Tea Cuisine: A New Approach to Flavoring Contemporary and Traditional Dishes. By Joanna Pruess with John Harvey. Published by The Lyons Press, Guilford, Connecticut, 2006, c2001 as Eat Tea.
Pruess and Harvey begin an elaboration on culinary tea with introductory notes about tea as a drink, followed by preliminary methods for using for tea as a flavor and how to store it. Their recipes elicit a state of spice forest fantasy, where tea becomes the secret support of more obvious flavoring agents. Three of the chapters interpret ideas and concepts of tea-permeated cuisine that might be new to you, while the straight up recipes like those in Hors d’Oeuvres and Vegetables, and Side Dishes can be taken delightfully as is. But a significantly interesting thing takes place as you glance fleetingly at recipes you think you’ll never use due to your current diet. Because there you’ll find a surprise: that techniques in taste-making don’t need to be limited to meat entrees. The authors are aware that you’ll want to wade in slowly, so they offer simple twists to traditional dishes at first.
These chefs do interesting things with tea. One is to grind the tea and spices together then sprinkle the mixture as a condiment over a cooked item. A second thing is to add tea in a curry paste to yogurt, then cover sautéed vegetables while hot. A third is to create a marinade from hot tea plus garlic, honey, etc., and pour this over noodles, tofu or vegetables. For soup, they suggest cooking an infusion of tea 5 minutes and soak dried mushrooms in it. Then use the soaking liquid in soup base, along with tomato paste, stock and thyme leaves; cook until soup is done; add lemon juice, Worcester sauce, salt and pepper. I’m certain—this is a wealth of basic flavoring ideas for the home cook. You say you don’t know many secrets about cooking great food? Start here—it’s easy with these chefs’ suggestions.
Their recipe for spiced pecans uses hot cinnamon spice tea and white pepper plus sugar to flavor the nuts. The authors coat the nuts with egg whites prior to adding flavoring. Now I ask this—is there a work-around for this non-vegan choice? If the egg whites are there to attract and hold the flavorings to the skins of the nuts, would olive oil or coconut oil do the same thing?
The authors’ magic continues with more than enough vegetable recipes to keep me entranced. I’ve considered Chamomile Tea-Farfaile (pasta) with Poppy Seeds, which uses tea bags to create a flavorful liquid in which to cook the pasta. Coconut Scented Yams has to be the most exotic recipe, infusing rose hips tea in coconut milk before mixing that liquor with cooked yams. Curried potatoes, Cauliflower and Mushrooms is a royal dish but made accessible with mushrooms, and spiced yogurt with smoky Lapsang tea. Crisp Yuca Wedges and Glazed Acorn Squash make use of less traditional, more high Vitamin C flavors like rooibos tea for the Wedges, and honey, orange juice and cinnamon spice tea for the Squash.
By now I’m hooked on the idea that tea can enchant any dish. Yet, from the chapter on Main Courses, dishes that seem to invite seasoning from tea liquor or tea spice are all meat or seafood! What’s to prevent these flavors from pairing just with vegetables? As I saw in “Cooking with Tea”, reviewed here, fruit also can be ravishing with tea. And great vegan recipes can be even more attractive with tea and spices. What’s nice for the discerning vegan cook is that unusual techniques for flavoring can be found in this section, and these can likely afford quite unusual tastes for vegan alternatives like tofu. Consider green tea and sumac to flavor dressing, or juniper berries, black tea, black peppercorns, mace and salt ground up with orange zest; both of these for fish could just as well be transferred to vegan preparations. Oh, almost forgot about Curried Dried Fruit Chutney made with mint tea, dried fruits and curry spice blend. Sometimes the tea is there to support a transfer of flavors between spices and fruit.
The last two recipe sections are Sweet Breads and Desserts, and Beverages, and are as compelling as the above mentioned chapters on Hors d’Oeuvres, Side Dishes and Main Courses. Extra suggestions can be found in John Harvey’s suggested tea and food pairings.
The Index is adequate, listing ingredients, names of dishes, categories of food, and tea information as entries.
Follow
