Expensive Tea

Expensive Tea

Qatar was hard to pin down for a specific type of tea. Most of what I found was that Indian style tea was popular there. Then I found an article about gold plated tea leaves being used to make a cup. (My first thought was how they recovered the gold after brewing). Thanks to a quick Google search, I saw a price of $178.00 quoted for a cup of tea. Not going to happen.

It kind of reminded me of an article about a $400 machine that brews your tea for you. I think it's one of those where you have to buy their tea pods, then it will brew you the perfect cup at the perfect temperature for best flavor. I can never remember the name of the contraption, but if you Google "overpriced tea brewing machine", it pops right up. (It's called teforia if you ever wanted to know.) I guess I'm not the only one holding that opinion of this gadget. While this contraption is not popular in the Middle East (or anywhere else that I can tell), I thought an aside to mention this would fit with today's theme.

Then throughout the region, saffron is listed as a popular tea add in. Saffron, the world's most expensive spice, because it is harvested by hand, and is the stigma of a specific species of crocus. Me being me, read up on how to grow them, because I like growing plants, and I don't like spending a lot of money on small amounts of spices. They are a fall blooming crocus, and like to grow in dry sandy/rocky soil. Each bloom produces 3 strands of saffron. Okay, it would take a while to break even on growing you own versus buying the spice (but lacks the fun of growing a plant).

Originally I had planned to make plain saffron tea, then infuse it with black tea and green tea to see how it tasted in the various concoctions. Then I thought about how much energy that would take and decided I would start out trying it plain, then decide if I wanted to go further. So, today's ingredient:

Seriously, I paid $15.00 for that? 0.4 grams (0.01 oz) total. Each vial is one tenth of a gram. Now I will say that I purchased this with a coupon to receive a certain discount if you spent over $50.00 on groceries, and this put me over the top to get it, so not all was lost. I reviewed some videos on YouTube on how to make saffron tea. In one video, a woman demonstrating it had a huge tub of saffron that she picked a pinch out of before dropping it into the hot water. It seems that various YouTube watchers had the same feeling I did when one of the first comments was speculating on the cost of her tub of saffron.

So I followed her instructions, boiled the water, ,poured it into a cup...

dropped in a pinch of saffron...
                                               ...waited 5 minutes.

Then I fished out the strands of saffron with a fork, and took a sniff...
                              ...then another sniff...
         ...and another.
Eventually I determined that it did smell vaguely like something, but not strongly enough to identify what it might indeed smell like.
                           Then I took a sip.
And tasted hot water with a metallic undertone.
After several sips, I realized this tastes like nothing but slightly metallic hot water, and is not going to improve or change with careful attention to try to find the flavor.

Maybe the ability to taste saffron is genetic, like those experiments we did in high school biology class where we put the various chemical treated strips of paper on our tongue to see who tasted it and who didn't. Every single one of those strips tasted like paper to me. It was kind of fun to let them dangle off of my tongue while the tasters looked at me in horror and asked how I could do that. Maybe I missed out on the gene that makes other people rave about how wonderful saffron is. Maybe my saffron lost all its flavor from being stored in a clear container (don't you love spice companies that don't follow their own advice to keep spices in a dark place?). Or maybe this is all a big joke to see if some idiot will actually spend the money to try saffron even though we know you could get the same effect out of a bottle of cheap food coloring. Either way, I have several recipes that called for saffron that I always wanted to try. Now I can make them as written, and know that in the future I can just leave it out.