Tropical fruit flavored "wild" Assamica Thai oolong

named after the river that runs past Bangkok

Visiting with a friend awhile back the owner of Monsoon, who made this tea, stopped by and shared some samples with us.  It's the second time that I've met Kenneth Rimdahl (that owner); he seems like a really nice guy.  He talks about the forest-friendly theme here.

I could be clearer on the "Assamica" part in this title.  Old, wild-growing tea plants in the North of Thailand are exclusively Assamica variety, per my understanding, but my understanding wouldn't always be accurate.  There are so many tangents to get to in this post, along with the review itself, that I'll not dwell further on it here, or say more about the wild and "forest friendly" aspects.

Kenneth in white; Sasha (right) hasn't been mentioned here for awhile

I've written a little about that in this post, which related to meeting Kenneth the second time.  In that post I downplay the overall impact making a limited amount of tea from wild sources will have on the industry, but if the impact is still positive that's a good thing, and it sets up a basis for expanding that over time.  This post relates to meeting him in my favorite Chinatown shop prior to that, and we did talk about that background there. 

Of course wild sourced tea is a very positive theme; old tea plants really are growing in a natural fashion in different places (organically, in a biodiverse environment), and the tea from such plants tends to be mild in character (low astringency), intense in flavor, and very pleasant.  It's hard to not notice that the tin presentation, the container, contradicts the conservation theme, but this isn't a critique of how it all works taken together.

three years ago; the time flies

On the subject of tangents, I wanted to also share which flavored teas I've liked best in this post.  It's a subject that doesn't come up often here, not for a couple of years in any post, and one I tend to discredit or downplay.  But to be clear I think there's nothing wrong with people liking all sorts of different teas (even Lipton tea bags), and flavored teas can be interesting in diverse.  To me natural, better-quality, loose-leaf versions are more interesting, in general, but citing some exceptions helps place my take on all that.

I think this is lychee and mango

Review

The first infusion is really fruity; it tastes like lychee and mango. Taste is clean, more natural in effect than flavored teas would generally be. A bright citrus aspect is a bit lemony but mango often includes something like that naturally, and lychee isn't far off that range either. Lychee is my overall favorite tropical fruit, and mango might be a close second. It's hard to get much read on the tea itself in a light first infusion.

More of the same on the second infusion, brewed for close to 20 seconds, a bit strong as other tea types go, for this proportion. Flavor is really clean; aroma is pleasant. Sweetness and other aspect balance is good. It's still hard to pin down what the tea itself is like beyond the flavoring but it integrates well. It's a light oolong, not dissimilar to a Jin Xuan, but since this should be Assamica it should be quite different.

Normally I'd only only provisionally like any blend or flavored tea, it could be fine for what it is, but this works as an exception. It's good.

Vegetal range is picking up as fruit drops off but this is still sweeter and fruitier than a plain light oolong. It's not vegetal in the sense of green beans or pepper picking up, more a floral range with just a trace of green wood. For as clean and pleasant as this is it had to be fine plain, but I get it why a lot of people would prefer it flavored. I'd have to try a plain version to know which seems better.

A touch of butteriness picks up; that might have been what reminded me of Jin Xuan, even though I didn't notice it in the last round.

The fruit flavor is hanging in there, two thirds dropped out, or so, but still a main component. The overall effect is still really nice, bright, sweet, fresh, and complex. These flavors must be extracts of some kind; there's no way chemicals would taste this natural. I should ask Kenneth but probably won't; blog posts take forever with Q & A back and forth as an input.  I'll do an interview post later if I get to it.

It's hard to do much with evaluating this as an Assamica based oolong, in part due to the flavoring layer input. It's clean, with good complexity and feel, a lot like a well above average Thai oolong.  This other post covers trying two of the very rare Assamica based oolongs I've ever had that worked really well, versions from Hatvala from Vietnam.  But those were more-oxidized in style, a completely different thing (what people often call "red oolong," a popular but less common style imported from Taiwan).


Later rounds:  3 more rounds stayed pleasant and well-balanced, with fruit tones fading and woody flavor picking up.  Even after 8 or so infusions the tea was still quite pleasant; interesting an added flavor would hang in there that long, even if greatly diminished.  I put the leaves in the refrigerator with lukewarm water after those rounds, to cold brew for an extra infusion; they still weren't done yet.

It would seem more conventional for people to brew this Western style, of course, for people more into flavored teas to just brew 2 or 3 rounds in a teapot or some infuser instead.  That would work.

I really liked it.  The color shows it's a very lightly oxidized oolong, which is either a good or bad thing, depending on how that suites the final tea aspects and character, and for this it worked really well.

Other flavored teas

There's nothing necessarily wrong with flavored teas, or liking flavored teas, but inexpensive, low-quality versions are often more a gateway to better tea than a final preference destination.  Artificially flavored, low quality tea based versions aren't like this blend, closer to how flavoring gas-station coffee with those artificially flavored non-dairy creamer cups comes across (which can be ok, for a road-trip caffeine fix).

I'll list a few flavored tea versions I've really liked, with these exceptions intended to fill in what I think represents the best of this category.


Earl Grey:  no need to go to far with describing this; bergamot essential oil (citrus) blended black tea should be familiar.  If not go try some.  Twinings loose version isn't too bad, but even better versions than theirs can be really nice.  I've reviewed a good bit of Earl Grey here but none of those reviews shed any more light on what it is, or how it is.  An interesting version from the Cordon Bleu cooking school was really maxed out for that orange citrus flavor, right at the balance point for being too much.  That seemed like a natural place to set that level, upon drinking it.  I think they stopped making it though; a later search about it didn't turn it up.


