Turkish tea revisited

Last month I got a postcard for a 10% discount to celebrate the 18th anniversary of my favorite tea shop. You know that there was some shopping involved. I was biasing toward the cheaper teas (although I did opt to spend on more ginger puerh), and decided to try real Turkish tea. As you may recall, Turkish tea is brewed strong and watered down. The instructions say to use 1 teaspoon per 6 oz of water and one extra teaspoon for the pot. They also say to brew 10+ minutes. I had my regular teapot set up, and realized that if I followed the directions I would end up with gallons of tea once I watered it down to a point where I could drink it. I decided to exercise caution on my first brewing. I used 1 teaspoon per 6 oz water, and brewed it for 5 minutes. Longer brew times bring out more of the bitter flavors, so that may be why they serve their tea with so much sugar.
When I opened the bag, I could see that the leaves have a finer cut meaning that they will brew a stronger tea. Thankfully they are not the hard little pellets like the black tea sold at the Indian grocery, or the tea I got from Tanzania. Those brew an incredibly strong tea that my doesn't like unless I add a little dairy. So I brewed, and poured my first cup.
After 5 mintues of brewing, it has a nice color. It's a little lighter than I expected. The flavor is actually pretty mellow, and reminds me of toast. I know that their tradition is strong and sweet, but I know from past experience that combination tends to make me gag. Then again I have always been an oddball. In fact, here's a project I recently finished from one of my oddball hobbies.
It's a 3-D bobbin lace star, made from my German star book. I'm slowly figuring the patterns out. I know some people use Google translate on their books that aren't available in English, but I haven't. I know that lace terms don't translate well. I'm willing to bet that few to none of the people working on those translation programs know how to make bobbin lace. We're due for another heat wave this week, so now I've moved on to tatting snowflakes. Hopefully my thread doen't melt!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Equatorial Guinea

Image
Equatorial Guinea Today we go to Equatorial Guinea , which consists of "Rio Muni" - Continental Equatorial Guinea, and 5 small islands known collectively as Insular Equatorial Guinea. When researching this country, I found "osang" tea. I found the name only, no instructions on how to make it. Mystery tea Upon doing some research, osang is a generic name for African milk tea. I couldn't pin down any specific flavors used for this region, just a general description of how people all over Africa make this tea. The base is black tea with milk. The suggested add ins are shown below. Tea Masala (thank you Indian food store), ginger, cardamom, or lemongrass. No, don't use them all together. Today I'm in the mood for cardamom, so that's what I used. The one blog I found about making this suggested a 1:1 ratio of milk and tea. I used 3/4 cup (about 200 ml) of each, with 3 cardamom pods. As usual, you can add sugar to taste. I decided to add the c...
Read more

Have a cup of Christmas

Image
I'm skipping ahead just a little bit because of a Central American holiday tradition. The hibiscus flowers are in bloom, and it's tea season. In this part of the world, hibiscus tea is known as "sorrel" instead of " bissap ". While my research on the tea of North America is not complete, I found that several countries make sorrel for Christmas. Trinidad and Tobago , the southern most Caribbean islands. They gained their independence from the UK in 1962. They are a continuation of the Andes mountains from Venezuela. They have a tropical climate, and temperatures vary widely between day and night. They used to grow a lot of sugarcane, but the last of the sugarcane estates was closed. Cocoa and coffee are also export crops. Most of the population is rural, and is made up of people from Africa, East Indian, and mixed race.  Saint Vincent and the Grenadines , are part of the Lesser Antilles in the eastern Caribbean Sea. These islands gained their independen...
Read more

Ataya/Waraga/Tuareg Tea

Image
"Berber Whiskey" What do you make on a Saturday afternoon when you're tired? I mean really tired. Like you just woke up from a 3 hour nap, and all you want to do is go back to sleep. I will admit I was a bit leery of this one when I found out how it was made, but this is wildly popular so I had to try it. This version of tea has many names, and some sources say that this is used like alcohol in cultures that forbid drinking and using drugs.  Ataya (or attaya - I've seen it spelled both ways), also known as Tuareg tea (so named for the Tuareg tribe), is a very social tea ceremony in West Africa. Most reviews say to expect to take at least 3 hours and have several rounds of tea. Over time, each round of tea is supposed to get milder and sweeter. Sometimes instructions say that mint is added. It is popular in many countries: The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau , Senegal (The Gambia is actually inside Senegal with a small border on the Atlantic), Sierra Leone , Mali , Mau...
Read more