Kaley Tea's Ceylon based Christmas blend

 

A vendor who had sent me Ceylon tea to try in the past, Kaley Tea, recently sent a Christmas tea blend version to try.  So nice!  Earlier in this blog history I would experiment with making Christmas blends every year; it seemed a good time to make an exception from only drinking plain teas, and to experiment.  

This says that it contains tea, cardamom, and cloves, so it's a simplified variation of masala chai.  Masala chai is a good start for a Christmas blend; from there people could add fruit, like orange peel, or cacao, or pine needles, but keeping it quite limited could work well too.  It might allow the tea to play more of a role, where if you mix enough things in it wouldn't matter what the tea is.

drying fruit and peels for use in a Christmas blend (covered here)

It's nice to feel like I'm observing Christmas too.  It's a little early for that, since it's around Halloween time, but holiday experiences never match up here anyway.  It might not be so hot in another two months but otherwise the weather in Bangkok is generally consistent year-round, beyond when it rains more.

I'm brewing this using their recommendations, sort of.  They suggest using a teaspoon to make a cup, brewing that for 3 minutes, with an option to brew it a second time.  I brewed more than that, I think, and for longer, so maybe this will be a little strong.  Ordinarily I'm opposed to diluting tea, adding water, no matter what happens, but I could always make an exception if I've screwed this up.

it's definitely less monochromatic in person; I think shading inside the infuser caused that

Review:

Infusion strength isn't bad, maybe just a touch strong.  It wouldn't be unusual for people to add milk and sugar to this, not to cut overwhelming astringency, since this is mild enough, but just to play up the dessert experience feel, or how masala chai is usually made and enjoyed.  I could drink some and then adjust it, to review it both ways.

The spice balance is good.  Cardamom and clove alone really work, and it seems like this is pretty good tea matching with those.  The flavor input of all three is reasonably balanced; it would be easy for spices to overtake the tea range, but they all show through.  It's pleasant like this, but the extra infusion strength pushes it a little far, off of being sweet, light, complex, and approachable, as the softest and sweetest black teas are.  The tea input seems pretty good but I'll stop short of adding a flavor list here.  Malt doesn't show through, so it's not like an Assam, and maybe some of the mineral base that is distinctive in Ceylon is giving this good balance.

The general effect is very clean; there is no negative contribution of any aspect.  Not very poetic a description, right, compared to bringing up some childhood image of people around a fireplace, drinking tea and eating gingerbread Christmas cookies, or whatever else?  This would go really well with cookies; that's what is missing in the overall balance, a reason for drinking a clean and positive black tea with spice inputs.  

I like the tea but it's not what I'm accustomed to, and this really would make a lot more sense in some sort of late fall or winter context.  It probably would make a nice iced tea, but it's odd mentally switching channels like that, considering a radically different context.  For drinking it plain maybe it would be better with food or those cookies.  I'll try it with a little milk and honey and see how that works.

It's good with those added, probably better.  I used skim milk, what I'm drinking right now; surely that's not optimum, but it's still nice.  As with plain black tea all the flavors fall into a completely different balance when you add milk and sugar (or honey, also what I had most handy).  Going even heavier on infusion strength and using more full cream milk than I added would probably be more optimum, to get the full effect of both inputs.  I tried a second infusion brewed for longer (with the same leaves), this time using whole milk (my wife couldn't sleep at night knowing there are two cartons open at once), but of course the effect is better from the first round, the intensity.

One nice part about drinking it this way--adjusted--could be that people who don't drink tea might be more likely to like it.  These particular spice flavors might appeal most to people with more developed food flavor background (in Thailand or in the West), but to me it's quite approachable and pleasant.  For people familiar with this spicing range there would be no need to mess around with this recipe form, and aspects balance, but for others continuing on to add cacao and a fruit input might be good.  Using an apple peeler to remove some outer rind off an orange might be a nice addition too, giving a touch of extra fruit edge.  I don't see this as working well for coupling with some sort of alcohol input (which can come up as another Christmas theme), but people on that page may take that differently.  A little cognac or brandy would definitely completely change this.