Monsoon coconut flavored black tea:  this really stuck with me (that post was from 2005).  This same producer made a relatively natural version (per my understanding) that worked really well as a winter / Christmas seasonal theme experience.  Some extracted, essential oil version of coconut really captured the flavor of toasted coconut (presumably it was that), combined with what seemed like a pretty decent black tea.  I'll drink that again someday.


Jasmine black tea:  my overall favorite flavored tea, probably.  To me jasmine works much better with black tea than green, and balances and complements it even better than bergamot essential oil.  A bad version might seem off, but even Indonesian grocery store versions were good.  Hatvala, a Vietnamese vendor, makes my favorite that I've tried (reviewed here), but Moychay also produced a really exceptional example.  It's hard to describe further than just saying that this particular floral range and good black tea work really well together, even better than it sounds.

the cacao nibs on the lower right; they work better ground a bit more, like coffee

Chocolate flavored tea:  I've not done much with this popular flavored tea sub-theme (maybe well represented by David's Tea selection).  Two Christmas themed blends, based mostly on a masala chai base, did use cacao nibs and actual chocolate.  Both masala chai and Christmas blends are promising directions for blends that aren't really typical of flavor-added teas.  The most basic version of the latter is something along the lines of black tea, orange peel, cinnamon, and mint, or just a twist on a masala chai recipe, maybe adding pine needles or something such.  Cacao husks would be a good way to add real chocolate flavor to any tea, probably as well balanced with a mild black version as any (the nibs, the actual "bean," can be hard to infuse).

fruit peels dried for one of those Christmas blends

That seems like a good place to leave off.  Blending other flavors into teas is promising, it's just that drinking single-type, narrow-origin, high-quality plain versions of teas is even more promising.  None of those blends or flavored tea posts are from the last two years; I've just not been exploring that lately.  I made a mostly herbal version of masala chai that worked well when I was sick last year; that's an exception (and tried chen pi then, from looking that up, tea stuffed in an orange / tangerine peel).  I really like masala chai, it just takes some messing around to make a version, and I don't get to it often.

Tea and illness 2: masala chai and chen pi

I'm sick again!  The short version:  I drank a lot of tisanes when I was sick recently, and trying out variations of masala chai worked a lot better this time than any single tisane or mix of those had then.  A chen pi (shu pu'er stuffed tangerine / orange) didn't seem to have much effect.

I probably pushed it related to getting back out running in moderately bad pollution within a week of recovering from that last sinus infection.  The levels had spiked to quite severe a day before the last run and partial clearing of that smog probably wasn't enough.

at the worst; I ran when the text balloons were yellow and orange

A doctor said that I'm fine, that I just need to drink fluids, rest, and wait it out.  I think this pollution may be too much for us, since my wife and kids have been sick too.  We've been using air purifiers at home, so we get a great break from it at least one third of the day, or more than half if we're around the house a lot past sleeping, but apparently it's not enough. 

We have masks to wear.  They're the special versions that filter a lot better than the green or white ones you can pick up in a hospital, surgical masks, but it just doesn't work to live in those.  It seems like your body can handle a moderate degree of pollution well enough, until it can't, and then you become much more sensitive to it.

back in February, the last pollution spike

The tisanes I wrote about drinking in an earlier post didn't seem to help in any medicinal sense, but it had been nice drinking a lot of hot beverages, and going easy on caffeine.  I speculated that masala chai blends, maybe even made with tisanes instead, might work even better, but I felt a bit wiped out to spend 20 minutes mixing inputs and simmering tea during that first round of illness.  So I tried it this time.

It seemed to actually help.  On the third day or so--hard to pin down the exact day you get sick, since you can just feel a bit off at first--I prepared masala chai, Indian spiced black tea, made with half black tea and half willow herb (aka fireweed / Ivan Chay).  For spicing I used clove, cardamom, cinnamon, and nutmeg, not exactly typical but it sounded good.  Drinking two large mugs of that, prepared with sugar and milk, brought on a heavy sweat, and I seemed to feel better related to illness symptoms within an hour.  I drank a second round with lunch hours later, adding ginger and fennel seed to that blend, and again sweated quite a bit.  Within those hours the output from blowing my nose ran much clearer.

Still, could be a coincidence.  I hadn't eaten much at all the day prior so I was wondering if the spicing wouldn't be a bit much for my stomach, but it wasn't.  The next morning I made another batch, and went a little heavy on the dash of salt I usually add, throwing off results a little, but then my sense of taste isn't great anyway.

Chen pi

Being a little tired of masala chai I tried brewing a shu stuffed orange / tangerine with a lunch.  I couldn't read any of the label but it was clearly shu, not a variation made with black or white tea.  One of the vendors in that Shenzhen tea market threw three of those in with what we bought and I'd not tried one yet.

before tearing up the peel a bit

As to approach I brewed it in a tea bottle.  With my sense of taste still on the limited side a flavor-list theme review wouldn't work, and optimizing that never was the point.  It tastes like citrus and shu.  At a guess the flavor would be positive if I wasn't sick, but it's hard to be sure with blocked sinuses.  The second round was brewed for a long time (I wasn't really controlling proportion or timing), ending up tasting nice enough but a little metallic.  Water might potentially taste metallic now, since beyond the illness more or less plugging my nose other symptoms do apply. 

I'm not even sure if the traditional Chinese wisdom / medicine claims say dried (and aged?) orange peel cures sinus infections, or colds, or whatever else.  It's said to have some medicinal properties, I thought, but most likely the list that turns up in discussions and marketing content is broad.  Why wouldn't it be, regardless of the truth of the matter?  Personal effects probably do vary anyway, and there is no simple, singular truth of the matter.


