Wholemeal Crank

Have never adjusted pastry recipes when making tarts during ski trips at similar elevations.

For fine pieces of dried frut, whirling inthe food procesor with part of the sugar or flour will permit very fine pieces without turning into a gummy mass.

I may let this one sit in the drawer for a while before I start playing iwth it.

Bought a block of that puerh but will probably not get to it for a bit yet. Today starting with some Big Red Robe, which is just right for a day when I need caffeine for wakefulness but also soothing for a mildly frantic day.

I've had poor luck with the kind of soft, moist cookies that usually feature honey. They tend to be fragile in the cookie jar under the weight of those above them. Plus I just prefer crunchy.

Today starting again with green tea, the yunnan mao feng from norbutea. I think I need to weigh this one, because what looked like a big pinch of leaves has not filled much of the pot, and the flavor of the infusions is coming up a little light. It needed to be a little stronger to stand up to the apple tart.

The first honey cookie bakeoff is complete. I decided to go with variations on my simple poppy shortbread, substituting honey for sugar and reducing the quantity, adding a bit of egg to be sure they'd hold together, and omitting the buttermilk to minimize competing flavors, since the whole point of these cookies is to show of the flavor of a particular honey. I made three small test batches, with slight variations, all starting with the same flour--25% short grain brown rice milled with 75% soft white wheat (upping the percentage of rice flour to increase the crispness). For all flour was whisked with soda and salt, then butter beaten in with the flat paddle on the kitchenaid until completely blended and even small crumbs achieved, then the egg/honey whisked together and mixed in at the end to make a smooth dough (the egg alone wasn't enough to get it to stick together, so a small amount of water was added at the last minute). version 1 200 grams wheat/rice flour 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon baking soda 1/4 cup unsalted butter, softened 1 tablespoon beaten egg 1/4 cup honey 1 tablespoon water version 2 200 grams wheat/rice flour 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon baking soda 1/3 cup unsalted butter, softened 1 tablespoon beaten egg 1/4 cup honey 1 tablespoon water version 3 250 grams wheat/rice flour 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon baking soda 1/4 cup unsalted butter, softened 1 tablespoon beaten egg 1/4 cup honey 2 tablespoons water (needed more for the added flour) And they were patted out and baked about as the regular recipe, but I changed the oven to 325 for 25 minutes, then 170 degrees with the cookies on cooling racks for another two hours. Also I used a fork to mark the individual cookie wedges to distinguish versions 1, 2, and 3. The results? three small batches of tasty enough 'shortbread' cookies. version 3 was too dry version 2 was delicious, but the honey flavor was a bit less prominent than the butter. version 1 showed off the honey, was pleasingly buttery nonetheless, and probably is the one to play with further. Time will tell how the crispness holds up but right now they're brilliant for dunking in tea or coffee.

Haven't seen this topic before, surprising for this popcorn-a-holic. I eat it at least 3 times a week (for breakfast, lunch, or dinner but rarely all 3 in one day!), most made plain in the microwave popper, with butter and salt. Occasionally like it sweet with popcorn sauce (my own concoction of 1 part honey to 2 parts molasses, zapped in microwave with butter to taste until it boils a moment, then over the popcorn and lightly salt all. And recently broke down and bought a 2nd popper for work, although that will mostly be eaten plain as the logistics of maintaining a supply of butter and doing paperwork with buttered fingers.... Used to have an air popper but the microwave is faster and simpler with this gadget, and there are no removable inserts required.

Just heard this one: spouse of a foodie friend will not eat any jam, jelly, conserve, preserves, unless it is PURPLE. Hence, applesauce was out of the question for a large windfall of tart apples.

Black Yunnan today--the Yunnan gold xtra fancy from Chadotea--with a sprinkling of Osmanthus blossoms. Really nicely amplifies the underlying fruitiness of this tea. Thought of the combination after a reshuffling of the tea cabinet yesterday, and running across the osamnthus which I'd forgotten about.

After yesterday's Ali Shan oolong-fest, today started with a comparison of Dragon Well and Yunnan Mao Feng green teas; then a first try of a new shu puerh; and now gyokuro again.

I got a bonus sample of that with my order yesterday, so will open it up and join in when everyone else gets theirs.

This topic has been quiet for a while. Today I finally started on a puerh tuo I got in a trade from Richard. The label leads me to this web site, which has a sound track to go along with the tea pictures and info. It's the one with 803 on the label, "Tulin Brand Phoenix Bowl Tea". Quite mellow and earthy, just ; I used 3 grams in a small gaiwan with about 3 ounces of boiling water. The later infusions were distinctly sweet. Guessing that this is a shu, because I think I see this character 熟 on the label (just above the black characters, first character inside the parentheses). Interestingly, it tastes very similar to the first puerh beeng I got from Wing Hop Fung, which came in a box long since discarded, and whose sole surviving label does not, as far as I can tell, have either character--raw 生 or ripe/cooked 熟--on the label. But my Palace Seven Sons Cake from TenRen looks like it is 生/raw (see the note on the image upper left).

Unfiltered tap water. There's a filter pitcher of water in the fridge for working with sourdough starters, which are supposed to be sensitive to chlorine, and because it's chilled, it gets used for pastry & a few other things. I have your basic bottled spring water dispenser at work and have used it occasionally for making tea--using the hot tap to speed things up when I'm in a rush--but have never noticed a difference between the spring water and tap water teas. I have never done a head-to-head comparison, though.

Unfiltered tap water. There's a filter pitcher of water in the fridge for working with sourdough starters, which are supposed to be sensitive to chlorine, and because it's chilled, it gets used for pastry & a few other things. I have your basic bottled spring water dispenser at work and have used it occasionally for making tea--primarily when I'm in a hurry I use the water from the hot tap to kick start things--but have never noticed a difference between the spring water and tap water teas.

