Making iced tea

Today, it was rather warm outside. I decided to have another go at making iced tea.

Decades ago, I had got a leaflet from a tea shop in Germany (of which I was a regular customer) explaining how to best make iced tea.

1. Fill several long-drink glasses up to two-thirds with ice cubes.
2. Brew the tea. Use double the amount of tea leaves as you normally would for a given amount of water, but let infuse for only half of the time. (Add sugar to taste.)
3. Pour the hot tea on the ice cubes. The tea will be "flash-frozen" instantly, while part of the ice cubes dissolve.

I tried to make a larger amount at once. A while ago, I had bought this "refrigerator pitcher".

 

I filled it with a lot of ice cubes. The pitcher holds 2 liters, and I filled it approximately to the 1.5-liter mark. Then I brewed the tea. I filled a paper tea filter with 8 teaspoons of green tea.

 

This is sencha with extra flavor added. I used earl grey flavor (a small rest) and blood orange flavor.

After I had added water of 80 degrees Celsius, it looked like this:

I let it infuse for one and a half minutes, then poured it on the ice cubes.

Hm. Again, I was not so happy with the color. I tried it. I wasn't that happy with the taste, either.

Possible ways to improve it:

1. Less ice cubes.

2. Distribute the tea leaves evenly among two tea filters, so they have more room to expand in the hot water.

3. Use fresher tea. (The blood-orange flavored sencha was more than a year old, I think.)

To be continued.

 

 

Another attempt at the perfect curry nabe

Yesterday, Ben pinged me on chat while he was at work asking what I had planned for dinner.

As yesterday was another rainy and rather cold day, I had planned to make a nabe using stuff that we still had in stock. I asked Ben if he would prefer tomato nabe or curry nabe, and he chose curry.

Overview of the ingredients:

 

Ben had pinged me around 6, and he was due home around 9. So I had enough time to soak some dried mushrooms. The bowl in the center contains about 20 g of dried cloud ear mushrooms, soaked in lukewarm water and cut into bite-size pieces. The bowl on the bottom right contains 4 dried shiitake, also reconstituted in the same water and cut into slivers.

I also decided to use the leftover konnyaku (in the bowl at the back). I wasn't quite sure if its fishy taste was compatible with curry, but then I thought: "The Thai make excellent fish curries. Why not give it a try?"

I had strained the liquid from soaking the mushrooms through a paper coffee filter into this measuring cup.

 

(Sorry for the blurry photo.) It had a really strong mushroom smell :) As you can see, it is almost three quarters of one liter. For use as stock for the curry nabe, I filled it up to one liter and added about half a tube of this instant kombu dashi:

 

To be honest, I am not so happy with this brand of kombu dashi. When I dissolve it in (usually boiling) water, it first turns into myriads of little gelatinous, light green squares. I have to stir really hard until they disappear. I'm also not quite so happy with its taste. But it is good enough for many purposes. 

I added two curry roux blocks to that and two tablespoons of this soy sauce:

 

(I have mentioned "light-colored soy sauce" a few times in this blog and translated that to "usukuchi shoyu". The stuff in the picture above was what I had used. I guess it's not really fair. This soy sauce is light-colored, yes, but it also doesn't taste very intense. Several cookbook authors tell me that real usukuchi shoyu tends to taste more salty than regular soy sauce, due to differences in the fermentation process. Yumi Hana carries real usukuchi shoyu. As soon as this bottle is finished, I want to try it.)

 

After I had taken this photo, I decided that the bag of Yude Udon would still fit in.

My first bowl:

 

On the whole, I was quite happy with this curry nabe. But I guess I don't want to use dried mushrooms every time. I also should have put in the shiitake right from the start, with the carrots, the cabbage cores and the konnyaku. They were still a bit tough when we had them.

So there is still space for improvement :)