Back to the masala chai instead, there seems to be a lot of potential in using modified spiced tea blends for the same purpose.  Sage and black tea sounds like a potential contrast in character but mixing in a bit of rosemary, or whatever else, and shifting the masala blend part to match might work.  Adding some citrus might be good, since shifting off the original flavor profile would be the point anyway.  It's hard to get that warm, earthy character back though, without black tea, which really ties masala chai together.  I don't completely avoid tea or caffeine when I'm sick, I just try to moderate it, since it doesn't pair well with lying around.

This part is more about talking crazy than a real suggestion, but tied to making roasted pumpkin recently toasting the seeds to a medium brown then grinding those as an input might work.  No one is going to roast pumpkin in the middle of being sick, although I just did since I feel better five days later, and there was a Japanese pumpkin no one was using in the kitchen.

roasted pumpkin with spices and ice cream is nice

Let me know what you think, if any of this rings a bell, even though no one ever does.  Or if it sounds awful; whichever way that goes.

Tea and illness

This is the theme I've been on lately, scaling back exposure to tea due to a nasty sinus infection.  It's been a rough week.  I'll describe how I took it, although I'm not sure the insight will add much to what everyone else already experiences.

I switch over to a lot of tisanes when I'm sick.  That mild and varied flavor range works for me, and there's always the hope that some of it might actually help in some herbal remedy sense.  Even if that doesn't apply drinking a warm liquid does help, and staying hydrated, and contact with a positive range of sensation is nice when you tend to get caught up in experiencing symptoms.  It's completely unnatural to drink a good bit of water at any temperature when you're sick, but it works much better to drink two or three good sized mugs of a mild tisane.

Mamaki, olena (Hawaiian turmeric), and ualoa (not what I was just drinking)

A Hawaiian extended family member (who sort of adopted my wife into theirs, versus the other way around) passed on some soursop tisane from a local Hawaiian producer awhile back.  It doesn't taste like much (I don't think--but maybe it does and I can't tell), but the label says it's good for helping with sleep and boosting immune response. 

Al with Keo; it has been too long, he is hard to pick up these days

this reference mentioned in this related post on Hawaiian tisanes and potential effects

I had a couple of Moychay (Russian producer) compressed tisane cakes on hand, so I've been mixing those in.  One was willow herb / fireweed and the other some sort of blend I didn't check the contents on (the label is in Russian).  A fruit version bar I already finished earlier would've been ideal; I was concerned about how well that would keep so I drank the last of it a few months ago. 

a Moychay tisane bar, which I reviewed here

We bought a lot of chrysanthemum tea in China on that last visit so I drink that alone or mixed in, or once combined with shu pu'er to split the difference.  When I'm not sick mixing sheng and chrysanthemum seems to make a lot more sense, even though I rarely do that, but when you're sick whatever it seems you'll tolerate well is the right thing.


Stopping caffeine entirely brings on a headache and crash, but if the plan is to lie around sick all day that crash can work out.  I only quit tea entirely one day but did drink very little of it for a few, so this served as one of a few small breaks from caffeine that I try to take every year.  Maybe there is no reason to do that but as I see things it can't hurt, and maybe there is a good reason I'd never be completely clear on.  Developed tolerance for level of caffeine doesn't seem to shift as much for some drugs, like alcohol tolerance, at least to me, but I'm sure that would vary by person.  I don't think that caffeine interferes with a healing process when sick, to be clear, I just don't think there is any point in ingesting a stimulant then, and maintenance of a dependency doesn't necessarily count as a good reason.

It's interesting trying teas and noticing how much flavor drops out when you've lost that much sense of taste.  In the last three days I tried a Vietnamese sheng I've been drinking for awhile, and a modest quality aged Yunnan version, and an even better Da Xue Shan.  In all those cases I really did enjoy what came across, more and more each day.  White tea might work in a similar way; even for losing half or more of the flavor the rest might still be nice.  The shu pu'er and chrysanthemum mix I had when I was much sicker was nice, although combining that with sheng makes more sense to me when I'm well, although that I tend to only try a couple times a year, at the most.  Of all those teas the aged sheng was novel for so much of that character being mineral taste (what gets picked up by the tongue) versus aromatic components, I just wouldn't drink really exceptional tea while sick.

The worst part is dropping out my tasting and review habit.  Even that works better for having such a low energy level and fuzzy mind; I feel like I'm about 75% clear while I write this initial draft, which isn't so bad, since I'm usually only ever about 90% clear on a good day.  I'm not sure when that last 10% ever kicks in; not too often.  There's a lot of tea I'm excited to get to--kind vendors have sent a lot of samples lately--and it will just have to wait.

Now that I think about it making an herbal version of masala chai might be nice.  Willow herb / fireweed even oxidizes, unlike most tisanes, so it would be as close as any to a "real tea" version.  I reviewed a version of one in a blog post, and a better pressed version in a Moychay site article.  That spice blend would be nice when sick, drinking a version made from cardamom, clove, ginger, fennel seed, and cinnamon, with just a touch of salt to balance it. 

using fresher, more-whole spices is better but whatever you have on hand will do

Even simmering herbs for 15 minutes is a lot of messing around when your energy level is completely bottomed out, but even during the first draft of this I was in a different middle-ground, recovered enough that using a limited quantity of black tea would also be fine.  An online masala chai recipe mentioned an easy way to get around that; start the tea (or tisane) and herbs simmering, turn off the heat and let it sit for awhile, then reboil and let it sit again (with related posts on making that  here and here).

