I left off the last matcha blog with green tea ice cream.  However, there are many other ways to use matcha in cooking.

The first recipe is salad dressing.  Matcha adds a surprising kick to salad dressing, that even my five year old likes. Since you are making the salad dressing you can adjust the number of servings below to what suits your needs.  If you store this overnight in the fridge, it will separate, so store in a container where you can shake it back into its intended form before pouring over your next salad.

Matcha Salad Dressing

Serving Size 2

2 tsp. matcha

¼ cup olive or avocado oil (if you keep around other oils, walnut oil is surprising good as well)

2 tbsp. rice vinegar

½ tbsp. soy sauce

½ tbsp. lemon juice (lime juice also works here)

Start by whisking all the ingredients together except the matcha.  Then whisk in the matcha about a ½ tsp. at a time.  It may clump on you so whisk hard (or if you have one of those nifty salad dressing containers with a tight lid, shake hard).  Allow the dressing to sit for about 5-10 minutes before pouring, it allows the matcha to really incorporate its flavor.

This next recipe is for cookies.  This one took a while to get right.  I learned that matcha does not play well with most flours.  Its grassy flavor has a tendency to amplify the wheat like flavor of most pastry flours so you end up with very bland cookies that are also not that sweet.  So here I thought I would make a shortbread cookie and ended up with more of a snickerdoodle type cookie to get the tea flavor I wanted.  The recipe below includes an option for chocolate chips as my son, as one of taste testers, firmly believes it isn’t a real cookie without chocolate chips.

Matcha Cookies -With or Without Chocolate Chips

2 tbsp. matcha

1 ½ cups sugar

1 cup unsalted butter (2 sticks)

2 tsps. cream of tartar

2 eggs

1 tsp. baking soda

¼ tsp. baking powder

¼ tsp. salt

2 ½ – 2 ¾ cup Brown Rice Flour

Turbinado sugar for topping (large granules, raw cane sugar)

Oven temperature:  375 degrees Fahrenheit

Bake time: 7-8 minutes per tray, makes around 3-4 dozen cookies

Start by putting the matcha and sugar into your mixer or whisk together by hand.  This needs to be mixed until all the sugar is uniformly the same color green.  This will kick up a lot of dust, so put this on the lowest setting your mixer will go.  This step is critical to getting a uniform green cookie, otherwise you will end up cookies with green streaks in them, which is not very attractive. Next drop in the butter in half stick increments and beat until the butter is uniformly green.  You will need to stop mixing and scrap down the sides and the beater to make sure the sugar uniformly gets into all the butter.  Next put in the cream of tartar and the eggs.  Follow with the baking soda, baking powder, salt and then flour.  Incorporate the flour in ¼ – ½ cup increments.  Once you get to 2 cups in the mixer watch closely as you go to incorporate your last ½ – ¾ cup as you do not want the batter to get too dry.  The batter should remain shiny and sticky to both the beater and sides of the bowl.  Scrap down the sides one last time to ensure all flour is in and then pour out onto wax paper.  As this point, you can cover the mound of dough in wax paper and put in the fridge for 30 minutes to an hour to harden (less stickiness to work with).  If the sticky dough doesn’t bother you, pinch out about two tablespoons size amount and roll around in a ball and then lightly roll in a bowl with turbinado sugar.  Press the ball flat into about a ¼ – ½ inch thick cookie.  Leave a good inch to two inches in between cookies as these spread as they cook.  No more than 12 cookies per tray.  Place in the oven for about 7-8 minutes, you should see light brown around the bottom edges of most of the cookies on the tray.  When you pull the cookies out of the oven allow them to cool on the tray – about 10-15 minutes.  The dough stores well in the refrigerator or freezer, so you do not need to make all the cookies at once. Just keep wrapped in the wax paper and in a container so it doesn’t pick up odors from other items in the refrigerator.

Optional:  Chocolate chips – if you are going to put these in the full batter, use about ¾ to 1 cup of chips, and 1 tsp. of vanilla extract.  I split the batter and mix in the chips to half of the batter, so I use about ½ cup and ½ tsp. of vanilla extract.

I hope these recipes inspire you to also explore eating your tea too.