It works for evoking a Christmas feel, I think.  It needs those cookies though, not just any one kind, whatever theme people tend to connect with their own expectations.  My Mom would make a lot of kinds; we had large trays of many types around in the holiday season.  This would be perfect with a kind we didn't make then, which we called whoopie pies, two soft chocolate cookies sandwiching a cream filling center.  Maybe even better with gingerbread men; that would round out the typical set expectation of ginger being the other main input in a traditional masala chai (as I see it; for others black pepper or other things could be added).

This might be a good year for messing around with your own Christmas blend experience; either go out and buy one, or keep an eye out for spice inputs, like spearmint, cacao, or whatever else.  There's still time to work out how adding pine needles to tea works for people in the US, which tree type needle inputs definitely won't poison you, and how drying or chopping the material changes infusion results.  Making adjusted masala chai versions takes practice; you might need a couple of trial rounds to prepare something you can serve to others (all of which I've covered in this blog).

Many thanks to Kaley for sharing this, and an early happy holidays for all readers!  

Christmas tea blend follow-up, and Indonesian jasmine black tea

I wrote about a homemade Christmas tea blend recently, and mentioned I was going to try variations.  It's not as if I've really broken new ground by doing that but I'll mention the update.

the dried fruits part

It had seemed the tea, a fruit and spices blend with black tea, would work best made as a masala chai is made, boiled versus steeped, with milk and sugar, so that's how I tried it.  It did work really well.  I've tried it twice since then prepared to be infused instead, as a normal tea blend.

Indonesian jasmine black tea

One part of that adjustment was varying the black tea used to make it.  One other Indonesian commercial tea I'd bought was a jasmine black tea, which turned out to be quite nice.  The appearance was a little odd, on the dusty side, with some sticks, and tea presented more as flakes rather than some other conventional way.  Oddly that didn't translate into a bad tea; it was actually mild and well-balanced, with limited astringency, nice clean flavors, some underlying earth and mineral tones, and a good balance of light jasmine flavor.


It couldn't pass for a higher end specialty tea, based on appearance, but it was much better than it looked, quite good for teas of that type, not so far off other teas I've tried that look much better and cost much more.  In fact it may have been the best value in a tea I've ever bought; something like 50 grams of tea for around a dollar, for one of the best teas I ever bought in a grocery store.  A black tea I found in Cambodia was pretty good once, and a hojicha in Japan, but you get the idea; grocery store teas are universally mediocre or even bad, and this one was ok.

Indonesian black tea label

I mixed that black tea with the other black tea I'd bought from the Wonosari plantation (another Indonesian tea I bought on that trip).  It also wasn't so bad, but was quite astringent, so that for me to drink that tea without milk and sugar added would be unthinkable.  This was really going to be the challenge for this blend, if I could adjust the ingredients for it to work as a normal steeped tea.


I loved the idea of clove mixed with tea, really the main reason I even tried it, and that spice in particular was problematic.  It gave the tea an aromatic, spicy earthiness but it seemed like adding enough of it to actually taste it would require at least sugar mixed in to counter the "spicy" spice aspect, something related to pepper or ginger, the heat.  Someone could drink straight cinnamon brewed as tea without compensating in the same way, or cardamom, or nutmeg, but spicing that comes across as heat is hard to integrate into a standard tea flavor profile not designed for adjustment with sugar or milk.  Why not add sugar and / or milk then?  Kind of a long story to get into that, but there is an image issue related to those, which overlaps with an image issue related to drinking tea blends.


One challenge would be balance.  Making it in a masala chai style took away from that problem; milk and sugar could offset any problems with astringency or spicing, and even smooth over other balance issues between fruit, tea, and spicing.  Another would be getting the fruit to show up, since tea typically brews in around 3 minutes, but a 5 minute steep really isn't long enough to get a fruit peel or dried cherry to give up flavors.