Eight days after first becoming sick I'm mostly back to normal.  It's nice how illness helps you appreciate little things, like a normal energy level, or tasting food and tea again.

White chocolate masala chai Christmas blend

Originally posted as:  http://www.tching.com/2017/12/christmas-tea-blend-2017/


I've been meaning to get back to making a masala chai and a Christmas tea blend, so to clear through both I combined the themes.  This also contains a touch of bitter orange marmalade to fill in the spice range with a little fruit but the title seemed wordy adding it.

I've done Christmas tea blends before, and talked through what that's all about quite a bit.  Two years ago I did a fruit and spice blend, and last year's version went a bit further from the basics (black tea, orange citrus, and cinnamon) to include vanilla, cacao nibs, and black cherry jam, so based on chocolate covered cherries.  It was nice, just a bit removed from a typical dry tea and spice blend.

This year I didn't put the advance thought in and prep was mostly limited to what I had around.  That actually came up as both a positive and negative factor in the outcome.

Christmas nativity play; there to see that cow in the lower right

my cheerful Christmas cow

Ingredients

-Thai organic CTC black tea
-ginger, clove, cardamom, touch of salt and black pepper
-bitter orange marmalade
-white chocolate
-palm sugar, milk


I did have to buy the black tea for this; funny there was no CTC tea in the house.  I think my wife picked up a couple of free tea bags in a hotel stay once but I went ahead and bought some loose black tea anyway.

I used all dry spices; spice-rack versions.  If the spices are relatively fresh that's fine (not on the old side, I mean, anything in jars isn't fresh in the other sense), since spices have a pretty good life-span.  Flavor dropping off is one thing but after a couple of years they really can pick up a mustiness.  Ginger is typically easy to use fresh, since we cook with the root here, and it's even easy to find back in the US, but we seemed to be out.  I think the powdered ginger was the oldest of the spices and did contribute a slight mustiness.  Luckily the proportion of ginger was quite low in this version, something I'll get to more in the next section.

I would expect that black cherry would be nice for the fruit balance, or orange peel for citrus, but bitter orange marmalade was the closest thing on hand.  I considered squeezing in a bit of fresh pomelo juice (Asian grapefruit), since that was on hand around, but didn't expect it to work as well.

White chocolate was sort of a gamble.  I wasn't sure the texture would work, but then using real vanilla bean (in the past) does contribute a really thick, creamy texture to spice and tea blends, which is still ok.  Adding a touch of salt gives blends balance.  I'm not sure it changed much but I went with a dash of black pepper for this version, which isn't atypical for masala chai, I just don't like peppery chai.  Palm sugar isn't that different than a natural brown sugar; it was really just what was around.

Proportions, process

The blend was mostly black tea.  Clove was heaviest after that, with this version light on ginger.  There was a good bit of chocolate, nearly as much as in a Hershey bar, but not enough to make the drink into a tea flavored hot chocolate instead of a chocolate flavored tea.  I didn't measure those, which leads into an aside I've been meaning to mention, and probably have already covered, about not sticking to well-determined proportions or parameters.

It comes from an approach to cooking.  I taught myself to cook in my 20s, based on my mother's cooking (which is quite good, mainly traditional foods back in Pennyslvania), and on a partial study in making dorm food in college.  Part of my approach was to never, ever use recipes, except maybe for something like chocolate chip cookies--those are touchy.  It was about the process as much as the outcome.  Funny that just came up in talking about making tea; you can probably imagine why.  People get into the ceremonial aspects of that, or see it as some sort of Zen practice, with the Japanese tea ceremony based on that sort of thinking.  I could be more careful about using ideal parameters (I am an engineer too; I get it), but then it becomes about optimization, not the experience.  For me winging it is part of an organic process, and experience limited natural variation is too.

So back to that blend.  I mixed the ingredients and simmered for around 15 minutes.  For more whole spices I'd probably go with at least 20 minutes, but that's fine for finer processed versions.  Whenever you taste such a mix without milk it seems like you've completely ruined it, but adding the milk swings it all into a reasonable balance.  It's probably more typical to simmer along with the milk, and it's my impression that the milk does actually cook a little, changing the flavor, but this time I didn't.

Conclusion, outcome

It worked!  Often the first go at something novel really points towards how to get it right the next time instead, but this balanced well, and was nice.  The chocolate fell into a nice relation to the spicing, and the levels of all of the flavors worked out well.  Clove was strongest of the spice elements, but they all mixed so much that no one element was really pronounced over the others.  The marmalade folded in so well that it was hard to notice it even had any citrus aspect, but I think it probably supported the other flavors more than was evident.  The texture was fine, a little thick, but then ordinary masala chai tends to seem a little thick too.

It was a bit close to hot chocolate, of course, really in between a masala chai version and that.  It worked well for me, but I wouldn't want to drink either of those things too often.  It's a lot easier to review; it tastes like those ingredients.  It would match well with cold weather but it's in the mid 20s here (C; probably up to around 80 F now, cool for us in Bangkok but not cold weather).  I made enough to have two very large cups with breakfast, and judging from the amount of soaked tea and spices I was probably good and dosed with caffeine from that.


Part of the point was trying something new, and part was also about encouraging others that making tea blends is possible.  You don't just need to rely on Teavana or David's to hand something over, and really don't need to go find whole spice versions to make a costly tea blend either.


