Samovar/tea concentrate help

On 18 Sep 2003, climbed into "rec.food.drink.tea", opened the box of crayons and scribbled the following:

Lucky bugger.

Yep. It also allows one to have hot tea almost instantly without oversteeping. And if your model has the little pot that sits on top, even your concentrate is kept warm.

Ceylon and Indian tea are typical in Russia (or they were when I was there in 1993). Black teas are most common. In 3 months, I don't think I EVER saw green tea in any of the shops - well, maybe once.

However, the concentrate did NOT steep for hours. The family I stayed with would steep the concentrate in one teapot and then pour it of of the leaves into the teapot that sat on top of the samovar.

The used leaves would then be spread out on a pan to dry and be used again for the next pot of concentrate. They reused everything

- including my orange peels that I "thoughtlessly" threw away and were used to flavor tea.

This depends on how much concentrate you want to use per cup. For example, if you want to use 1/4 of the cup concentrate with 3/4 of the cup hot from the samovar, then you need to make your concentrate 4 times as strong as you normaly would.

I do similar at home with my T-One. It makes 1 cup of tea, but to have 2 cups, I double the leaves and then split the steep between two mugs. Then I top off the mugs with hot water.

You want to steep your concentrate at the "normal" temperature. The water from the samovar should be the right temperature for consumption. Hot is important at that point, boiling is not.

Well, you don't want your water so hot that you burn yourself drinking your tea.

As for using unboiled water - was the Russian FAQ from Russia? Even in urban areas, I know families who boil their drinking water. And, especially if you're going to keep it "warm" for tea, you don't want to help things grow.

I saw plenty of electric ones in Russia, made by the same Tula manufactures who used to make the coal-powered models. :)

Derek

On 18 Sep 2003, AK climbed into "rec.food.drink.tea", opened the box of crayons and scribbled the following:

And, from what I understand, it was also a time that a better grade of tea was imported. My host family decried the decline in the quality of the tea they could get in 1993 compared to what they got just a few years earlier. :)

Derek

I have been slowly collecting tea and coffee preparation devices, and I have always admired the look of the samovar. I got a reasonably good price by shopping locally at an Iranian store, rather than the internet. The price was not too bad considering the workmanship.

The basic principle of tea making is not too complicated, I was just confused by some instructions saying that you could keep the tea around for up to 4 hours.

Did your grandmother make the concentrate in a different pot, or did you drink it all immediately?

I am considering using the samovar mainly for big family dinners and like the ability to make tea for 10 or so people, which is difficult to do 'English style' even with a Chatsford.

We won't even get into teabags.

I am also gett> Hello,

...

On Fri, 19 Sep 2003 00:02:22 GMT, snipped-for-privacy@ix.netcom.com tripped the light fantastic, then quipped:

I like your philosophy. :)

Tee

Not in our city.. we could only get Georgian tea (Georgia was a USSR republic). It was sold in small cube-shaped tinfoil-paper packages, there were no teabags (yay) but no chinese or indian teas (nay). Those Georgian packets were IT. In the same sense that there wasn't this type of cheese and that, but just cheese. You'd go to a store and ask if there is cheese, and nobody would ever ask 'what kind do you need'. It was a yes/no question :P. Anyway.. that tea wasn't that great, really. Afterwards we started getting better teas like Twinings, but always in teabags.

But this depended much on the city you were in. Larger cities had more stuff, Leningrad had more yet and Moscow had most. Here in New York you can go to Saks store, but in the middle of Montana, you can't. Back then in Moscow you could get cheese and sausages and cakes when you wished, but in some 400k-sized city you could only get it every once in a while, and in villages you probably could almost never buy them.

In Russia, ever since tea was introduced, 99.9% of tea drinking involved very weak tea used only as an accessory to sweets, sugar, talk. It wasn't a thing in itself, like it is in China. And samovar was a convenient gadget to make lots of it.

- Andrei

I'd say, no.. the only type that can do that is pu-erh. Other teas, with normal brewing methods, don't last longer than around 30 minutes. (and usually much less).

side note: chainik can mean either teapot or kettle of any size.

It could be the reasons you mentioned, but I think at least part of it is that tea was made very weak, and that didn't matter because it was just something to go with cake or pancakes or prianik (spicy hard cake?) or cube sugar. In fact, even if it was rather astringent it would not matter too much because of the sweets.

- Andrei

It was a dark and stormy night when AK stepped out of the alley onto "rec.food.drink.tea" and cried out:

COOL! More Russian history info about tea to file away in the resesses of my mind.

Right next to the words for "Ya Vac Liubil." :)

Derek

It was a dark and stormy night when Space Cowboy stepped out of the alley onto "rec.food.drink.tea" and cried out:

Ok, now this makes sense and takes the discussion a different direction.

If you put tea in the "small pot" and add cold water which then has to be heated by the samovar itself then the steep will be very slow. It will take longer for the necessary "goodness" to be steeped out of the leaves this way than it does when you had boiling or almost boiling water straight on the leaves.

It's like "sun tea" where you leave it out all afternoon with teh bags [ shudder ] in the jar and it steeps over a matter of hours.

Me thinks we're makin' headway here.

Derek

I don't remember, but I'd give 9 out of 10 lima beans that you can keep them there longer, if only because of the diluted, weak final brew. If I were to give it a try, I'd first go for 20-30 minutes and then waltz from there.

It sounds right, and at any rate, even if the tea was infused for a long time, that was only done because in older times, when samovars were invented, the tea was expensive for many, and brewing it for a long time , you'd get more out of the same amount of leaves. Later on, in the USSR, tea leaves could be hard to come by in some places. And when the tea is diluted so much, extra tannins and astringency is not a problem anymore. Needless to say, this is *not* the best brewing method for a $100/lb IPOT emperor golden dragon phoenix gung mung chao keemun :-P.

- Andrei

It was a dark and stormy night when AK stepped out of the alley onto "rec.food.drink.tea" and cried out:

Razborchivui! Razborchivui!

(Sorry, transliteration wasn't something they taught in college. :)

Derek

It's been entertaining watching you two guys compare Russian ethnic notes.

Jim

It was a dark and stormy night when Space Cowboy stepped out of the alley onto "rec.food.drink.tea" and cried out:

His volumes are thicker. :)

Derek

Not that it matters much, but.. it ends in -viy :)

On 21 Sep 2003, AK posted the following to rec.food.drink.tea:

Razborchiviy, razborchiviy!

(If the Russian language was a marathon, then I'm way out of shape.)

Derek

Thanks for the very informative post!

Interesting - the local Iranian stores ( I live in west Los Angeles ) seem to have a few major varities of tea

- Ceylon

- Varieties of Earl Grey or other flavored teas

- Assam ( 'Barooti' and 'Kalami' for broken and whole leaf )

- Darjeeling

These teas are generally available very reasonably - for example, Ahmad Assam golden tippy long leaf for $3.99/500 gm. And it's very good tea!

I've tried making Ceylon tea samovar style and it seems to come up rather tannic.

Any suggestions of brands that might be available stateside for this style of tea?

- Mike H.

I would th> Later on, in the

I'm being ripped off. Here it is $5.29/500g. I need to shop the stores where the son still drives a cab. Or not, maybe that is the overhead.

Jim

Many good pointers there. A fun way to make tea. =)

~sara