the black tea.

There are so many cloying herbal blends out there (again, Lipton French Vanilla), so it's refreshing to taste one that has some real umph. Think I'll go brew a second flush right now.

If you'd like to try some for yourself, see here. And yes, I know I need to oil my cutting board.

My Mom Turns 6-Tea

It may come as no surprise that my mother is a tea drinker and my stepfather a punster. So when my mom turned sixty, she was thrown a "6-Tea" party. The task of selecting which six teas of course fell to me. So of course I called Dave.

Together we decided on Shou Mei Classic White, Green Dew Gunpowder, Chrysanthamum Oolong, Keemun (black), and a few cakes of Yunnan Compressed Pu-Erh Tuo Cha, all from Upton. To mix things up I included one herbal, brewed from the needles of a Florida Slash Pine and harvested a few blocks from the house.

We decided to demonstrate the camelia sinensis spectrum, going from white to black. In fact those were the two most commonly requested teas: Shou Mei and Keemun. I'm guessing that's because black and white tea are the most and least familiar, respectively.

I was more surprised by which teas where who's favorite. One of my mom's friends liked the pine best, and one of her friend's teenage daughters favorited the puehr. (And that was even after I described it as "cavey.")

As usual, my favorite was the oolong. The blend was so nicely done that you couldn't tell where tea stopped and flowers began. In other words, it was unlike many blends in that nothing stood out, the two elements being balanced in a compliment that went both ways. Yet it still tasted so much like oolong that I wouldn't have been shocked to learn that the chrysanthemum was just a colorful descriptor, as is often the case with oolongs anyway.

Here's a quick lowdown on everything else.

Shou Mei: pleasant, though extremely mild. There was a faint hint of citrus, but it may have been a trick of the mind as white teas are so commonly infused with citrus these days, probably to make them taste like something. Or maybe it was just because we were in Florida.

Green Dew Gunpowder: Good and aptly named, being as refreshing as green dew and as grounded as gunpowder. That doesn't actually make sense, but the tea was both light and earthy and that seemed like a convenient way to say so.

Keemun: I never drink black tea, but was surprised by how sharp and fresh this one tasted. It might make aficionados bristle to hear an adjective so commonly associated with the dregs of the industry, but it really was "brisk." (Note: if you go to one hyperlink today, go to that one.)

Pu-Erh Tuo Cha: Not as impressive as a puehr can be, but that wasn't the point. This was an easy intro for those who hadn't had a puehr before, which was everyone. Even though I brewed it lightly, many still wrinkled their noses and my mom described the bouqet as "fishy." Elise suggested the more palatable "marine."

In the end a good time was had by all, and everyone left much better equipped to think outside the bag.

Bottling Kombucha

An ancient beverage thought to date back to the Qin Dynasty in 250 BC, Kombucha has only recently tipped here in the U.S. Perhaps that's because it was a well guarded Chinese health secret, but more likely it's because it's weird and slimy.

Making it at home is much more rewarding and infinitely more cost effective than buying it. And like many homemade products, it's also usually much worse.

Until now. For fifteen bucks I bought a bottle capper and caps at a local brewery supply shop, poured the brew into beer bottles, and capped them off. The capping alone won't stop fermentation, so I stuck them in the fridge, except for one, which I left out for a few more days. That one was as fizzy as a Coke.

To avoid confusion, I labeled each of the bottles, which formerly housed my roommate's Amstel Light, with a piece of masking tape marked "kombucha." I wouldn't want him to get healthy instead of drunk.

Golden Yunnan

I'm not a huge black tea fan, but this morning I had to be dragged out of bed by a dog and I needed something warm and caffeine-laden to get me going. All pu-er comes from the Yunnan province, as do a few green and black teas, including this one. The dry leaves of this tea are beautiful, if you peer in the canister you can see the gold buds intermingled with the black leaves. The tea itself is rich and a little sweet.

In addition to being delicious, this tea taught me a lesson. For months, I thought that it was quite bitter. It turns out that I was just using too many leaves. I began using about a level tablespoon of leaves per cup and the resulting tea wasn't bitter at all. As it turns out, brewing tea can be a little tricky.

P.S. I am drinking the broken nugget pu-er as I write this. I can't get enough of it.