How to cook fresh tea
Preparation
- A fresh sprig of green tea: normally an old leaves that have lots of side leaves (which is not too young and not too old). A sprig of green tea usually have one-span long including buds, leaves and sprig. Also, you can easily buy it at a street market or super market. You should choose a good-looking sprig, without smashing, crushing and rotting.
- A flavored sprig (optional): it could be ginger, pandan leaf, lemongrass or peppermint. Depends on your liking or using purpose.
- Kettle and a bottle.
Steps to cook fresh green tea:
1.
Prepare the leaves : Clean the leaves carefully then chop the fresh leaves, old leaves and sprig separately. Because these three part have different flavor and cooking time.
- Crumple the old leaves, this would help nutrion inside the leaves to flow out easier.
- Chop the sprig to a small piece, about 3-4 cm to easier fushion.
- Separate the fresh buds.
2.
Parboil the fresh tea: put everything on, including old leaves, fresh leaves and sprig in to the big bottle. Then pour the boiling water in, steam in 3 minutes. After that, you pour the first water out, this technique helps to clean the leaves, make it less resin, rusty and bitter.
3.
Cook the tea: Heat the kettle first, then put all the mixed leaves after parboil right into the boiling kettle. Next, continue to cook in 10 minutes.
- You can add ginger, pandan leaf, lemongrass or peppermint right at this time.
4.
After 10 minutes, pour the tea out: Some people has the habit of steaming the leaves long in the kettle, that would make the tea too bitter. It’s also makes both flavor and small would be ruined.
5.
Let it cool down and enjoy: It’s nice to drink either hot ot cold.
Useful advices
- You should keep some tea flake in the cup when serve your friends or customers
- Tea tree in each place is different. So you should repeat the parboil step time to time until the rustly smell is gone.
- Instead of crushing tea leaves by hand, you should use fabric bag, or chop it into small piece.
- Cook green tea in the cooker will cause the tea muddy. If you want the tea clean and fresh, just need to steam the tea in boiling water for 2 hours.
- These day, you can use Thermos bottle to keep the tea hot or cold much longer.
- Nghe An people also add a pinch of salt while parboil the tea for more flavor and longer keeping.
Note
- Don’t put too many kind of flavors in the same bottle, it would make the tea smell and taste the way you unexpected.
- Do not cook or steam the tea for too long. You can pour the tea out and enjoy it later, it will help keeping the flavor.
- Green tea has a lot of easy-oxidant organic substance, so you can keep green tea in the fridge longer.
- Should you not drink tea that left in room temparature after 8 hours.
