Wholemeal Crank

Today I drank no tea. Quite shocking.

My impression is that you get the best of the PMD sooner, where the YZ gives less up front, but keeps giving and giving with the subsequent infusions being pretty much as pleasing as the first. I wonder if that's due to the delicate thin larger leaves, in distinction to the tiny needles of the YZ?

Yesterday was a delicious but limited day of tea. I drank only one tea, the winter harvest Bao Zhong from HouDe, but it was delicious, and I had a thermos full plus an evening gongfu session with it. Yum. Sunday was busier, with several comparison sessions with delightful white teas from the current tasting, and a pair of Tie Guan Yins. Saturday was also pretty limited, but as usual, the Big Red Robe from Wing Hop Fung kept me going through that all-day class. So it's been tasty, though shincha-deprived and puerh-less.

My first brewing of these was an attempt to get close to the same ratio, 2.5g to 6 oz water, that Richard is calling 'western style', but I miscalculated and should have used 1 gram of leaf in the 75mL/2.5 oz gaiwans to get to a 0.4:1 ratio (I used 1.3). I used the smaller gaiwans only because I wanted to try both teas side by side, which is harder to do when drinking a couple of 6 oz glasses of each tea. My caffeine capacity becomes limiting at that point!

Penzeys has epazote. And so do many of my local grocery stores....but have only seen dried, while not sure I'd recognize the fresh if it were at the market.

I just invested in some laser labels for mailing labels, and used a few for the kitchen, and after only a week they seem great. But I have no idea of their long term removability, so have only used a handful in places where I'm not going to remove them. I mostly use sharpies directly on my glass jars and bottles, because sharpie is surprisingly easy to remove with a good scrubbie and a bit of water. It's water proof but once you break it up a little by scratching or scrubbing, the water seems to get under it so it comes off the rest of the way quite easily. But the sharpie labels are a bit unnattractive, hard to read over dark jar contents, and the scrubbing off, while not hard, is not entirely trivial. What labels are you using--brand/item number?

2nd round, 2 grams of tea in small gaiwans, 2 ounces/60mL water 160°F/71°C. But before the water hits the tea, even the scent of this Yin Zhen is so much stronger than the version I had before, and it has a strong peach/plum odor, almost like an oolong I had tried recently. Mmmm. Anticipation! And the Pai Mu Tan has an equally delicious odor, but I expected that. As soon as the water hits the tea, the scent shifts to vegetal, very strongly, but by the end, the wet leaves have a milder scent with some floral amidst the vegetal. Again, after 30 seconds, the Yin Zhen liquor is paler than the Pai Mu Tan, light creamy yellow vs medium gold--but the flavors are closer than the colors. The Yin Zhen is a little more delicately vegetal, and the Pai Mu Tan has a bit more of a peach/camphor, almost fermented fruitiness. The second infusion went longer, pushing the teas a bit, to 90 seconds/2 minutes. Now I'm seeing a stronger difference, with a deeper flavor to the Pai Mu Tan, and a more delicate flavor to the Yin Zhen. There is a slight bit of astringency to the Pai Mu Tan, but none to the Yin Zhen. For a 3rd infusion (about 1 minute), both teas are quite nice, but the difference is more pronounced: the Pai Mu Tan is more like a ripe fruit, and the Yin Zhen is like the flower before the fruit. Both still pleasing at infusion 4 (1 minute); at infusion 5, the difference again is more amplified: the Pai Mu Tan has lost the sweetness, and there's some caramel but also some astringency; the Yin Zhen is still pretty light and floral; 6th infusion (shorter again than the 5th), the Pai Mu Tan has a little lighter touch with a nicer balance of fruity and floral still present. A 7th & final infusion (the kettle is running out of water), at 180 degrees (because the Pino has trouble holding temp when the water level is low), there is still some lovely flavor coming out.