I'd think lots of things might work well for this holiday blend theme, lots of which I've seen in review posts about them:  pine needles (more on using those here and here), peppermint candy, etc.  It might be cool to try and figure out how to integrate nuts, or other things that wouldn't typically go in a tea blend, cognac, or egg nog, whatever comes to mind.  At worst a batch would be awful, so the time and ingredients would be wasted.

drying fruit for a version awhile back

Messing around with the tea input would be a natural variation.  I often use both CTC black tea and a mid-range quality orthodox black version (if I have both around), but an aged shou mei might fold into spice flavors just as well, or maybe better if you could balance the richness and subtlety well.  Smoked tea (Lapsang Souchong) has blending potential, but you know how it goes with those, finding a good one and getting the balance right would be tricky.

It starts to go a bit far but a Hunan brick tea might have interesting potential, keeping the spice a little lighter in that case so the unusual nature of that tea would have a chance to shine through.  One of those with a little cinnamon and nutmeg, dried orange peel, apple, and some dried fruit (raisin or date) might be great.  Crazy spicing like rosemary and sage might work for a different version, in the right mix.

Or just mixing black tea, cinnamon, and dried orange peel would be great, I'd think.

2016 Christmas in PA, with snow

visiting grandparents last holidays

Masala chai pumpkin pie, really cooking with tea

I made a masala chai rice pudding not so long ago, but didn't actually add tea, only the related spice blend.  That worked out really well, just drawing on the spicing mix, but I couldn't help but wonder how it would've turned out with tea as a flavor element.  I'd written here about how to make pumpkin pie from scratch, awhile back, so it was just a matter of putting it all together in another desert, with tea as an ingredient this time.


To back up a little, we ran across a wholesale vegetable vendor in Phisanulok on a trip in Thailand, and bought what must be at least 20 pounds of Thai pumpkin, a half dozen of them.  That cost around $2, kind of crazy.  Vegetables cost less here but buying them out in the country at good rates for those areas is something else.  I could make a lot of pies.


The American pumpkin pie spicing, used for pies and coffee drinks, is pretty close to masala chai spicing anyway.  Per my understanding that would include cinnamon, ginger, clove, and nutmeg, with masala chai swapping out nutmeg for cardamom, and potentially adding star anise and black pepper, which I'll skip.  A touch of salt also works well in masala chai, which of course would've been part of the pie anyway.  So it's onto details, how I went about it.


How would one add tea to a pie?  There are a few options, which start from the assumption I didn't plan to actually mix the tea in as an ingredient (eating a good bit of tea alone would probably be hard on your stomach, but mixed with food would probably be fine).  The most obvious fix would be to add it to milk, to simmer that with tea added prior to using it to make the custard base (pumpkin pie is just pumpkin, sugar, milk (or cream or condensed milk), eggs, and spicing).  A less obvious solution would be to add black tea to the water used when roasting the pumpkin, which I did decide to try.

I added a lot of black tea; nearly a third of a cup of it, split between a CTC  Assam I had around and a Thai black tea I just bought.  I'm not sure how much difference it makes but I like the idea of splitting the tea input between an astringent, malty, rough-edged CTC tea and a smoother, milder, fruit or woody-tone tea.  I might've added some of a Taiwanese black to this instead if I'd not ran across that Thai tea, but it's a waste to use tea that's really good, and the version I've not tried yet that I have a good bit of is probably well over that threshold.  That orthodox tea takes up a lot of space for a limited amount of tea but the CTC version doesn't, and partly as a result the input of the latter really could be a bit much.

roasting pumpkin in tea--different

I added some spicing to the tea and water mix used to roast the pumpkin, some clove, thin sliced ginger, cardamom, and cinnamon.  It wasn't intended as the final spicing blend but it made sense to start the spice infusion process too since roasting would take about an hour.  There are different ways one could give the pie the ginger kick, with using fresh ground ginger or even juiced ginger standing out.  I have dried ginger powder in a spice rack but I'll go with all fresh ginger since we keep it around and cook with it anyway.  The effect of fresh ground ginger versus dried is quite a bit different though; there's definitely more risk of the pie turning out too spicy, so one would have to be careful about the amount used.

While setting up the roasting mix it occurred to me that I'd have a version of masala chai as leftover pumpkin broth after the roasting step.  That would be different than typical masala chai because it would have a strong pumpkin flavor.  How strong, you might wonder.  Since I've roasted pumpkin before I'd already have experienced that:  quite intense.  It works well to make a pumpkin soup base, or it's nice just to drink, if one is into such things (I am; I usually just drink it).

I'll review that masala chai version first, then get back to the details about the pie.  I might mention first about tasting the darkened, roasted pumpkin, that tea and spice blend input seemed a little strong.  That's normal; masala chai tastes awful without the sugar and milk because the flavors balance just isn't designed for drinking it that way.  Unless you're dealing with a light version that is intended to be drank alone, but it would have to be very light though, still back in the range of flavored teas.  A more typical masala chai mix is strong, and needs those counters to balance the intensity.  That's not a bad thing; the recipe design accounts for that as an input, focusing on the final effect.

Review of the by-product, masala chai with pumpkin stock

I saved the infused spiced tea and liquid blend, a by-product of the roasting step, refrigerated overnight.  The initial water I measured as 3 1/2 cups, and between evaporation and the pumpkin absorbing a lot there was about two large cups of tea worth left.  One part I heated, simmering it on the stove, and drank a second cup cold, to try it both ways.  Upon first taste it was a bit too vegetal, in part related to Thai pumpkin being a little closer to a squash than the jack-o-lantern style version (what Westerners call squash; they're all part of the same vegetable group, they're squash).  A bit more sugar and a few drops of vanilla helped offset that, along with just switching expectations.