For the first try at an infused version I just backed off the spicing, went a little heavier on the fruit, and tried it out brewed at boiling point for the typical range, around 2 to 3 minutes, prepared with enough extra tea it would brew two or three infusions at that ratio.  I skipped the vanilla because it was too much messing around for preparing a tea with breakfast, cutting a bean / pod open to get to the spice itself.  It was drinkable but not great.  I tried it with sugar; better but not great.  Then with milk and sugar both; much better but still not great.  The fruit really didn't come out nearly as much as in the first version I'd wrote that earlier blog post about, a boiled preparation of a similar tea, but then I'd simmered the dried fruit alone without tea for 5 minutes in that batch to give it a head start.

the earlier version; pre-simmering the fruit and spices

I adjusted the mix a little the next day, backed further off the clove, and added a hint of cardamom along with the nutmeg and cinnamon, but the results weren't so different.  It was more drinkable but still needed sugar and milk to get the flavors balance right.  It seemed possible that I was so accustomed to straight teas, usually a bit subtle, that trying to drink a plain spiced tea wasn't working based on that, even adjusted to be more subtle.  The fruit still wasn't completely there.  It occurred to me one could go with a much reduced ratio of tea to water and use a 5 minute steep to compensate, then add more black tea and go with a second 5 minute steep, and it would show through much better in both infusions.



I've been drinking tisanes with dinner lately, to allow for a version of tea (something like it, at least) in the mid evenings, without caffeine, and steep times can just keep going for those.  When one reads package instructions or blog reviews of tisanes those always cite a 5 minute steep time, longer than for tea, but that's typically for a well shredded or even powdered version of an herb or flower (or whatever it is, a root or spice of some other sort, or mix).

sage!  it's already an "herb tea," just like this

If you make an herb tea / tisane with a plain spice like dried sage or rosemary (which I do; those are two of my favorites) that can make tea based on using 4 minute boiling-point infusions, nearly endless numbers of times, producing a half-dozen cups of tea.  Of course I'm not using anywhere near as limited an amount of herb one would find in a tea bag, and they need to shred that down nearly to a powder for it to brew out in the 5 minutes.  It would be possible to tear up the herbs a bit to speed infusion along (chop them, however that would go), but I don't, which is why I'm using a lot more and then needing to let it brew for much longer to get the "tea" out of it.


So what is the conclusion for this tea, prepared as a more conventional blend?  Per my taste it worked a lot better made in the style of a masala chai, with a lot more infusion time for the fruit, conducted at a simmer.  The real vanilla probably made a big difference, since that gave it a lot of natural sweetness and a creamy feel.  The infusion version may have worked out better with that added back in, but it wouldn't seem likely two 4 minute steeps would pull out most of the flavor of a vanilla pod either (although that might be wrong; I didn't test it).


Although I loved the effect of the clove, and the idea, it would be hard to get it to balance in a tea and herb infusion that didn't rely on sugar and milk to compensate for the peppery spice effect.  Something as simple as ramping up cinnamon by a lot might help with that, but cinnamon wouldn't bring the same smooth, sweet, creamy effect that vanilla did.

spices and some of the teas from Indonesia

I don't plan to do a lot more with tea blending but you never know; something else might come up.  I'll still be keeping an eye out for crushed tamarind seeds and orange blossoms to put that traditional Thai iced tea version together, someday.  And I bought cardamom pods I didn't get around to using yet in Indonesia (the touch I added was ordinary spice-jar version), so although we're coming to the end of the Thai cool season now at some point I'll revisit masala chai.  Given the daily lows are around 80 F / mid-20's C now it might make sense to adjust that to an iced tea version, but somehow it never comes to that, I just drink hot tea when it's hot and humid and then sweat a bit.

an extreme take on a Christmas tea blend

A few different things have reminded me of tea blends lately.  One is seeing the Twinnings Christmas blend; interesting because it contains clove, not interesting enough to actually buy because it's commercial, mass produced tea, and it's not as if I've ever tried a Twinnings tea that was so amazing that I wanted to go buy some.  But to be fair their loose Earl Grey is not so bad.

vanilla pod (bean, if you rather)

One other reminder was a decent flavored Thai green tea (coconut).  Before trying that I was already considering how the local, Assamica based Thai black teas might work in blends.


