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5 Tips for Making Your Own Tea Blends

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Herbs and spices to create your own tea blend.

Herbs, spices, flower petals, and more can be used to create your own tea blend.

Making your own tea blends is a fun way to play with your tea and allow you to make a one-of-a-kind creation for yourself or for a special event. Before pulling out all the spices you can find, you should keep in mind the following.

    1. Bad tea is bad tea. No matter how good your spicing or flower mix is, it cannot cover up bad tea. If you want a good tasting blend, you need to start with good quality tea. If you are contemplating blending to try to use a tea you do not like or tastes slightly off, put those tea leaves in your flower bed or compost pile, your plants will love you and you do not have to drink bad tea.
    2. Less is more. When working with spices and herbs like cinnamon, mint, or lavender, a little bit goes a long way. Tea is hygroscopic, which means it absorbs all odors in the air. It only takes thirty minutes of exposure to mint, that is just sitting next to it on the counter, for mint flavor to appear in your tea, adding that to the spice itself amplifies its effect. Start with these spices and herbs at 1/8-1/4 of a teaspoon per ounce of tea and work your way up to a flavor profile you like.
    3. Work in small batches. Black tea can have a three year shelf life, but few additives can last that long. If you are making a blend, work with no more than 2 ounces of tea, which makes thirty cups.
    4. Use dried or fresh edible flowers, but brew them first by themselves. To brew them by themselves, you will want about 1 gram to 1 ounce of water, bring the water to a boil and steep for 5 minutes. Sorry, but a scale is necessary when handling flower petals, there is no direct conversion to teaspoons as their weights vary dramatically. This will mimic what will happen when it is in the tea and give you an idea of what flavor it can add to the mix. Dried flowers, like calendula (marigold) are frequently added to tea for their appearance but they have their own flavor. By itself, calendula tastes like leather, but in a tea it adds depth and a full mouth feel.
    5. Size of ingredients matter if you are planning to store the tea. Small ingredients will fall to the bottom of your container, if you size the ingredients to the size of the tea you have a better chance of it remaining blended evenly while in storage. If that isn’t possible, you will want to pour out the dried tea, stir and then scoop out what you need to brew a cup or pot.

We have several tea blend recipes for you to play with including Almond Tea, Kashmiri Chai, and Masala Chai.

Making Tea Ice Cubes

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Frederick Tudor made tea ice cubes possible.

The inventor of ice (cubes), Mr. Frederick Tudor.

You may be asking “tea ice cubes? really? why bother?” but bear with us. In short, why not? And they are a great way to dress up cocktails at your next gathering.

Making tea ice cubes is really easy. Understanding when and where to use them requires a little more thought and work. Any tea you brew hot can be turned into ice cubes and this opens up a new world of possibilities. The trick is understanding the size of your ice cube tray so you know how much tea to brew. Because you are taking boiling water and trying to freeze it, expect several hours for these ice cubes to set, so prepare at least the night before you plan on using them. Before we get to the recipe, let’s talk a little history about ice cubes.

History of Ice Cubes in the US

So if you have done any foreign travel, one of the first things you may have noticed is that water or any cold beverage is served with little to no ice. This leads to the question, why do American restaurants and Americans in general expect and use as much ice as we do. We can all thank a gentleman by the name of Frederic Tudor from Boston, who after failing to sell ice harvested in Maine  in 1806 to the citizens of the Caribbean Island of Martinique, set his sights more local and started traveling the eastern seaboard of the United States and demonstrating his ice blocks at hotels, bars and restaurants in large cities. He created demand for ice from an entire population that had no idea they needed it. Ice in drinks became an exotic treat and the demand for ice increased. At this point, ice was harvested from northern streams and lakes in big blocks and the restaurant was responsible for chipping off ice from the block for drinks. This natural ice would not see consistent and reliable competition from artificially made ice in the United States until after World War I. Wide scale home production of ice would not occur until the 1930s, when refrigerators with electric motors that powered ice production, made it into American homes. So with the origin of our love of ice complete, let’s return to our tea ice cubes.

