Lychee Tea

All About The Many Uses Of Lychee Tea

Exquisite tasting lychee tea is created from a special blend of black tea that has been scented with aromatic lychee peels. Lychee is a sweet, delicious, tropical fruit that received its great popularity in Asia. When enjoying lychee tea, you may be instantly amazed by its strong, yet pleasantly fruity and sweet aroma.

When the tea is brewed, you will notice that it has an interesting and lovely brownish-red hue that is complimented with a sweet yet light, honey-like taste. Aside from drinking this tea in the traditional way, lychee tea is also perfect as iced tea or served hot with cream and sugar like your favorite cup of coffee. If this tea is prepared with milk and sugar, you can make the extremely popular Taiwanese Boba, bubble tea drinks or tapioca.

Preparation

When preparing yourself a cup of lychee black tea, the water that you use needs to be at a minimum boiling point of 100°C. Ideally, you will use three grams or two teaspoons of loose tea leaves to every five ounces of water. Most people will steep their tea from an average of three to five minutes but you will want to experiment with less or more steep time to arrive at your desired concentration. The great thing about lychee tea is that it has a wonderful taste all alone or you can sweeten it to your liking.

Cooking With Loose Lychee Tea Leaves

Lychee tea is not just for drinking. You may not be aware that you can use these leaves to season food offering a tangy flavor that is complimented by quite a contradiction by the black tea's tart acidity. Follow these four simple steps to use lychee tea in your cooking to impress your friends, family and even yourself.

Pulverize the tea leaves either by using a rolling pin or a grinder. It is important that leaves are crushed as fine as possible to extract the maximum amount of flavor. The finer the leaves are ground, the better they will dissolve into the liquid or sauce of your recipe.

Hydrate your lychee tea leaves in a few tablespoons of water. The amount of water that you use is ultimately going to depend on how many leaves that your recipe calls for. When you soak the leaves for even a couple of minutes it helps you extract more flavor into your dish.

You are going to brew the tea partially during the cooking process. Therefore, the longer that your food cooks, the longer that the tea is going to brew and steep which ultimately influences the final flavor of the food. For a stronger flavor, you will want to add the leaves to your dish when you initially start cooking. If you desire just a hint of flavor from the lychee, you will just add the lychee leaves to the dish for the last 5 or 10 minutes of the total cooking time.

For a special treat you can combine your lychee tea leaves with nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves or any other spice of your choice. Put the leaves and the spice into a pepper grinder and then you will simply grind this mixture out into a container. You can use this spice mixture either in baking or it is perfect for a rub for poultry and meat dishes. For an exceptional and unique meat marinade, grind the tea leaves with white pepper or for a phenomenal Asian rub you can grind the lychee tea leaves with soy sauce and ginger. This unforgettable sauce compliments fish, pork, chicken and even tofu. Whatever dish you use these leaves in is sure to be the topic of conversation at even the most challenging dinner parties.