Update: Homemade Green Tea

As I briefly men­tioned in my first green tea post I really don’t like brew­ing my tea into/with plas­tic. Sim­i­lar to my rea­sons for get­ting rid of our microwave over eight years ago, I just get the hee­bie jee­bies these days about ingest­ing food or liq­uid which was sur­rounded by any kind of plas­tic espe­cially if it was heated/cooked/brewed etc. in or around plas­tic. Because of my feel­ings on this mat­ter, I am try­ing lit­tle by lit­tle to rid our kitchen of all plas­tic items which have inert alter­na­tives.¹ So when the plas­tic pitcher which came with my tea maker broke yet again last week, I was forced with a deci­sion: obtain yet another plas­tic pitcher by means of order­ing a new one online², search thrift stores for a plas­tic pitcher with lim­ited chances for suc­cess, buy a new whole machine at a poorly-lit dis­count store³ or search around for a glass or stain­less steel alter­na­tive I could buy that day for the all impor­tant imme­di­ate sat­is­fac­tion. I opted for try­ing to find a per­son­ally more prefer­able replacement.

Con­tinue reading »

1. cof­feemaker is next on the list [↩]
2. wait­ing over a week for deliv­ery [↩]
3. all of which I have done sev­eral times [↩]

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My Green Tea Recipe

I have been mak­ing my own tea for about one year now. I searched and searched for an alter­na­tive to our pre­vi­ous main bev­er­age expe­ri­ence which was a national brand of green tea sold in gal­lon quan­ti­ties using a cheap sweet­ener called high fruc­tose corn syrup. I have worked hard to remove this ingre­di­ent from our diet which is not a really easy thing to do because it is in just about every­thing. This was the last prod­uct con­tain­ing this ingre­di­ent on our weekly gro­ceries list. Then I found agave syrup in our local health food store. This is a great alter­na­tive sweet­ener and just the thing I needed to begin mak­ing my own green tea.

The recipe I have come to make almost daily is as follows:

• 2 TBSP (heap­ing*) Ban­cha Green Tea Leaves
• 5/8 — 1 cup honey
• 3/8 cup agave syrup
• 2 cap­sules pow­dered gin­seng or 20–30 drops of liq­uid ginseng
• water

Right now, I make tea using a 3 quart Mr. Cof­fee Iced Tea Maker how­ever, I would love to acquire this teapot some­time in the future to heat the water and steep the tea. I mea­sure the tea leaves and pour into the brew bas­ket. Fill the machine full of water. Pour the honey and agave syrup into the bot­tom of the tea pitcher. I do not mea­sure out the honey so the above amounts are esti­mated and will need to be adjusted based on your taste. Occa­sion­ally, if I run out of the agave syrup I find that just adding more honey makes the tea sweet enough to drink. I brew and steep the tea in the pitcher. When the tea leaves have cooled to a rea­son­able enough tem­per­a­ture to han­dle I squeeze the remain­ing tea out of the tea leaves and dis­card the leaves in my com­post pile. Be care­ful not to let the brewed tea cool down too much. You want the brewed tea to still be warm so you can stir the honey at the bot­tom of the pitcher so it blends with the tea; the honey is eas­ier to blend when the tea is still hot. Pour mix­ture into 1 gal­lon sized con­tainer or 2 half gal­lon con­tain­ers (prefer­ably glass or other pitcher made of inert mate­ri­als). Fill pitcher full with ice cubes and/or cold water. Enjoy!

If this recipe doesn’t make you want to drink some then here are 7 seven more rea­sons to enjoy a nice cup of green tea.

* I chose the amount of tea leaves to brew based on the fact that the tea syrup it brews can be mixed with enough water to make 1 gal­lon of very deli­cious “iced” or cold tea.

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