Cooking with Tea: Techniques for Appetizers, Entrees, Desserts, and More. / by Robert Wemischner and Diana Rosen. Published by Periplus Editions, 2000.
Once in a while, get out of the house, and go straight to your public library’s cookbooks shelves: you’ll be amazed and gratified by the treasures there. You may like to purchase online, but you wouldn’t know how great a book was until you saw it in person, right? Some of the most unusual and intriguing tastes lie between the covers of a good cookbook, awaiting your attention! Such a one is Cooking with Tea: Techniques for Appetizers, Entrees, Desserts, and More. by Robert Wemischner and Diana Rosen. These wonderful recipes are more than ten years old, yet the inspiration is fresh and superlative now. I especially like to collect ideas from older cookbooks, since their tastes promise to be new today, and fairly unique.
What piques your interest is the bouquet of flavors that are big on taste! Consider cloves, cinnamon, sugar, black pepper and vinegar over fresh plums, as a side dish. Or a Thai Tea Sauce for spring rolls that features Thai tea leaves, a vanilla bean, star anise and sugar with an option to add cornstarch to thicken? And then there’s Red Rice in Oolong Tea, which is presented with cranberries, pecans, and chives… Think of what plant foods inspire the tea-infused flavors: eggplant, mushroom, zucchini, cucumber, onion, apple, especially orange. And of course chocolate marries with tea quite well. There’s a “Basic Tea Rub” that sounds really scrumptious mixing dry spices with black tea, sugar and salt. You don’t always use black tea, as green tea and oolong work well too.
Although promisingly complex in flavor, these recipes don’t appear to be difficult, if you’re adept at using your equipment, plus cream, milk and eggs. Of course the latter are all but foreign objects to vegans and raw vegans. But I think—-not to diminish the value of these recipes for the omnivore just the way they are—-well-tested methods are adaptable. As long as you keep to the spirit of the recipe, vegan alternatives to dairy could, quite possibly, modify a “Tea Anglaise” which calls for milk, tea, egg yolks and confectioner’s sugar with a different set of ingredients, like nut milk, tea leaves, maple or agave syrup, cashews and lemon juice? It’d be a Cashew Cream, with the addition of tea leaves for flavoring, or made with sun-tea. And you would have a delicious cream, without having to bring it to a boil, then cool it down, etc.!
Recipes like Jasmine Lemongrass Tea are so inviting; what about Chocolate truffles with orange peel in the center layer of a three layer chocolate and cream mixture—couldn’t that certainly be made to order, raw vegan style? Oh wow! Makes me so happy, just dreaming about it!
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