Newbie needs help with Green tea - PLEASE!

Yeah, that germed rice can become green (covered by mold) in 24 hours if you don't store it in the fridge after opening the package. OK, that happens only with the version without additives. But where do you go if need additives even in your rice ?

I cook brown rice like white one. The advantage is it's like pasta al dente, it's very good for my taste and that's not a quick sugar. Contemporary Japanese have problems of teeth and gums, and specialists think it is because they no longer eat much food that need to be chewed. That made me laugh, but after 2 years in Japan, I have started to get tooth decay for the first time in my life, even though I still brush my teeth. I have found that other foreigners got the same problem. There must be some truth in it. So now, I'm careful to get something to "chew" on the menu everyday.

Kuri

OK, so that 5 pound bag I bought today gets tightly sealed and refrigerated, I guess.

/Lew

No, don't let the tea dry out between steepings. Don't use tea that's more than a few hours old to resteep.

Oh... and you should only use 1 1/2 TEASPOONS (not tablespoons, sorry) of large leaf tea. But getting a good digital scale is the best way to measure out loose tea, because it's by weight, not by volume.

1- don't overheat the water for steeping the green or oolong. Keep it on the cool side. 2- keep the steep short, around a minute or two.

Doing that, you can steep the tea at least two times. I haven't found resteeped black tea to work as well.

You are correct that the first steep has much of the caffeine removed from the leaf, however some of the bioflavanoids in tea are the same compounds that give tea its color. So if the tea is still coloring water, there are still polyphenols/bioflavanoids not yet extracted. I don't remember exactly, but I believe it takes 5 minutes of steeping tea in hot water to remove 95 percent of the epicatechin, from one abstract I looked at on green tea.

Another option might be to brew green tea for five minutes, then dilute it with water to taste. But in my experience this produces a different quality of tea vs. the traditional steeping. I tend to use a single cup filter for my tea, and heat water in a microwave. I can easily re-steep tea this way, just for one cup. Another option is I fill a thermos flask up with two steepings of tea.

It's really academic, though. If you drink first steep green tea, you are getting bioflavanoids, but the ratio of caffeine to bioflavanoids will be higher with a single steeping vs. multiple steepings.

Why? What is wrong with it? I resteep sometimes leaves that were sitting there for a day or two. I may have 5-6 different teas sitting in their chahus at the same time during the week and me resteeping them now and then. Never a problem, never a disappointment. Never saw any mold or anything like that or any unhealthy looking films or spots developing on the leaves. I live in Reno, about 1200 feet above the city (altogether 5200 feet above ocean level) and on its NW side, which means that air quality here is one of the best possible in the country, so may be in other, more polluted parts of the world it would not be so, but in that case I would just put my chahus in a fridge, instead of keeping them as I do - on the kitchen table.

For puerh drinkers it may be interesting to know that steeps of the puerh tea that has been kept in a chahu for several days after initial brewing appear to be quite different. May be it gets some rejuvenation of its fermentation? I have no idea. All I object to is the notion that one "SHOULD NOT USE TEA MORE THAN FEW HOURS OLD TO RESTEEP" without any arguments explaining why not.

Sasha.

snipped-for-privacy@xprt.net/15/04 20: snipped-for-privacy@xprt.net

Yes, of course I have. And of course it seems just right for sushi and sashimi. I'd like to try it in the at home context though.

How about the myriad Mexican fast food places that are all over NYC now and all run by Chinese families?

Michael

My favorite sushi place in upstate NY was run by Koreans.. It was quite good.. They made a spicy tuna second to none... They used the Vietnamese Sur Racha spicy sauce in it.. Granted, it may not be as authentic, but the quality was good.

Does your rice happen to be Tamaki brand, in a thick brown bag?

--crymad

This is news to me. What sort of additives? Do they come off during the routine rinsing just before cooking?

Mold in 24 hours? Is this really possible?

[...]

Yes, Japanese have an unhealthy desire for softness in most anything they eat, be it rice, bread, vegetables, meat, or cakes. In fact, on those TV shows featuring young ladies out on gustatory adventures, the first word out of their mouths after swallowing something they enjoy is very often "yawarakai" ("soft"). Flavor is a secondary concern. Drives me nuts.