The tea wasn't designed to be a final version, so the flavor profile had eased up quite a bit on spicing as I typically prepare masala chai.  Ginger in particular was quite subdued.  But it worked.  The pumpkin gave it an interesting complexity, not bad at all once I expected it to be there.  Beyond that it was just a mild masala chai blend.  I would expect some people to hate it and others to prefer it to versions without pumpkin depending on personal preference.  It definitely added some complexity, although it didn't taste mostly like pumpkin with all the tea and spicing in it.

masala chai stock photo, from an earlier post about that

It was interesting experiencing it cold and hot, as two versions.  The cold presentation helped the pumpkin input largely drop out, so I suppose preference for one of those two styles would depend on that factor.  I liked both; they were just different.  Pumpkin really was just another layer in the flavor, it just stood out a lot when initially tasting it because it's an atypical layer.  The balance of the spices was fine, I'd just prefer even more clove and ginger.


I was wondering if tea balance would work, since around a third of a cup of tea is a lot, surely enough to make at least a half dozen cups of tea, probably more like a dozen, now absorbed into a lot of pumpkin and remaining in three cups of liquid tea.  It was strong but fine.  At a guess that pumpkin absorbed a good bit more than half the tea flavor (and caffeine? who knows).  It seems kind of obvious but I didn't want to under-shoot related to tea flavor addition, to be concluding that the experiment would be interesting to re-try with more tea so that the tea taste was actually present.  It's bold to add so much tea to a recipe but I think that was in the right range.


There's one more choice to be made related to that since I have a third small cup of the strong tea left, half a cup really, which I could add back into the pie or leave out.  Either way would have worked, but in the end I did mix it in.  Water is not a typical ingredient in a pumpkin pie but I have some cooking cream at home, so it's easy to offset the addition by going with the cream instead of milk or half and half, as I usually do.  As I recall the old traditional version my Mom made when I was a child used condensed milk, but I stopped considering that type of ingredient more than 20 years ago, early in my cooking self-training.

To me cooking is about tasting, about projecting ahead where a flavor balance is going to go, then making adjustments.  Another part is about texture.  Using interim tasting as input really doesn't work so well in making a masala chai, if you don't add the milk as you cook it (which is the typical way to prepare it, to cook the milk with the tea), because milk and sugar change the flavor so much it's hard to factor that in.

Towards the end of making this pie it really turned into a struggle.  It's easy to run into trouble with crust temperature, since the butter or margarine needs to be at just the right degree of softness to form correctly, and that became a glitch.  It's hot here (I live in Bangkok, and it's the hot season now), even hotter in a kitchen while cooking, and once it started to soften too much I put it in the refrigerator, then the rest took too long and I overcooled it.

I had been using ground cloves in the past but tried grinding whole cloves this time instead, and our food processor isn't as suited to that as a spice grinder would be.  I grated fresh ginger for this pie, but it was difficult dialing in that spicing level along with the clove.  A glitch or two is easy to work through but when a few aspects don't click the venture can turn into a slog.  I was trying to rush this cooking process by the time it was over, already working it into a busy day, and that's just not really how experimental cooking works.  We'll see if that affects results or not.

The final results

the pie; crazy, but it's square

Sometimes these experimental food ventures work out well, as that masala chai spice rice pudding did, and often not nearly that well, or sometimes better on a second try.  On first taste this didn't click in the same way.  The clove and ginger were both a little strong, and I didn't get the salt level right to balance flavors.  That's just about not paying attention, since you can't easily tell how spicing will integrate but salt level is an easier call, even if it's quite subtle in this type of dish.


It wasn't immediately obvious if the tea played much of a flavor role or not, due to the spicing.  It all came across as a little too strong, not falling into balance, and I think the tea might have just helped push it further in that direction.  Backing off the more intense spices might have helped it play a nice supporting role, but I erred in the other direction instead.


It made me think through the differences in masala chai (the drink), and cooking rice pudding and pumpkin pie.  Masala chai needs to be intense, that's part of the whole point, and the sugar and milk provide compensation for some relatively high spice levels.  In retrospect I went quite light on the ginger and clove in that rice pudding, even backing off the cinnamon, allowing the cardamom to play a larger role, but I switched all that around in this case.  All of those rely on striking the right balance, which is especially important in pumpkin pie.  Layering pumpkin with intense spices requires the right touch or the pumpkin itself can nearly drop out as a flavor base that ties it all together.

With a rice pudding the neutral rice flavor automatically falls way into the background; there can be no substantial "rice" flavor, although it is in there.  With that dish you can potentially lose the "custard" flavor, the creamy fullness egg cooked into milk provides, which is already not going to stand out in a desert based on pumpkin instead.

Anyway, tasted on it's own it turned out ok, just a little intense, without striking that exceptional balance.  There wasn't much "pumpkin" aspect coming across.  That general spiciness also offset noticing the input of the tea, which probably just ramped up flavor intensity, complexity, and busy-ness, which it really didn't need.  I can't help but wonder if using so much CTC tea wasn't also a problem, if that edgy, biting, malt tone didn't combine with the edge of ginger and clove to dial up the flavor volume a little too loud.  Could it work better than plain pumpkin pie, if adjusted correctly?  Maybe.  One more factor comes into play.

The whip cream input, sort of

the kind of people that eat whip cream from the can

The adjustment period is not over once you finish the dish, although at first it may seem so.  I made the pie to go with whipped cream (you sort of design it for a certain level of that for balance).  We had a can of instant whipped cream in the refrigerator, with only a little already used to go with jello, so adding extra whipped cream would be an easy counter to the spiciness.  It's not just a fix because the spicing level was designed to include that, in the same way you would make two completely different masala chai versions if you planned to add milk and sugar or not.