Understanding the Size of Your Ice Cube Tray

Before you brew your tea, take out your ice cube tray and a tablespoon. Try filling one compartment of the ice cube tray with water using the tablespoon. Usually, most ice cube trays make cubes that require 1 ounce or 2 tablespoons of water. That is not to say there is not a variation in size, because there is based on the age of your tray and the shape of the cubes. As cocktails have become more popular in the United States, ice cube trays have become very artistic. If you dig around a bit at your typical cooking supply store you can find ice cube molds in the shapes of airplanes, stars and ones specifically built for highball and lowball cocktail glasses.

Tea Ice Cubes

So once you determined the amount of water your ice cube tray holds, you will need to measure out roughly 3 grams (Roughly a teaspoon for smaller leafed tea and a tablespoon for your larger leaf teas) of the tea you want to every 8 ounces of water. Brew up your tea as if you were going to drink it (so get the correct steeping time and water temperature for the type of tea you are making). Instead of drinking it, pour it into the ice tray. As a warning, if you have a metal tray, it will get hot, so you may want a hot pad near by to carry your tray to the freezer. Allow to harden in the freezer, which can take several hours, so I have always done this overnight.

Also, if you already have brewed iced tea, feel free to use that.

Where to Use Tea Ice Cubes

Iced tea or iced chai tea with milk is a good place to start. If you are going to put iced tea cubes in iced tea, check your iced tea recipe as those recipes are geared to concentrate the tea flavor since it is going over plain ice. To use the cubes in iced tea, brew your iced tea and then pour over the cubes. Chai tea ice tubes make a great addition to iced chai tea as the cold milk usually dilutes the flavor of the tea.

Finally, for some fun you can take inspiration from some high end hotels and lounges playing with ice cubes. There are a number of cocktails that will take on the flavor of some of your favorite black teas or oolongs when these cubes are added in, so play and experiment at your next party. Our ancestors even had a green tea punch in the early 1800’s that might be worth bringing out.

Let’s us know what you put your tea ice cubes in!

Chai Banana Chocolate Chip Bread

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Banana chocolate chip bread drizzled with chai tea icing.

Moist banana chocolate chip bread with chai tea icing.

Nothing like browning bananas to prompt the search for a banana bread recipe, like Chai Banana Chocolate Chip. This recipe can also be baked  as cakes or muffins, which I have included in the instructions below. This banana bread incorporates Chocolate Chai tea, giving the bread a nice spice. I have a tendency to treat banana bread as a dessert, so I have included a recipe for Chai icing as well. You can actually use any of your favorite chai teas in this recipe.

The great thing about this recipe is that it starts by making yourself a good cup of Chai, most of which you can enjoy while baking.

Chai Banana Chocolate Chip Bread

1 tsp Chocolate Chai Tea

8 oz of water

4 small to medium sized really ripe bananas (You are looking to get to about a cup when smashed)

2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup of granulated sugar

1/3 cup canola oil (or other mild flavor oil)

1 tsp of vanilla extract

1 cup of semisweet chocolate chips (optional, can be replaced with walnuts)

Start by making yourself a cup of Chai tea. Bring the 8 oz of water up to a boil and then pour over your Chocolate Chai tea leaves and allow to steep for 5 minutes. While that is steeping preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and lightly grease your cake,bread or muffin pan. When your tea is done steeping, reserve a 1/4-1/3 cup of it to mash into the bananas and another 2 tablespoons for the icing recipe. Take the remaining tea and doctor how your chose,so you can enjoy it while you are cooking.

In a medium sized bowl, mix the flour, baking soda, and salt together. In a larger bowl, mix together the sugar and oil, then add the bananas. Stir in 1/4 of the chai tea and the vanilla extract. Mix thoroughly. If batter appears dry, going a teaspoon at a time,stir in more of the chai tea. Next stir in the flour mixture and chocolate chips until just incorporated.

Fill your muffin, bread or cake pans about half way full. This batter rises a lot.

For muffins and small bundt cake pans – Bake for 20-30 minutes until golden brown and the a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean.