100% Hawaiian grown oolong by Hilo Coffee Mill I’ve been given a sample of this tea as part of a tea swap. Dry leaves: strong tart/fruity aroma. Infused 2 grams of leaves in a 50mL yixing pot with 190°F/88°C water for 30 seconds. The tea is fruity, sweet, like ripe plums. A second infusion for 30 seconds brings out a little spiciness in addition to the rich fruit. 3rd infusion at 60 seconds is still strongly, deeply, fruity. 4th infusion at 120 seconds is sweet, fruity, not much tart left. 5th infusion at 4 minutes is losing strength, a little sweet, a little fruity, warm and friendly, but not strong like the earlier infusions. 6th infusion at 10 minutes (just couldn’t let it go) is still pleasant, mildly plummy, sweet, but again rather dilute. I think I may actually buy a little of this for a treat. It doesn’t have the legs of a great Dan Cong, but the fruit up front is pretty incredible. Even the aroma of the wet leaves after the infusions are over is still quite nice.

Yesterday started properly with shincha (Sayamakaori from Yuuki-cha), moved to some Lao Cha Tou shu puerh, so nice and mellow, and some Sichuan Yin Zhen silver needle yellow tea, these last from norbu. Today, missed the shincha window, but got in a nice thermos of Yunnan Mao Feng from norbu, much to the taste of those in clinic with me, and then it was on to Ba Xian, eight immortals Dan Cong from Tea Habitat. Tomorrow is an all day class, will need a thermos of strong stuff to pull me through.

I do end up simply composting the veggies used for my stocks, and that makes me sad, but I find it indispensable in my pantry, and pressure can it to keep a good supply along with a rich chicken or turkey stock, at all times. A good rich vegetable stock should not simply be an afterthought, only tossed together from random veggie trimmings in your freezer. A one-shot stock for this or that dish can certainly work--like corn stock for my freekeh soup--but I often ended up with a lopsided stock without a broad enough flavor base to really build on. I can't recommend the section on vegetable stocks in the Greens Cookbook highly enough, for the discussion of what different vegetables add to a stock, and the collection of basic stock recipes therein.

Can't imagine the horror of having to do without one or the other of these. No carrot-sweet carrot and parsnip soup? No roasted carrots? No fresh sweet crunchy munch for long drives? Yikes. But carrot would be exactly wrong in so many places where the tangy herbaceous crispness of celery brings perfect clarity. It is the perfect companion to tomatoes in my tomato basil soup. It is a more singular foil for walnuts in salads. And together they are such excellent companions in many other dishes. I refuse to choose! Don't make me live in a world without either one!

Ok, so I was not that far off with my bai mu dan. Perhaps just the Bai Mu Dan is wrong for this.

I keep some of the original Greens Cookbook summer vegetable stock on hand at all times, for a variety of soups & bean dishes where a strong meat stock would blunt the fresh sweet vegetable flavors: Tomato basil soup, curried lentils, my vegetarian posole; and a corn stock can give the same richness of mouthfeel as a meat stock, but again does well with sweet and light spring/summer vegetable soups, like this vegetable soup with corn and freekah, or even in this late summer/fall pepper and corn soup. My basic approach to corn stock is given in the corn/freekah soup recipe: I make it on the spot with vegetable & corn to be used in the soup, rather than canning in advance.

For brewing western style, low leaf-to-water ratio?

How much tea are you using for how much water? I read about using more tea when cold brewing, and managed to make some rather horrid stuff, perhaps from overdoing it.

--hand rubbed sencha. This is amazing, to watch a tea master make the tea completely by hand.

How does C sinensis provide teas as diverse as white, black, green, oolong, puerh? I was browsing wikipedia the other day, and came upon this great chart, that shows the different steps in processing tea, and how different combinations of them result in very different types of tea. It's brought a lot of information together in a way that helps me keep it all straight, more simply than several books and many articles & web pages. So the chart shows how oolongs and black teas both go through some bruising and oxidation, steps that white, yellow, and green teas skip, which steps help develop their fruity & spicy complex flavors, with black tea going 'all the way' and oolong varying from almost green to very near black tea. It also clarifies the relationship between puerh and green tea, making clearer why some young puerh appeals to me most when brewed as though it were a green tea (low temp, short infusions). Of course, if I had just looked at the chart without reading those books & articles & web pages, it might have been pretty confusing itself. So this seems like a good idea for a topic, to discuss tea processing, and link to good sources for information about it. For example, I have a link to a great video of hand processing sencha in Japan that I will try to find & post next.