Unbeknownst to me my two kitchen assistants ate part of it and expended all the propellant--nitrous oxide--by ineffectively eating it directly from the can.  This was in spite of clear instructions related to how making that mistake would be possible.  I told them to not eat it from the can, at all, and if they did to just tip it up while doing so, holding the can nozzle side down.  So much for me being consistent.  It was that kind of cooking venture anyway, a bit up and down.


I tried the pie with vanilla ice cream the second time, not ideal but it would serve the same purpose.  It was much better; quite good even.  It was amazing how it shifted the intensity down to enable the spicing to become reasonable, although still just a little heavy on clove.  I might've been able to detect tea as an input but it seemed to layer in to just add complexity and earthiness to the pie.  It's hard to say if that actually improved it.  Pumpkin taste definitely did get crowded out.


If I tried it with rice pudding again instead, and used better tea, and all but omitted clove and ginger, used them sparingly as mild support, that may work even better.  But I'm not sure I could really tell what role black tea played even if I got the balance right, or it might not taste like black tea at all especially if I did get it right.  That's an odd thought, isn't it, that the only way to balance the flavor properly might be to not taste it at all.

The reason that better tea in general is so effective in beverage form is that it's standing alone, or at least my tea almost always is.  Only blended versions aren't.  Most teas can be intense but only in a subtle way; the intensity and complexity comes from a tea drinker becoming accustomed to that range, to calibrating their sense of taste.

Masala chai really is an anomaly, and it's quite odd that bergamot in Earl Grey works as well as it does, or jasmine in a nice black tea.  Jasmine green tea or osmanthus oolongs are typically great examples of why those other two are exceptions.  Both can be fine until you become accustomed to plain teas, and then the lack of subtlety becomes hard to take.  Or maybe that's just my experience.  Jasmine green tea was a gateway tea for me but I have no idea when I last tried one.

It might be better to just make the pie without tea and have a nice tea on the side.  That seems an odd place to leave it, so I'll consider what someone else tried related to this.  Google had more to say about the masala chai rice pudding I made, which I'd not looked up when making that.

Thai fruit; no connection

Versus from a recipe

I'm not recommending that you do this, to completely hand your cooking experiment over to some internet reference source, but it wouldn't hurt to check one before starting out (like this article and recipe; Google's first pick for the terms I entered).  Of course I didn't; I read all this after making this pie.  This citation about author preference shows where it's going to go:


I prefer a pumpkin pie that is subtle in its spice and sugar; with a creamy and tender filling, against a crust that has both flake and crunch.  

I usually serve pumpkin pie with some whipped cream that's folded through with just enough maple syrup to take off its edge, but If in the mood for true gilding, I’ll serve it with a Black Tea Caramel... heady with Darjeeling and cardamom, it completes the whole masala chai thing the pie has started. 


I must admit I'm a bit flexible about the crust texture part but that is how ideal spicing usually goes for pumpkin pie.  Spicing supports the effect but stays in the background.  Related to texture, it's funny how I do like to cook, and experiment with flavors, but in a sense I really do have a "crocodile's tongue," as my wife says (a Thai expression).  I could spend a whole day making something I feel like eating, prepared just in the way I imagine it, or I could just eat grilled cheese sandwiches for a week.  And when I make pies frequently the crust does turn out flaky but it doesn't matter so much to me if it doesn't.


Here is her recipe related to spices (although adding that sauce mentioned changes things; that sweetness and spicing essentially becomes part of the equation):


1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/8 teaspoon ground clove
1/8 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper



That would be subtle.  I don't measure ingredients when I cook but I went stronger on spicing, with the actual black tea input adding a substantial layer beyond that.

Let's consider the caramel sauce spicing too (omitting reference to cream and butter):


1 tablespoon loose leaf black tea, Darjeeling is best
4 green cardamom pods, cracked
2 cups (400 g) granulated sugar
1/2 cup (120 ml) water
2 tablespoons pure maple syrup
1 tablespoon whisky
Seeds scraped from a vanilla bean
1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon flaky sea salt such as Maldon


So way, way less tea than I put in this pie, nearly by a factor of ten.  I can't imagine how this caramel could be "heady with Darjeeling" from adding enough tea to make a couple of cups worth.  Darjeeling is a good call, probably a second flush or autumn harvest version, maybe second flush instead to not waste the other.  Or a Lipton tea bag might work almost as well for mixing in a tablespoon of tea with all the rest.  Using a single vanilla bean might seem sparse but I've went on before about how much flavor those can impart, even adding a creamy texture based on adding only a limited amount.


I suppose it's appropriate that my first experience with really cooking with tea wasn't a resounding success.  It sort of worked, and maybe I'll get back to it.

Masala chai spice themed rice pudding

You might think this topic makes no sense, that it's not even close to being a tea, unless I made it with tea as an ingredient, but I didn't.  That might've worked.  It's not so different than anything including cinnamon and ginger being marketed as "pumpkin spice" related back in the US, but that typically happens in the fall.

I could accept that critique.  This post isn't at all about tea, even though it appears in a tea-themed blog.  It is vaguely related, and I feel like communicating how a masala chai themed rice pudding worked out after making one, and writing about cooking instead, so here it is.

from really making masala chai, in this post

What would the difference be if it were pumpkin pie spice related?  The two sets of spices overlap so much and can vary enough that per my understanding there isn't much difference (which you can check in this first venture into food writing, a post about making a pumpkin pie from scratch).