For bread pans – Bake for 40-45 minutes until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean

For cake pans – Bake 30-40 minutes until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean.

While it is baking, this is the perfect time to making icing. Follow our recipe for Chai icing to add a little more tea flavor to this treat.

 

5 Fun Tea Quotes

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Mick Jagger, lead for The Rolling Stones, takes his tea at 3.

Tea is one of Mick Jagger’s “nasty habits”. Photo by Georges Biard – CC BY 3.0

Tea has been around so long in civilization that there are numerous tea quotes. Some are well worth repeating, and others only work in certain situations. Either way, every avid tea drinker should have a few of these at hand at share with our non-tea drinking friends and to just remind us how our tea drinking habit reflects our own personality and how we interact in the world. Most have an Asian or British bent, which is no surprise, but Americans have views on tea as well. Below are just five of of our favorites and little bit about each author. (This was much harder to limit to five than you can imagine.)

“Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.”  – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims, 1875 CE, British Author

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” -C.S. Lewis, Famous British Author who lived from 1898 CE-1963 CE. His best known books here in the US are the Chronicles of Narnia, but he wrote many more.

“Moderation is the very essence of tea. Tea does not lend itself to extravagance.” Lu Yu, The Classic of Tea, 760 CE, The father of tea, Lu Yu was the first scholar to document in writing how to make tea and his Classic of Tea is one of our favorite tea books (link to tea book blog).

“There are those who love to get dirty and fix things. They drink coffee at dawn, beer after work. And those who stay clean, just appreciate things. At breakfast they have milk and juice at night. There are those who do both, they drink tea.”  -Gary Synder, Pultizer Prize winning American Poet born in 1930, whose work is often associated with the beat generation.

“I have nasty habits; I take tea at three.” – Mick Jagger, Lead Vocalist for The Rolling Stones. The irony in this one makes it too good to leave off this list.

Do you have a favorite tea quote to share?

Green Tea Chicken Noodle Soup

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Tea steeped in a Pyrex measuring bowl strained into soup.

Straining Off Green Tea for Soup

Green tea chicken noodle soup is an American take on a common Chinese practice of using tea as the broth in non-cream based soups, see our Smoked Mushroom Soup recipe as another example of this. The recipe below is easily modified to be vegetarian by substituting the chicken with smoked tofu. It’s a fun recipe to play with as you can adjust the presence of the green tea taste both with the broth to tea ratios and the flavor of the chicken. Not to mention, this recipe takes very little time to make so long as you have precooked chicken.

Green Tea Chicken Noodle Soup

Yields 4-5 servings

1 1/2 tablespoons of your favorite straight green tea (Sencha, Gunpowder, Vietnamese Green)

4 cups of water

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 medium onion

1 medium sized carrot

2 stalks of celery

2 cloves of garlic

2 cups of vegetable broth

2 cups of cubed chicken (already cooked) or smoked tofu

4oz of egg noodles

1 tablespoon of dried oregano

1 tablespoon of dried basil

Salt to taste

Directions

Dice the onion, carrot and celery (you will need to cut the stalks of celery in half length wise to get a size similar to the carrots. These should be bite sized pieces. Heat up the olive oil in a large stock pot and add the onion, carrot and celery. Allow to cook until onions are translucent. Try not to allow the vegetables to brown, so watch the temperature of the oil and stir periodically. In a separate pot or kettle, bring the water up to 185 degrees, or allow to boil and then pour into a ceramic or glass container and allow to cool for 2-3 minutes. Add the tea and allow to steep for 4 minutes. While the tea is steeping, finely dice the garlic. Give or take the speed of your kettle, your tea should be ready to strain off about the time the onions are translucent so you can pour the tea through a strainer into the stock pot and then add the vegetable broth. Then add the garlic, oregano, and basil. Allow the liquid to come up to a boil and then add the chicken and noodles. It will take the noodles about 8 minutes to become soft. At this point, taste the soup and add salt to taste.

If you want to increase the green tea flavor, you can replace the vegetable broth with more green tea. You can also make green tea chicken using this marinade (link to recipe).