Tea Blog

Using flavored teas as an ingredient in recipes is becoming a real trend. Considering the bits of fruit, flower petals, and spices in these teas, this trend seems only natural since these items are used for cooking anyway. The tea just adds that “something extra.”

A number of recipes have been featured on this blog already, including this series of taste pleasers by Janis Badarau:

• Cooking with Tea: Sangria
• Cooking with Tea: Blancmange
• Cooking with Tea: Good Gravy!
• Cooking with Tea: Fruitcake You’ll Actually Want to Eat!
• Cooking with Tea: Homemade Cranberry Sauce
• Cooking with Tea: Late Summer’s Bounty
• Cooking with Tea: Just Peachy!
• Cooking with Tea: Fruit Kissel
• Cooking with Tea: Tea Punches
• Cooking with Tea: Hot and Sour Sesame Noodles

There have been numerous recipes posted online, too, on sites like Twitter and Facebook but also on blogs and vendor websites. A great one I saw recently that made my mouth water was Green Tea Citrus & Dijon Roasted Chicken that used a tea called Green Tea Citrus Spice, a combination of spices and citrus that can be used to season seafood and chicken but quite versatile with its mild, distinctive flavors that also make a fabulous vinaigrette.

My hubby, too, has been doing some experimenting, using some cinnamon flavored black tea in the instant oats instead of straight water, for example. You can use some jasmine green tea to cook your rice. In fact, a lot of foods that require water can have a tea substituted. A flavored tea just adds that extra touch and saves you from adding those extra ingredients yourself. The trade-off is that you can’t adjust the amounts as easily as when you are adding in those flavoring ingredients directly, so some trial and error will be called for here.

Some good teas for your recipe experiments:

• Granny Green Apple Tea — imparts a real fruity apple flavor to your foods, making it good for pork dishes or something dessert-like.
• Blackcurrant Naturally Flavored Black Tea — natural high grown Ceylon tea from estates at more than 5500 feet above sea level with real blackcurrant flavor that works in various dishes.
• Izu Matcha (Japanese powdered green tea) — while not a flavored tea, I throw this one in here because it seems to be featured in recipes almost daily, from ice cream to cakes to even pasta and meat dishes. The sky’s the limit here.

Have a great time with your experiments and be part of that flavored tea trend!

See more of A.C. Cargill’s articles here.

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