This related to trying some teas and also to researching a semi-mythical original version of Thai iced tea awhile back, that orange bubble-tea-like version, which supposedly stemmed from a real, respectable tea.  It was intriguing for using crushed tamarind seeds and orange blossoms in a blend, versus the mix of artificial flavors now used (in powdered tea mixes--just nasty).

I also recently tried an Indonesian black tea that turned out to be a commercial, machine made, essentially ground black tea.  It was so astringent that I  couldn't drink even a diluted infusion of it without milk and sugar, although it was decent with those added.  I almost considered reviewing that tea with the milk and sugar but I've not been drinking enough others to use as a baseline, and those additions really do mute the original flavors.  Eventually I probably will do such a review, just because it's a crazy idea.


It was kind of shame about that tea because I really wanted to get more of a feel for how the volcanic soil affected the taste of Indonesian teas.  Not that I was going to really be able to separate the inputs well, but it seemed possible the black tea would fill that in a bit beyond trying a green and white tea (both recently reviewed here).  So the tea brought blending to mind.  Usually I only make masala chai from teas designated as ingredients, but this was a chance to broaden that.



So I researched a bit and made my own Christmas blend.  I just ran across a Tea for Me Please post about an interesting version I didn't see prior to making this blend, but I'll mention it here anyway.  That Twinnings tea, which may or may not be the same product I've been seeing in grocery stores here, was described as follows:


The Twinings Christmas blend this year is Winter Spice.  It is a black Assam tea from North-East India, expertly blended with warming spice flavours, safflowers and orange peel for a delicious festive treat.


No specific mention of clove, but descriptions I've seen before only cited clove and orange peel.  One of the recipes that turned up in a blog post looked like just what I wanted to go for:

Vietnamese black; really too good a tea for blending

200g orange pekoe tea
2 oranges, zest only
4 tbsp pink peppercorns
4 tbsp cloves
5 cinnamon quills, broken up into pieces
1 vanilla pod, halved lengthwise and finely sliced


200 grams is a good bit of tea; my plan was to make it in steps, to put some ingredients together and adjust across different tries, to make it batch by batch instead.  This would still require making dried fruit separately, per something like their method:


1. Peel thick strips of orange zest and then tear them into small pieces and arrange them on a baking tray lined with baking paper. Bake for 20 minutes at 100ºC until dry. Cool.


2. Combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix well. Store tea in a jar/airtight container for at least a week so that the flavours are allowed to develop.

those two black teas used for this batch

The orange peel was a given, but I decided to add some cherry as well since we had it on hand, from a fruit basket gift.  I was going to add apple but it turned out to be a nectarine (from that basket), so I added a good bit of dried nectarine peel and fruit.  As wet as those were I dried it at around 120 C (250 F) for more like a half an hour.  The orange peel didn't need that long to be ready, just the other two did.


I actually had vanilla pods on hand from a trip to Java and Bali (spices are inexpensive in Indonesia, it seems), so I did add that, along with the clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, and a dash of salt.  I think the salt really did help make it work, but of course getting that level right is critical; it wouldn't take much to ruin it.

drying peels and some thin sliced fruit

The mixed storage wasn't going to work, because of the plan to make it by batch.  For the first go I didn't brew it per a normal tea infusion process, just steeping, but rather made it like a masala chai, boiled instead, mixed with milk that went through the boiling process as well.  The basic blend would work for either, it was just going to be easier to do that way, and including milk and sugar would smooth out potentially overdoing spicing elements.  And plus I felt like making it that way; my intuition said I should.


I had backed off the clove enough that part wouldn't have mattered, spicing intensity, and since I did sweeten it with a little each of sugar and honey the only remaining hurdle was achieving balance.


And the final tea was--AMAZING!  It was like a Christmas themed mixed fruit tart, condensed into the form of a masala chai.  I've did an awful lot of baking but I've never experienced fruit in that way before.  In a way it was cheating because I didn't brew that much at one go, one very large coffee mug worth, essentially two cups of tea, and adding a pod of vanilla to almost any slightly sweet drink in that proportion would come out ok.

wouldn't try it; I'm raising a tea snob

The overall balance was pretty good, although I could've ramped up the clove a little more.  Even though I had boiled it for about 10 minutes I was wondering if the fruit had more to give, so I added more tea and a dash of clove to it, and it made one more large mug worth by way of a normal steep that was just a bit diminished in intensity.


Making this as a tea blend to be infused normally, not boiled, and probably without milk or sugar, would require a good bit of adjustment.  I'm not sure the effect would be the same prepared as an unsweetened tea without milk, and I really don't plan on drinking enough fruit blends to go through all that preference curve again in a different form.  But I'll try it and see how it goes.

Taking it the next step

I tried to imagine how to really improve this beyond making adjustments, and it seems something related to the role peppercorns would play might be it.  Of course I've been through all that with masala chai (maybe not a given, that I've experimented with variations of those, but some of you know what I mean), and pepper sort of works but it's not for me.  So what else?  Ginger jumps out as the obvious alternative, but I also think better not for this.  It would have to take over, even a trace of it, and the spice role is different.  This is going to sound crazy but I did have an idea.


Dried chili pepper.  You might be thinking of some bright red spice-jar powder version that would drag the profile just a little towards Tabasco, so that just a dash would seem close enough to using peppercorns, but that's not at all what I mean.  I'm talking about warm, rich, sweet, smooth roasted chilis, a completely different thing.  Think mole sauce; more like that.  The following is a reminder of what that even is, but if none of this part is familiar you might try getting into some decent Southwestern food, since a really, really good enchilada is a transcendent experience.


Mole poblano is the best known of all mole varieties and has been ranked as number one of "typical" Mexican dishes.[14] It has also been called the "national dish" of Mexico...

Mole poblano contains about 20 ingredients, including chili peppers and chocolate, which works to counteract the heat of the chili peppers,[14] but the chocolate does not dominate. It helps give the sauce its dark color, but this is also provided by the mulato peppers.

Here is a description of a dried chili type I mean, from the same reference page this picture is from:


Ancho: The name means "wide chile" in Spanish, a fitting moniker for this wide-shouldered, nearly black pepper, made from ripe poblano peppers. They have a high yield of flesh to skin, which makes them a workhorse in sauces. Anchos are mild with a rich, dark cherry/raisin sweetness.


But I don't have that, or easy access to it, so I'll probably shelve that idea for years, if I ever even get to it.  I did cook a lot with a range of dried peppers quite some time ago, and these do have great scope, and are easy to use.  You can just about soak the chilis in hot water for awhile then blend up the mix, and you're done, you just use that.  Some versions would bring up issues of excessive heat, and then you'd be on to considering not using seeds, or figuring out tricks like cooking with sugar to drop that level, but all that is the fun part.


The trick is finding them.  Going to a farmer's market around Phoenix or Albuquerque would turn up lots of options, and better grocery stores all over the US should have something, but beyond that it might take some doing.  Call me crazy but a smoked version might work really well, aside from sourcing that seeming even less likely.  Some peppers seem to have a bit of natural smokey element, but even claiming that is going outside my current range a good bit.  If one only had the right lapsang souchong on hand that tea could bring the element to the table instead.  Even I'm not out there far enough to put that last smokey Silver Needle I reviewed in a fruit and spice blend, which probably makes for a good place to leave off.