Category Archives: Cooking with Tea

Cooking with loose tea provides many ways to incorporate the taste and aroma of tea and tisanes into your cooking. From seasoning to ice cream and cocktails.

Honeybush – The Other South African Tisane

Honeybush is closely related to rooibos which also grows in South Africa

Honeybush, also known as Cyclopia, of South Africa

Rooibos is not the only tisane which calls South Africa home. While rooibos has captured the most attention, and been subject to at least two attempts to trademark the name, honeybush is a very close cousin. Honeybush is used as a base for a wide variety of products and can be used in cooking. It is also caffeine free making it popular in the afternoon. Although similar to rooibos in many ways, it is has a bit sweeter taste providing an equally delicious infusion.

Honeybush Production

There are many similarities between honeybush and rooibos. Not only are they both from South Africa but they both come from the Fynbos region. Specifically they come from the Western Cape, South Africa, around the Cederburg Mountains. The product is chopped into fine pieces and normally fermented before packaging and shipment. As a variation, green honeybush is produced without the fermentation step. Like rooibos it also comes from the legume family, though this family is quite large and includes 16,000 others.

Though there are many similarities, there is a large difference in cultivation.  Most honeybush is harvested from 20+ species of wild cyclopia bushes. About 70% is harvested by hand in remote regions of South Africa with about 30% coming from commercially planted bushes.  Global demand from the Germany, the US, and other locations is increasing however, so this plant is increasingly planted and harvested from commercial plantations.

History of Honeybush

South African castle built by the Dutch East India Company

Dutch East India Company – Castle of Good Hope

Like rooibos this tisane has its roots dating back hundreds of years to consumption by native bushman or Khoisan people. According to the Institute for Traditional Medicine, honeybush infusions have likely been around for hundreds of years. The Dutch “discovered” it while exploring the plants and animals around a fort near what is now Cape Town when it was a stopover for trade between Asia and the Netherlands. The purchase of the Cape Colony by the British and subsequent adoption of English helped further spread knowledge of honeybush and probably rooibos as well.

Honeybush Future

Production of honeybush has been rapidly increasing to meet growing international demand for this tisane. Not only does it make a great base for caffeine free tisane infusions but there is also potential for health benefits as well.  According to the South African Honeybush Tea Association (SAHTA) which formed in 1999, there is a substantial amount of research occurring around potential health benefits from anti-oxidants and other compounds. Its consumption may help prevent cancer or offer alternatives to hormone replacement therapy.  Much still needs to be done to validate these ideas as well as meet existing commercial demand. To satisfy these needs SAHTA also actively works to improve cultivation, biodiversity, and sustainability practices to increase production and ensure continued availability.

Honeybush tea infusions are often consumed straight, although they may also be consumed with milk and sugar. Honeybush blends well with a wide variety of ingredients including ginger, lemon myrtle, lemon grass, fennel, and even caramel pieces. Be sure to have a look at the recipes provided by SAHTA on its website for honeybush tea punch, tarts, and muffins.

Matcha: Drink Your Tea and Eat it Too

Matcha is considered to be the first powdered tea. Created in China sometime between 960-1139 CE, it traveled to Japan with the Zen Buddists. It is actually de-stemmed gyokuro. Matcha starts like gyokuro in Japan, by spending a few weeks in the shade before plucking, withering in the sun, and then steaming. At this point in the manufacturing process, the leaf is typically folded or rolled for gyokuro. With matcha, the leaf is dried flat and the stem is removed from the leaf and the remaining parts are sent through a granite grinding stone to make the finished matcha powder.

Whisking matcha ice cream.

Whisking matcha powder into an ice cream base.

There are a few different grades of matcha. The two most commonly found in the U.S. are ceremonial matcha and cooking matcha. Ceremonial matcha is usually made of 1st pluck of gyokuro and has a much more subtle grass and seaweed flavor. As its name implies, it is drunk during the Japanese Tea Ceremony. This type of matcha really should be drunk in the traditional way and not used for cooking. Cooking grade matcha is made of older leaves and carries a much stronger grassy taste. It holds on to its flavor even when added to recipes. It can also be drunk and its name in Japanese actually translates into daily matcha. However, in the U.S. cooking matcha is rarely marketed as a daily drinking matcha.

While, matcha as a drink for me is still an acquired taste. Cooking with it is super easy and it adds some really interesting flavor and color to everyday items, like ice cream. We recently tried two different matcha green tea ice cream; one more traditional and one vegan friendly.

