Cooking with Tea

Tea is good to drink and tea can be very good to cook with, too. My friend Maggie and I have been working together on a "tea cooking" project. She is a trained chef and I love to eat, so this is a great partnership!

Last week, we had our second attempt at cooking with tea. She gave me some ideas of what dishes she wanted to make and I gave her some ideas on which teas might go well with the ingredients. She came up with a chicken dish using our High Mountain Buddha Hand, a steamed Halibut with Jasmine Green Tea, stir-fried Shrimp & Vegetables with Dragon Well, and Pork Belly with Muzha Tieguanyin. All of the dishes were delicious and the tea flavor came out very nicely. We had a feast and were very proud of the results. In my next post, I will give you one of the recipes.

Maggie Chiu was born and raised in Taiwan. She received her professional cooking training from a culinary school in California. She used to own a restaurant in Taipei and cooked at the Four Seasons. She now lives in Seattle with her husband.

Blog and LaLaShan

I am glad that my writing helps you in your tea discovery, and hope that it will continue to do so. A customer wrote me a note this week and I thought it would be nice to share it with all of you:

"Thanks for including the sample of Tiequanyin in my last order. It was delicious, and I was hoping you would add some to your web page. Also, the first time I had the LaLaShan I wasn't overly impressed, but after reading your blog about the tea I tried it in my yixing teapot. I thought it was much, much better brewed in a yixing rather then the gaiwan that I had originally brewed it in. Hadn't really figured there would be that much difference. Thanks for the idea, and thanks for the great tea."

Thank you all for reading my blog! Keep experimenting and please share your results.

Brewing LaLaShan High Mountain Oolong

After having tested out my Lishan oolong (sorry, sold out!) in a Gaiwan and a Yixing tea pot, I thought it might be interesting to compare another High Mountain tea in various Yixing Pots and a Gaiwan.

I decided to test out the LaLaShan Tea and used three yixing pots that I normally brew Taiwanese High Mountain oolongs with.

After rinsing the tea, I smelled the lids and preferred the smell from the gaiwan lid the most. After the first round of tea, I decided I liked the taste of LaLaShan from the yixing pots better than the gaiwan. I compared four infusions of the tea from these three pots, and I most preferred the tea from the Yixing pot that is closest to the gaiwan (please see the picture above) because it yielded a round and smooth tea liquid. The tea liquid that I liked the least came from the middle Yixing tea pot. For the LaLaShan, the middle pot made the liquid taste bitter. I also liked the LaLaShan from the larger Yixing pot on the left. This pot and its clay made the tea taste bold.

It's quite fun to test out a tea in multiple tea ware and to notice that they will have different results. Try it out yourself and see what you discover.

Taiwan Trip

I will be in Taiwan for tea this May! One of the exciting things about this trip is that I will be working with a professional photographer/videographer and we will be shooting some informative tea videos. We already have some ideas for possible projects. One of our ideas is to feature an organic tea farmer. Another one is to compare different tea making processes.

I thought that it would be a great idea if you, my customers and blog followers, were interested in participating in our project as well. Start by gathering some of your thoughts together. If you could talk to a tea farmer in Taiwan, what would you ask him and what kinds of things would you like to know? Here's your chance to find the answer to your important questions!

Alishan

Every day after I arrive and open up the shop, I choose a tea to drink. My preference is mostly based on the weather. Lately, it has been gloriously sunny in Seattle! This beautiful weather has caused me to crave for this season's Alishan High Mountain Oolong.

This Alishan tea gave me a very good surprise two days ago when I drank it. It has developed much rounder flavors and carries a beautiful floral bouquet with a citrus note. The tea blooms especially well after the second infusion.

A customer wrote to me and told me that this Alishan was his favorite high mountain tea from this season. He has tried various Lishan and DaYuLing oolongs from Floating Leaves as well as other places and thought this Alishan carried especially good high mountain characteristics. He also commented on the energy of this tea and asked me if this Alishan was made from old tea bushes.
I told him it shouldn't be, but I heard from the farmer's wife that they rotate the tea bushes so that they don't over-harvest the tea.

Good Alishan is limited in quantity for this season because of the big typhoon that hit Taiwan last year, causing a lot of damage to the area. This season's Alishan is surprisingly good and has gotten even better in the past month.