I made this rice pudding with cinnamon, cardamom, clove, and vanilla.  Ginger would've been ok,  standard for both spice theme sets, but it seemed like clove covered some related flavor-role space, only better for this dish.  Cardamom stood in place of the nutmeg used in pumpkin pies.


Masala chai can include black pepper too, and often enough star anise, but often enough not too.  I only like star anise in savory soups or else it seems like too much for me, with too strong an aftertaste.  That limits it in my cooking to the role it plays in Chinese five spice blends and Vietnamese Pho.


With that context out of the way I'll move on to discussing making this rice pudding version, after some background.

before cooking, the mix

The background, cooking history and philosophy

My Mom made rice pudding, a favorite desert as a child.  That version would've probably used only cinnamon and nutmeg for spicing, besides vanilla.  She slow-cooked it in a crock pot.  It was made based on a standard recipe, using the same ingredients in the same proportion every time, the way normal people prepare foods.

I stopped using recipes in my early 20s, and cooked enough to overcome the missteps that resulted from that.  I guess the idea was to explore cooking by feel, to learn from mistakes, and to experience balancing the inputs more directly, by tasting and adjusting.  It usually worked out, and when it didn't the next version after almost always did.  I cooked everything I could think of:  meats prepared a broad range of ways, traditional American foods, barbecue, soups, or region-specific foods like Cajun, Mexican, and Italian, expanding into doing a lot of baking.  That ranged into ventures as aggressive as making croissants and danishes from scratch, one place I ran into my limitations.  Cakes, pies, tarts, puddings and custards are easy; finely layered forms of pastry not so much.

Rice pudding is easy, you just need to avoid screwing up the proportions.  That's what would happen if someone tried to make it for the first time without any reference to a recipe.  Lets take a look at one, although it's not my Mom's, which I've lost track of.

Old-fashioned Rice Pudding

This recipe was referenced as a Quora answer as the 1975 Betty Crocker version (so it's quite classic):


2/3 cup uncooked regular rice

1 1/3 cups water
2 eggs or 4 egg yolks
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla or 1 tablespoon grated orange peel
2 cups milk
1/2 cup raisins
Nutmeg


Stir together rice and water in saucepan. Heat to boiling, stirring once or twice. Reduce heat; cover and simmer 14 minutes without removing cover or stirring. All water should be absorbed.


Heat oven to 325°. Beat eggs in ungreased 1 1/2-quart casserole. Stir in sugar, salt, vanilla, milk, hot rice and the raisins. Sprinkle with nutmeg. Bake, stirring occasionally, until knife inserted halfway between edge and center comes out clean, 50 to 60 minutes.


All that really would work.  They don't mention cinnamon at all; kind of strange.  Vanilla seems more appropriate than orange peel, to me, but I guess it could be a matter of taste.  Lets move on to what I just made instead.

A masala chai spice version

I used about 3 cups of cooked rice, and probably around 2 1/2 cups of milk (a lot--too little and the pudding turns out too dense, since even cooked rice will soak up liquid, and the dish is basically a custard).  I added 5 relatively small eggs, a size that just wouldn't come up back in the US, where almost every egg seems to be large.  I'd guess that would be similar to three of those.

palm sugar (credit)

I didn't measure the sugar, and used palm sugar instead, which comes in disks (strange, right?).  I've botched some dishes getting a feel for how those equate to granulated sugar.  I tasted the mixture for sweetness--with raw eggs in it, just madness--and added a bit of granulated sugar at the end to adjust it.  Salt is a critical ingredient, getting the right amount, so little that you barely taste it but enough that is still balances the rest, just as for masala chai.  I added about half a teaspoon.


I can't estimate how much cinnamon, cardamom (ground black pod type), and ground clove I added; some, a good bit, adjusting by tasting after.  Nutmeg really would also work well, and someone else might like ground or even fresh ginger in it, but I'd rather have clove and cardamom fill that range.  Beyond that I added a bit of vanilla (imitation liquid version, maybe two tablespoons), and skipped the raisins, since my Mom didn't add those.  Mashed banana might be nice to add fruit tone but it doesn't match this theme.

I baked it at around 350 for over an hour, starting even hotter initially to speed up heating.  We use Celcius here (in Thailand), so really 200, but then we have a large size version of a toaster oven and temperatures work out differently in those.  Thais tend to not bake; ovens aren't standard.  Slow cooking in a crock pot works really well, we just don't have one.

cooked version; browning the top is optional, but would dress it up

The verdict

It was awesome.  It might seem like splitting spicing input between cinnamon and nutmeg would make roughly the same desert but going heavy on cardamom and adding a good bit of clove for higher end gave it a spice effect you could almost feel more than taste.  I don't mean in the same way spicy Thai food hits your sense of taste like a hammer, or more like a comet-strike if that goes badly, or how Indian food changes your metabolism and the spicing sweats back out of you.  I mean it was tasty in a way that's hard to completely get your sense of taste around; the effect was deeply catchy.

served warm with milk

It would seem natural to add some black tea, wouldn't it?  I'd probably even strongly brew two types of black tea and add both, to give it more complexity.  But I'm not really a "cooking with tea" type of person.  I drink a truly insane amount of tea, maybe only equivalent to a half dozen large cups a day, or 20 small ones, or a mix of sizes, but the number of types really adds up.  I like matcha soft serve ice cream and pretty much leave it at that.  Tea could combine well with lots of foods but I'd sort of rather that in my own diet it didn't.


If I'd made this dish for other people I'd have tried that, for the sake of novelty as much as flavor balance, and eventually I may.  If adding black tea it would make sense to go ahead and put the ginger back in too, but draw the line at black pepper, to keep it sensible.