Matcha Green Tea Ice Cream (With or Without Mint and Chocolate Chips)

Running ice cream blender mixing in chocolate chips.

Blending Chocolate Chips into Matcha Mint Ice Cream

2 cups half-and half
1 cups heavy cream
2/3 cup brown rice syrup
2 tbsps. matcha powder

Heat the half-and-half and heavy cream to 175 degrees Fahrenheit. Remove from heat and stir in the brown rice syrup. Pour through strainer into a bowl and whisk in the matcha. Cooking matcha clumps a lot like corn starch, so send it through a sifter first to make your life easier in whisking in the matcha to the milk base. Cool in the refrigerator until 40 degrees Fahrenheit (about 6 hours). The matcha will float to the top, whisk again and pour into your ice cream machine based on the instructions for the machine. If you want, add in ½ tbsps. vanilla extract and 1-2 tbsps. mint extract based on your preference, just before pouring into the machine. About 10-15 minutes into churning you can add ½ cup of your favorite chocolate chips.  Finish churning the ice cream based on the instructions for your ice cream maker.

Matcha Green Tea Ice Cream (With or Without Mint and Chocolate Chips) – Vegan

Blended matcha ice cream base.

Matcha Ice Cream Base

¾ cup cream of coconut milk (see below on how to get this)
½ cup soymilk (plain or vanilla)
½ package of silken tofu – 6 to 7 ounces
½ cup agave nectar or brown rice syrup
2 tbsps. matcha powder
Put a can of coconut milk in the refrigerator for at least 10 hours, but it hardens better overnight. The cream rises to the top of the can, so do not shake the can when you take it out. Open the can with a standard can opener and spoon out the cream into a measuring cup. The remaining items freeze nicely and can be saved to use in other recipes. Add all ingredients into a blender and blend until everything is incorporate and smooth (usually about 3-5 minutes). Put back in the refrigerator until the temperature is 40 degrees Fahrenheit (assuming everything you use came out of the freezer this only takes about 3 hours). The matcha may separate if you leave this overnight in the refrigerator, just lightly whisk by hand before pouring into your ice cream maker. If you want, add by hand ½ tbsps. vanilla extract and 1-2 tbsps. mint extract based on your preference, just before pouring into the machine. About 10-15 minutes into churning you can add ½ cup of your favorite chocolate chips.

This is just one of several ways to add matcha into your routine, even if the drink is not your thing. What do you like to add matcha too?

Matcha Ice Cream is Served

Matcha Ice Cream (With and Without Mint and Chocolate Chips)

Nilgiri Tea Ice Cream (Vegan Friendly)

There is no better way to celebrate summer than to combine two of my favorite things, tea and ice cream. This would seem easy; there is green tea ice cream already. So why aren’t there black tea ice cream recipes all over the place?

The short answer is that green tea ice cream is made with matcha powder, so the tea is blended in with the cream allowing for a nice flavor, texture, and neon green color. When you are eating green tea ice cream, you are literally eating the tea. Black tea is not made into a powder like matcha, so to make black tea ice cream we have to borrow from the coffee ice cream recipes.

Photo of Nilgiri flavored ice cream being poured into churn.

Pouring Nilgiri Flavored Ice Cream into Churn

The trick behind good ice cream, thank you Alton Brown for this bit of information, is to find a nice balance of fat and sugar. If you want less fat, you need more sugar to help keep a smooth texture on the ice cream. It is also handy to note that the human tongue is not very good at picking up flavors in frozen items, so concentration of flavor is key. Keeping that in mind, I set out to find a simple ice cream base that could hold a strong cup of tea. Below is the recipe I came up with for Nilgiri Tea Ice Cream.

Why Nilgiri? It is the usual base to most iced teas in the USA. Its flavor holds up to ice, so it seemed like the easiest place to start.

1 quart Nilgiri Tea Ice Cream Recipe:

Ingredients

6 grams Nilgiri tea
8 oz of water
1 15oz. can of coconut milk (low fat coconut milk is fine, but double the arrowroot)
12 oz. of SILKEN tofu
¾ cup Brown Rice Syrup*
2 Tbsp of Vanilla Extract
½ Tbsp of Arrowroot powder (can use corn or potato starch here)

*Since I am not heating this mixture, it is safer to use a syrup than granulated sugar in this recipe. I am not a fan of high fructose corn syrup, which is why the brown rice syrup is here. Feel free to substitute the corn syrup, but the brown rice syrup adds a slight nutty flavor that compliments the tea in this recipe.