Today, I had a long meeting, and no time to prepare tea beforehand. I filled the thermos with hot water from the water cooler, couldn't find my thermometer that belongs at work, and used my finger to test the water--hot, but not immediately painful--so figured it was green tea time, grabbed some Jade Pole Yunnan green tea from Yunnan Sourcing, my korean 'travel set' and ran to the meeting. It was quite lovely infusing cup after cup of pleasant green tea during the two and a half hour meeting. Then some Spring Tie Guan Yin from norbu for the afternoon clinic, lovely as always.

I've bought several cheap digital thermometers on amazon. I have now three from polder, one of which died a strange loss-of-calibration death that I can't fix by recalibrating (because it reads so far out of the range where the calibration feature works even if I stick it in ice water); one is a 'meat' thermometer that beeps annoyingly because it wants temps to be 170 or 180 or 190 degrees, one of several fixed presets, and I have relegated that to the less-used satellite office; another works fine but has small difficult to use switches instead of buttons. The best seems to be the last bought, a taylor 'professional' model from amazon. The big problem I have iwth all of these is that they don't balance well in a short teacup or teapot. But using the pino kettles they have become less of an issue anyway.

Today I was wandering around Wikipedia while a phone call was on hold, and found this gem of a chart on wikipedia, that diagrams the different tea processing steps and what type of tea results from them. Brilliant and clear. In the last week, I think I've had tea processed every which way except fully oxidized black tea; I think it has been at least two weeks since my last pot of Yunnan gold. Today started with a shincha medley--mixed ends of some samples from a tasting swap, tea that was steamed, rolled, dried; and then moved on to some of the white bud sheng puerh from Norbu, perfect for a gray damp day, tea that was probably panned, rolled, formed, dried, and aged; and finished with another green tea, a rolled Jin Xuan varietal from Norbu, that was likely panned, rolled, formed, dried. All so nice!

Most Americans have heard of black tea, and green tea, but not oolong, or puerh, but I find I have no trouble making fans of oolongs after one or two tries of a nice mellow green-style or a rich Wuyi. I was lucky to focus on oolongs right away because my father learned about tea from chinese friends who were fairly knowledgeable about tea. Neat article, and hope it brings more attention to the best of teas, although not so much that they get more expensive/harder to find!

Today did a more formal gongfu cha session with the Hou De 2009 Winter harvest wood-roasted Shui Xian oolong. This is a very interesting tea. It is tightly rolled, unusual vs the other wuyi oolongs I’ve had, and looks fairly green in the rolled state, and unrolls to a deep green leaf. But the tea liquor reminds me more of a Dan Cong style of oolong—astringent, complex, toasted, sweet, spicy. And it has the ability to last through a dozen infusions easily, getting lighter at the end, but even the light infusions are still fruity/sweet/spicy. I started this brewing with 3 grams of leaf in a 100mL red clay pot, water about 185 degrees, and infused at first for 30 seconds, and extended as long as 2 seconds by the end of the session. Very very nice.

Iced tea experiment with Bai Mu Dan from Wing Hop Fung: used 10g tea per 12 oz infuser mug, one started with 160 degree water, the other with chilled water, both refrigerated for about 12 hours. The cold brewed tea was a bit lighter in color than the other, but both were a rich amber, and both tasted....rather vile. Astringent, a little bitter, just not good. I'll be sticking to cold water & hot tea again after the annual failure of the cold tea experiment!

Nominal capacity was 60mL, but actually it holds 80mL by my tests.

A new teapot, a Chao Zhou sandy red clay pot from Tea Habitat: