Matcha tea

Well, maybe, but it sure doesn't sound like making matcha.

Matcha is made by whipping a powdered form of green tea with hot water into a thick suspension. It sounds as if these teabags are mainly chopped leaves with a bit of powder to give you the illusion of matcha due to a powdery texture in the cup.

/Lew

Hi Lew,

Thanks for your comments.

The bag that the tea is in has a very fine mesh and only a small amount of leaf bits comes out. One could just cut through the bag and then mix the leaves into the tea but most people don't like loose bits in their mouths.

What really surprises me is the 30 seconds steep time. I can't imagine even a fraction of the nutrients in the tea leaves coming into the water in that time.

Soooo, I am adding them to another dish and eating them completely. No point in wasting whatever nutrients are left.

Have a great week :-)

It depends on the water temperature, the amount of leaf relative to the amount of water, how finely the leaves are chopped (if at all), and whether you expect to steep the leaves multiple times. For some setups

/Lew

Ill add to Lew. Look at the Bodum milk frothers. If those are too expensive just get a cheap tea press and plunge away. I use them to make chai for tea. If plunging is too much work put some powdered matcha into a tea press and act like you are serving James Bond, shaken not stirred.

Jim

Matcha... it's not like normal tea. You add the tea powder to the water and whisk it around and then the powder settles out and you drink the stuff on top. It's really kind of nasty, actually.

Making matcha with a bag seems to kind of defeat the whole process, but I could see someone doing this with the bag and the added powder to simulate the experience of making matcha the regular way. Thing is... it doesn't seem like it would be any less work than the regular way.

--scott

You drink it all if you like the taste and texture.

Nasty? Only if it isn't good matcha.

Scott, like you I used to think matcha was useless to people with functioning taste buds. But less than a month ago I tasted *good* matcha for the first time. The difference amazed me.

/Lew

And half the fun of tea is in the making. But... with bags, there emerges the possibility of a second steep. What wonders (or horrors) might one there find?

-DM