Directions:

Nilgiri flavored iced cream churning away.

Churning Nilgiri Flavored Ice Cream

Brew 6 grams of Nilgiri tea in the 8 oz of water for the typical 5 minute steeping time and set aside to cool slightly. Combine the rest of the ingredients and the tea in a blender and run the blender until the ingredients are combined and smooth. If you are like me and not very patient, the tea will have raised the temperature of the rest of the ingredients too high to immediately pour this into your ice cream machine. So put the contents of the blender in the refrigerator. It will probably need to sit there between 4-6 hours to drop it down to around 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Then follow your manufacturer’s instructions for pouring the mixture into your ice cream machine and churning it. It will come out a soft-serve consistency but will harden into more solid ice cream after about 4 hours in the freezer.

A hungry family is ready for dessert.

Nilgiri Tea Is Served

I hope you enjoy this as much as my family did. Have you tried using tea to flavor your homemade ice cream?

Cold brewing tea to filter for serving.

Cold Brewing Iced Tea

Brewing Iced Tea in the Sun

Sun Tea by flickr user SanFranAnnie, CC BY SA 2.0

As a native of Arizona, I spent most of my childhood drinking sun tea.  It was always an interesting sight to watch the tea bags infuse the water in the glass jar using just the rays and heat from the sun.  At the height of summer, it usually took no longer than a few hours for it reach the color my mother wanted.  When we moved to Florida, it was disappointing to learn that sun tea didn’t quite work there. So in came the countertop ice tea maker.  This remained my go-to method of getting quick black iced tea for many years.  Then I learned of cold brewing tea and quickly found this easy method opened up a whole new world of drinking some of my favorite hot teas cold.

Anyone with an iced tea maker will tell you it is impossible to get green iced tea out of it that is not horribly bitter.  As someone who steadfastly refuses to add anything to my tea, this was very disappointing.  The water is just too hot and the steeping time too long for the tea.  Even some of the best flavored teas lose their flavor in the ice tea maker; Jasmine tea being one.  Cold brewing these teas leaves their flavors intact.

Cold brewing iced tea to filter for serving.

Cold Brewed Iced Tea – Perfect for Summer

How to Cold Brew Iced Tea

It is super easy to cold brew tea.  You just need a pitcher and water.  The ratio is roughly 7 teaspoons of loose tea to 750 mL of water.  Put the loose tea and water into the pitcher and put it in the refrigerator for about 6-8 hours and see what happens.  The trick behind cold brewed iced tea is getting the liquid out at the end of brewing without the tea leaves.  That’s a piece of cake if you find one of the pitchers with mesh infusers at your local big box store.  Or if you happen to have 2 pitchers and a fine mesh strainer, you can strain the contents of your brewing pitcher through the strainer into the other pitcher and then discard your teas leaves, hopefully as compost for one of your favorite plants.  Play with the amount of tea versus water and your steeping time until you find the combination that works for you.

This cold brew method has been used in Japan for many years.  Not a surprise when you think about all the green tea Japan drinks.  So feel free to try this with your favorite green tea and see what you get.  This method also allows oolong to become a fabulous iced tea.  Those complex oolong flavors remain after brewing cold.

My favorite so far is cold brewed sencha iced tea.  It is really refreshing after a workout.  Have you tried cold brewing your favorite tea?  What do you think?  As we head into warmer weather we’ve highlighted the teas that we think will cold brew well for you on the Dominion Tea specials page.

Hillary @ Dominion Tea

Tea Infused Yogurt

I have been making my own yogurt for over a year now, and tea infused yogurt would combine two of my favorite foods..  In trying to find yogurt that is not loaded with sugar or artificial sweetener, I did what many people do these days and googled how to make yogurt at home.  I was pleased to discover how few ingredients it required and, since I already had a dehydrator big enough to hold 8 oz glass jars, I was pretty much ready to go if I could just find yogurt starter at a grocery store.

Yogurt starter is basically the bacteria necessary to make yogurt, in packets very similar to the yeast used to make bread. Some recipes suggested that you could use yogurt from the grocery store instead of the yogurt starter however, as I was trying not to eat the yogurt in the grocery store, I decided to pass on this option. Finding the yogurt starter was simple here in the suburbs of Washington, DC where I found yogurt starter in the baking aisle next to tapioca and various extracts.

So why tea flavored yogurt?  Over the year as I have gotten more comfortable with scalding milk, getting it up to 180 degrees Fahrenheit without boiling, I have gotten braver in adding alternatives to the milk to try to flavor the yogurt.  I decided while reading a recipe for tea flavored ice cream that I should be able to flavor yogurt with tea was amazed to find that it worked!

