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Tea 107: Week One Recipes!

So, I just started my next module started last week and the ‘theme’ for this one is “Cooking with Tea/Tea and Food Pairings”. It’s one of the classes I tried to sign up for before (instead of The Business of Tea) but at the time not enough people were registered. Now, it’s the class with the largest amount of students in it that I’ve had to date! The first few weeks of this module are dedicated to cooking with tea, and after that there are a few weeks of tea and various food pairings. So, here are the recipes from week one!

Matcha Infused Ice Cream

This is something I’ve often wondered about doing many times before; I drink a lot of matcha and it’s no secret that I like to combine it with other things, such as baking. Imagine mixing any of RLT’s flavoured matcha into vanilla icecream! The possibilities are endless, right?

That’s kind of what we did, though I used a plain cooking grade matcha provided by class instead of any of my large personal collection. We were meant to pick out a vanilla ice cream and just blend in the matcha and then refreeze it. In this class, we’re encouraged not to follow the recipes directly and instead make substitutions as we see fit and get creative, so instead of a ‘normal’ vanilla ice cream I used this as a chance to try something really new (since I’ve had green tea ice cream before) and I bought a vanilla goat’s milk ice cream.

This was the easiest recipe to make so far: I just measured out 2 tsp. of matcha into a bowl of ice cream and stirred it all up. Then, because I wanted to try it right away I just ate it instead of refreezing and doing it later. The only problem was that it melted faster but the taste was great! Very smooth and vegetal. This is absolutely something that I’ll make again in my own time but probably using a RLT matcha because the flavours appeal to me more so and I know the quality of the matcha from RLT is better.

PS. Goat’s Milk icecream is pretty good on it’s own too. Definitely has that distinctly “tangy” sort of taste you get with any product made with goat’s milk. If you like goat’s cheese or stuff like that this’ll totally appeal to you though!

Lapsang Souchong Cheese Spread

This one was a little more challenging to make, but only because it involved grinding up a tablespoon or so of Lapsang Souchong and I neither own a mortar and pestle or a food processor so I spent forty minutes grinding the tea by hand with a spoon while watching Netflix so I wasn’t completely bored.

The groudn tea was then mixed into 1/2 container of Phillie Cream Cheese (just the plain one) along with whatever spices we wanted to add. All I added to mine was 1 1/2 tsp. of garlic powder. The result was the perfect light, smoky cheese spread/dip that everyone in my family enjoyed – even my brother which was super unexpected. We ended up trying it with potato chips and on bagels. The only real downside was that it had a grittiness to the texture that was very unpleasant. Had this been properly grounded, I think it would have been much better though. If I had a better way to grind the tea, I’d totally make this one again too.

This was the recipe I got to talk about in class as well; everyone had to discuss one of the three recipes in depth and how they made it and this was the one I chose to talk about. My instructor was surprised to find out how much I like Lapsang in my ‘normal life’; she said normally this is the most polarizing recipes in the course because people dislike Lapsang so much. I can see that, as my friend Kandyce (who works at DAVIDsTEA) says, “The only people who order LS are stuffy middle aged men”. I’m definitely not one of those…

Genmaicha Soup

I don’t drink/eat a lot of soup: it’s just really not my thing and the idea of using tea as a stock/broth doesn’t overly appeal to me either so this was definitely the recipe I was least looking forward to. It did turn out to be my least favourite, as well.

Basically, I brewed up a pot of very intensely strong Genmaicha and then heated it on a stove top with some vegetable bouillon mixed in (we had the option of using vegetable or chicken and as a vegetarian I obviously went with the vegetable route). I also added in chopped onions: white, red, and green. But when all was said and done the soup just tasted very thin and bland (apart from the onions). I mean I certainly could taste the green tea and the roastiness of the brown rice in the blend but it just didn’t wow me.

I wouldn’t do this recipe again; or at least not this way. I’d be open to trying other tea based stocks with soup again but some things would definitely have to be switched up for this to really appeal to me.