Cooking with Tea

Cooking with tea can be an exciting adventure. Just like spices, the tea leaves can add interesting, exotic, and unusual flavors to your favorite dishes. Try adding your brewed tea to broths for soup or sauces. Or add tea leaves to baked goods to make savory breads and cookies. Tea can make an ice cream or yogurt dance with flavor. If you like the tea, then you will like whatever you cook using the same tea leaves!

If you aren’t sure what the best way to brew your tea here is a previous post that can help get the flavor from your tea leaves.

https://www.bostonharbormt.com/brew-great-cup-tea/

I encourage you to use the tea leaves just like you would any herb or spice in the kitchen. I have included a couple of my favorite recipes for you in this post.

Montana Gold Tea

An orange flavored tea with hints of cinnamon and clove, this tea is wonderful for adding to rice. Brew the tea as usual and use instead of water. When the rice is cooked, add raisins and walnuts.  It is also great for steaming vegetables particularly beets, carrots, and broccoli by placing the loose tea leaves in the water. By using the leaves while steaming, it infuses the food with the elements of the tea. It is absolutely fabulous for steamed fish as well.

Himalaya Tea

Again this green tea with essence of jasmine and pineapple lends itself well to the method of steaming as you can brew the tea and use in place of the water when cooking rice or vegetables. Add pineapple tidbits, walnuts, or other favorites to the rice. This can be served with a teriyaki sauce.

Lapsang Souchang

This tea has a smoky characteristic that is great for all kinds of meats. Parboiling the meat with the loose tea leaves gives the meat a wonderful taste like it has been smoked. Another use is by smearing your fish, especially salmon, with olive oil and then using the leaves as a rub before broiling or grilling. An additional treat is to use while preparing hard boiled eggs. Crack the shell lightly and boil the eggs with the tea in the water for 15 minutes. When you peel the egg, you have a marbled effect. The taste is outrageous!

Damiana

Damiana is kind of like oregano and is a medicinal herb tea. Rub it on a roast (pork, beef or other) before cooking. It is great for any tomato based dish such as goulash, spaghetti, soups, or Sloppy Joes. This is also a wonderful addition to any stir fry. Although I haven’t tried it, others have recommended using this herb in scrambled eggs.

Okay, now you have the idea! Get to cookin’!