Now, before I show you the recipe I should say I do not add sugar to my yogurt.  I rely on the lactose in the milk to sweeten the yogurt, which makes for a tarter yogurt than most Americans are used to. I really like it, but my son absolutely dislikes it and David doesn’t eat yogurt, so I’m subjected to my own creations.  I have added a note at the end, if you want sweetener, on what and how much to add.

While I haven’t done this recipe with herbals or green teas, I imagine it could work with them also.  Just be prepared for your yogurt to take on some unconventional colors – like green or pink.  This recipe calls for your favorite black tea, which in my case is Earl Grey.  Just be aware of how it tastes in the cup because that taste will amplify in the yogurt, especially if it is citrus in flavor.

Getting started, you need a few pieces of equipment, a good liquid thermometer, dehydrator and fine mesh sieve.  You can usually find a thermometer in the kitchen equipment section of your grocery store next to the can openers.  If you have butter fingers like I do, spend the extra money for the waterproof one so when you drop it in the milk it will survive (learned this one the hard way).  As for the dehydrator, there are many options out there, so find one you like that can run at 115 degrees Fahrenheit and is deep enough to hold glass jars.  Ball makes 4 and 8 oz jars, so measure before you buy.  I use 8 oz since I already had them in the house from making jelly and my dehydrator was big enough to hold them if I removed the racks.  As for the sieve, the finer the mesh you can find the better, as the dust from the tea leaves will get through if the holes are too big.  You might like it or you might find it a bit gritty in your yogurt (it looks almost like vanilla bean seeds at the bottom of the yogurt cup when it is done cooking).  I resorted to a kitchen supply store to find one that was fine enough and I still get some tea dust remaining in the yogurt.

Milk and Tea in a Sauce Pan

Whole Milk and Earl Grey Tea

Recipe

  • 4 cups Whole Milk*
  • 2 tbs Favorite Black Tea (mine is Earl Grey)
  • 1 packet Yogourmet yogurt starter
Scalded Milk and Tea in a Sauce Pan

Scalded Whole Milk and Earl Grey Tea

Put the 4 cups of milk in a sauce pan with the tea leaves, you will need to stir to get the leaves incorporated.  Bring the milk up to 180 degrees Fahrenheit without letting it boil.  Expect it to turn caramel color as the tea brews in the milk.  As soon as it hits 180 degrees take the pan off the burner and allow the milk to cool back down to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. If you are adventurous you could strain out the tea as soon as you pull the pan off the burner.  I prefer to wait as I have no need to get burned by hot liquid if it happens to splash while pouring it through the strainer.

Straining Off Tea

Straining Off Earl Grey Tea

Pour the milk through the strainer into a vessel that makes it easy to pour the milk into the jars (I have a 4 cup Pyrex measuring cup with a spout that makes this super easy).

Put the yogurt starter into a small bowl that you can whisk in and ladle in a couple of scoops of the milk once it hits 115 degrees (I have found this happens almost immediately after pouring the milk through the sieve).  Whisk until the starter has dissolved then add back into the rest of the mill and stir.

Distribute the milk between your glass jars and then put those jars for a minimum of 4 hours in your dehydrator at 115 degrees Fahrenheit.  Check if thick enough by turning the jars upside down at the 4 hour mark.  I have had it take as long as 6 hours in a few cases. Transfer the jars to the refrigerator and start to enjoy the yogurt the next morning.  Be prepared for losing about ½ cup of the milk to being absorbed by the tea leaves.

Just a word of caution about Earl Grey and other citrus flavored teas – Citrus and milk creates buttermilk, which is very tangy.  Even if the citrus is nothing more than an extract, my experience has been that the yogurt is rather tangy.  So I will admit, sometimes sugar is necessary to help tone this down.  I add mine after the fact by pouring a little agave nectar (no more than a teaspoon per serving) over the top before eating, but that is only after I have tasted the yogurt first.

For those who really need sugar in your yogurt – go with ¼ to 1/3 cup of a liquid form of sugar – like agave nectar, honey or maple syrup.  While these 3 may turn your white milk slightly cream colored, you do not have to battle trying to dissolve granulated sugar in your milk while trying to make sure your milk does not boil.

*Forget 2% or skim milk as they make runny yogurt that requires corn starch to thicken – too much work in my book

I hope you enjoy this recipe.  What do you like to cook with tea?

Hillary at Dominion Tea