After being surprise in rereading in the Harney & Sons Guide to Tea that "The sweetness [of Japanese green teas] is extremely faint compared with the honeyed quality of many Chinese green teas," I decided to try two chinese green teas this morning prepared similarly to the Sencha and gyokuro that I have found to be so amazingly sweet. And this is my first crack at the Yunnan Mao Feng Green Tea I received in yesterday's order from Norbutea. The other tea is "Precious Xihu Dragon's Well" from Wing Hop Fung. I tried to find this one on their birdpick.com site but can't find anything that exactly matches the abbreviated label on the bag from the store. This is the closest, but at $71/4 oz it's even more expensive. So....about 1 gram each of these two teas, in matching porcelain gaiwans, just over 1 oz of water about 160 degrees and infusions of 30", 10", 30", 30". The results are very nice, as good as I've gotten yet from the Dragon Well, but still much less sweet than the senchas or gyokuro. There is a stronger vegetal astringency with the pleasant nuttiness I expect in the Dragon Well. I think it would be better with double the tea to water ratio, but wouldn't expect the silky texture of the liquor from the japanese teas even with that change. The Yunnan Mao Feng is a much wilder looking tea than the very neat flat uniform dragon well--thin, twisty, some paler than others--and the flavor of the tea is also 'wilder'--a bit smoky, with a resinous edge that may be 'camphor', very like a green version of the 2007 white bud sheng puerh crossed with the wild white camellia sample I got in a trade from Richard. It's also sweet, but less so than the Dragon Well, and also would probably benefit from a higher leaf-to-water ratio. Here they are after brewing: Now wondering: is there another Chinese green tea that is particularly prized for sweetness? Or is there more sweetness that I should be able to coax from these? The closest I think I've encountered to what I would think of as "honeyed sweetness" is from the new style very lightly oxidized oolongs.

Working on the head-to-head comparison of the 2009 Ali Shan High Mountain Oolong Teas from norbutea.com. 2 grams each of the spring, summer, and fall teas, in gaiwans, about 2 ounces of water per infusion, with water that started at 185 degrees and then cooled because I was too lazy to keep reheating the kettle. I think I am up to the 5th infusion or so, and all are just lovely teas. The spring and fall are very similar in flavor--very sweet, mellow, hay/straw/caramel notes, with the spring tea perhaps holding up little better with more infusions than the fall, and the summer tea is least sweet but more of the warm caramel notes--it just tastes more like fall and harvest than the fall tea does. They're wonderful teas, standing up to strong cheese (montogmery's cheddar) and tart apples quite well.

Only mention I've seen of that is here. Does sound like it's worth the time to counterfeit, at that price.

$12.99 at Wing Hop Fung, aka birdpick.com, similar in size but a lot cheaper than this one they sell online.

I'm not too worried about the water, because I can give them an extended time in the oven at low temperature to dry out. Does sound like the key problem I have to work around. Until I get a few more bottles from this year's harvest, I don't really have enough to experiment with. I'll start with some plain commercial honey, and go from there.

More musing about japanese green teas: last night I was rereading that section in the Harney & Sons Book of Tea, and he says, in discussing the processing of Sencha teas: "The sweetness is extremely faint compared with the honeyed quality of many Chinese green teas." This and other comments discussing the desired astringencies made me wary of these teas, but in my very limited experience of 3 sencha samples, and one gyokuro, what astonishes me and draws me back and back again is that they are so stunningly sweet, when brewing conditions are just right. I have not worked with that many chinese green teas--mostly a variety of jasmines, a couple of samples of dragonwell, and probably two or three more generic teas--but have never experienced anything like the silky sweetness of these japanese teas, even when brewing the fanciest dragonwell at ridiculously low temperatures.

Redoing, because apparently my browser ate my post. It's going to be a while before I get around to my project of exploring Korean and Japanese stores here in LA for some nice teapots, but in the meantime, I decided to try a little experiment: brewed the last two grams of my sencha select sample, dividing one gram each into a porcelain gaiwan and my smallest yixing pot (which hasn't yet been used for any strong teas). I preheated the gaiwan and pot, used the same water/timing etc, but can only say that both made delightful tea, because the yixing held the the heat so much more that the flavor was noticeably influenced by the brewing temperature.

Started the day with the sencha experiment (discussed in the japanese green tea topic), and then as I was cleaning up, the postman knocked with my box from norbutea. So....had to set up the teapot again and taste the 2009 Late Summer Ya Bao - Wild White Camellia Varietal Tea. As I'm brewing it, it is sweet, vegetal, grassy, piney, floral--but all of these quite subtle. Quite a contrast to the refined sencha! I'm also looking forward to making a comparison between the spring, summer, and fall Alishan High Mountain Oolongs. Should be a nice chance to educate my palate about the differences between the seasons in the same tea.

Several posts slipped in while I was working on this one.... That's quite similar to the roman honey cake. They look delicious, with little to hide the flavor of the honey. That's my main concern here--to make a very simple cookie that doesn't overwhelm or hide the nuances of the spicy complex honey. Hence the need to think about the textural effects of a large proportion of honey, so that they don't get so soft and sticky in the cookie jar that they collapse in to a heavy solid mass, or get unacceptably scorched in an attempt to cook them into dry crisp cookie-jar separateness.

Thanks for your thoughts. I will also need to go back to my tea books to review their sections on japanese teas also, but they are too basic and general to have much discussion at the level of effects of pottery on the flavors of tea. I'd like to find a good book on japanese teas but first attempts on amazon is overwhelmingly focused on the traditional tea ceremony.