Tea Recipes

I've seen mentions of tea-steamed duck, tea-cooked eggs, and tea used as meat rubs in several of the thread on this forum so I thought it might be about time to start a thread for tea recipes.

My favourite is Ochazuke, a Japanese "soup" made from tea over cooked rice.

Serves 2

1 salmon steak
salt to taste
3 cups hot water
3 tsp sencha or other high-grade green tea
1 tsp minced ginger root
2 cups cooked rice
4 - 6 sprigs of "chinese parsley" (mitsuba) or cilantro
Wasabi to taste

Season the salmon with salt and grill or broil for 6 - 8 minutes. Remove the skin and bones and flake the fish.

Combine the hot water and tea and steep for 3 - 5 minutes. Strain out the leaves and stir in the ginger root.

Divide the cooked rice between two serving bowls. Top with salmon flakes, chinese parsley and a dab of wasabi. Pour as much of the tea as you like over the rice and serve.

Ah!　I haven't eaten Ochazuke for a while ... maybe I will make it for tomorrow's lunch, easy and quick :-)

Nothing comes up to my mind right now, but I like mojito made with green tea. (but not with mint leaves. Oddball? well I don't like mint tea.)

I'll definitely try that Ochazuke soon. Meantime for something completely different:

Tea-marinaded, rum-steeped prunes.

Ingredients:
Large prunes (no seeds)
Hot, strong, well-sweetened black tea
dark rum

Put prunes in a bowl and cover with the hot tea.
Let stand, covered, overnight. Don't refrigerate.
Next day pour off any un-absorbed liquid.
Put prunes in a jar and cover with dark rum. Put lid on jar.
Leave for three days.

They'll keep for ages in a cool dark place I'm told, but mine have always been eaten pretty quickly.

For an utterly over-the-top treat you can drain some of the prunes and dip them in melted chocolate (let the chocolate set).

My favorite which is embarassingly simple: Just add a teaspoonfull of gunpowder green tea to a portion of rice,
a minute or two before you serve it. The rice tastes better and your guests will wonder in vain which spice you've used.

I make chocolate ganache from cream-infused tea. I bring whole cream just to the boiling point and add in a tea bag (flavored tea is fine, I like Earl grey for the flavor/aroma), let it infuse until desired strength, then remove the bag and bring to the boiling point again. Ready to pour over the chocolate. I use it for all kinds of things: fillings for cake, piped between cookies for cookie sandwiches, etc. The rum/tea steeped prunes sound interesting, though!

>4 bnielsen
Does it have to be 'gunpowder green tea' or can it be any sort of green tea? I like the idea.

I also very much like >5 RShelton's cream-infused tea (or could it be tea-infused cream?) and am quite sure I'll use it.... probably when I'm serving a sweet tart of some desciption and think "That needs a bit of oomph.... how about RShelton's 'tea' idea?"

I have used cold tea to soak dried fruit for a German Barn Cake.

>7 hazeljune
I do the same for Irish (Tea) Bread (or Barmbrack - can't recall the actual Gaelic name). I wonder if the German Barn Cake is related.

The Irish recipe: Soak overnight: 1 cup brown sugar, a well packed cup of dried fruit and a cup of hot strong black tea. Next day add: 1 beaten egg and 2 cups self-raising flour. Mix well. Put mixture in some kind of loaf tin.
Bake in a moderate (180 degrees Celsius) for about an hour..... Serve sliced and spread with butter.

Last week I made tea cookies from a recipe I found online. It called for a tbs. of chopped loose tea, so I used a powerful Ceylon blend, good quality, but the cookies just tasted like butter cookies. No tea flavor at all.
Anyone have a recipe that works?

#6: I think you can use almost any tea. I just like the taste of gunpowder tea :-)

Last weekend I purchased a new cookbook called Culinary Tea. The first half of the book is about tea in general. The second half contains recipes made with tea. The recipes are both main entrees as well as desserts. As I am writing this I can't remember the name of the author.

I just found the Culinary Tea book. It was written by Cynthia Gold and contains 150 recipes made with tea.

#8 Thrin the recipe sound much the same, I do not make it any more as I could not stop eating it and put on lots of kilos!!!