--crymad

Not to mention the pizza joints and Italian restaurants run by Serbs and Albanians.

Joe

I can't remember buying spoiled brown rice more than maybe once in my life, and I get the organic stuff from the large bins at the health food store. But, true, it does take twice the time.

Also, brown rice is not a

Boy, were you shopping at the wrong store. And were you using enough water? Mine's delicious, but I do prefer the long grain which is less chewy than the short. Anyway, chacun a son gout.

Like Uncle Ben's?

Joe Kubera

I get it - may be this is what 21 century is all about: everybody doing someone else's job because the people who suppose to do the job are busy doing something else: Italian joints run by Serbs, Chinese run Mexican restaurants, Israelis running our foreign policy. And the governments do that too - China does all our manufacturing, while we are busy working in McDonalds, Mexico grows our population, we are making sure that in a while Iraq has no population. What's not to like about the New World Order?

Sasha.

No doubt there are physical differences in body type between ethnicities. People in equatorial regions tend to have long, thin limbs, whereas people in subtropical regions tend to have shorter limbs and a stockier, heavier appearance.

However, I suspect alot of the difference is that many people in Asia are just more physically active (though China's rate of obesity in urban areas is increasing, it is nowhere near the level in the US), and in many parts the society is still agrarian.

De gustabus non disputandum. I just don't want to drink stuff that's sat around for hours.

I'd imagine Reno has very low humidity. Here in the American South, stuff starrts to turn bad in a couple of days if you let it set out on the counter and it has moisture in it. It's so bad I keep my tea and coffee in a cabinet with a few big buckets of moisture absorber- I just don't want it to taste or smell musty at all. Spices in the cabinet will cake up in a month or so. I suppose a de-humidifier would be the way to go, but that just uses more power.

Not just dry - extremely dry. All tea I bring from SF in bamboo containers start cracking after just day or two and crackle for several days waking us up occasionally. But teas left in chahus remain quite moist and looking beautifully silk-shimmering on teh surface of large leaves. I may have 5-6 of them simultaneously sitting on the counter waiting to be re-steeped. I usually re-steep green puerhs, ShuiXians and TeGuanYins up to

7 times.

Sasha.

Yes, I already responded, but at the time I probably wasn't caffeinated enough to think to call my wife and get the authoritative answer, which is "yes".

Does this matter?

/Lew

We were just at the Japanese market a couple days ago saw an elderly Japanese lady buying a big bag of this. She said mold growth isn't a worry and that you don't have to store it in the refrigerator. Though this rice may come with the mystery additives Kuri talked about, there is no mention of it on the package in Japanese. Still, if you got the room, refrigerator storage can't be beat.

--crymad

Sorry -- didn't mean to dis brown rice. I was speaking more why Asians historically never took a liking to brown rice.

These are just bad memories of my mother-in-law's pressure-cooked brown rice. Not bought at a store, mind you -- her elderly parents grew it themselves. I used to make a separate pot of brown and then mix it with white in about a 1:3 ratio. I just might start doing this again.

I can't remember the last time I made long grain rice. Short grain is just more "juicy". Even for Indian food, we use short grain, albeit a less premium grade than what we use for Japanese food. Must do it pilaf style, otherwise it turns out too sticky.

--crymad

Vitamines, minerals...all the stuff that guaranties you not to get Alzheimer.

It's pre-rinsed. Well, most germed rice I see for sell is produced by industrial vitamin food companies (fancl, etc) and it tastes un-natural to me. The exceptions are the overpriced bio-versions that are humid and in special 1 cup packages. I have had molds as I used only half of the bio version and kept the rest in a normal box. As you said, I don't need that as my diet is balanced, so I have not been following the latest inventions. I've just seen that for 100 000 yen, you can buy a rice cooker that germinates the rice in 48 days before cooking it. They really needed a pretext to ask that much for a cooker. I eat normal brown rice for taste, and because I like changing. I also occasionnally cook farro (spelt ?), buckwheat, etc. The "brown rice program" of the rice cooker is adapted to those grains and to soaked beans, but I find it too strong for regular brown rice....unless you want it disgustlingly "yawarakai".

Kuri