EXPERT TIPS for making DELICIOUS MATCHA

hey tea here this is don from may leaf and i'm here to give you five essential tips to make your matcha taste great i'm recording this in january and many people out there are starting the year off by choosing to add matcha into their daily routine and you'd be right to do so it is one of the most healthy habits that you can get into for both your body and your mind but a lot of people think of matcha sort of as this green goodness a sort of spirulina style drink that you need to gulp down and endure rather than actually enjoy or they throw the matcha into matcha lattes or smoothies in order to soften and mask the flavor well i'm here to tell you that pure matcha is a delicious and luxurious drink when made properly i am continuously being asked questions about matches so i thought that i would collate my most common advice into five essential tips for you to truly enjoy and crave that pure matcha hit actually i have six for you but we're calling it five tips and a bonus just because that's the way listicle videos tend to go people like the bonus it's sort of like a freebie at the end even though all of this is of course for free before we get into them i have made a much more detailed and extensive video in japan showing you how matcha is made from beginning to end and how we select our matcha here at mayleaf plus we have some really old videos made right at the start of this channel all about matcha and how to make matcha most of the information in those videos still apply even if they look a little bit amateurish although they're probably due an update so you can go check out those videos you can laugh at the old videos if you'd like i'll put links to those videos in the description below right let's get into it let's start with our first tip which is the get yourself good quality matcha but what does that actually mean well first of all you have to buy ceremonial grade matcha and not culinary grade matcha i wouldn't even use culinary grade for my cooking to be frank if you want to make lattes or ice cream then i would still recommend getting yourself some ceremonial grade matcha perhaps culinary grade is usable for like baking with matcha but honestly the quality of culinary grade is not worth having on your shelves there is a lot of ceremonial grade match out there and to be honest anyone can call their matcher ceremonial grade there is no regulation there are no standards so what should ceremonial grade mean and how do you pick your match out of a million choices out there well for us ceremonial grade means that the matcha is made from proper spring-picked shade grown tension which is the raw material and ground by stone mills at low temperature to under 10 microns of fineness now most brands out there will claim that their matcha meets those requirements so how do you pick a truly tasty matcha one filter that i would recommend using is to only buy matcha which shows the cultivar on the label if there is no cultivar mentioned that's kind of like going and buying a red wine which just says red wine on the label without any mention of the grape variety if the packaging talks about cultivar then you can at least have some sense that the brand is connected with the basics of the production another tip is to avoid matcha which is only made with a hundred percent yabukita cultivar now don't get me wrong the yabukita cultivar is the most widely produced tea variety and it can make excellent tea but it is a bit one-dimensional for matcha if it is blended with another specialist cultivar then that is fine but i would say that just on the odds of balance stay away from 100 yabakita as it's less likely to give you that luxurious taste my favorite cultivar is the ujji hickory cultivar but there are many other varieties out there which can produce stella matcha here in front of me i have some uji hickory matcha this is our ceremonial grade matcha at may leaf and this is not culinary grade this is still ceremonial grade but is a lower quality matcher so um let's do something which commonly is being done out there and i'm going to show you it but i'm also going to give you a word of caution so let's just take a little bit of this ceremonial grade matcher we put it on a bit of paper you've probably seen this a lot of brands out there use this to sort of show the color of their matcha you can visually see it very clearly anyway from the scoop but if you take your your finger and you just rub down you can sort of get an idea of the color difference between these two matches but this is a useful technique but certainly is not foolproof be very careful about judging a matcher simply on the basis of color you've also got to look at texture this is very they're both very fine they produce a very very fine sheen on the paper there's nothing granular about it but with color you have to be a little bit careful some producers intentionally pick cultivars which look very green but may not have a great flavor and some unscrupulous producers out there i have found will also throw in a little bit of chlorophyll powder into their matcha which is not harmful but it's not pure matcha anymore and that chlorophyll gives it a very vibrant green color so be wary of just judging matcha by its color right tip number two and that is to drink your matcha from a bowl it doesn't have to be a char one which is the particular bowl that is designed for matcha it can be any wide rimmed bowl but you should drink your matcha from a bowl and not from a cup this is not just for practical or aesthetic reasons it also affects taste you see good matcha has a complex blend of taste from floral to creamy from savory to sweet and from smooth to bitter in order to experience the proper balance of flavours the matcha should hit your tongue all over the front the middle the back and the sides preferably starting at the front and the sides and moving backwards traditional mugs or cups tend to direct the flow of liquid onto the center to the back of your tongue and that's where you experience more like earthy and bitter notes of anything which you are drinking or eating by drinking matcha from a wider rimmed bowl you're actually directing the matcha to the front and sides of your tongue and then it moves to the back and that allows you to get a full balance of the taste to be experienced so you can do this yourself grab yourself a bowl wide rim so not nothing too narrow and pour in some cold water just so that you can feel the temperature on your tongue so that you know where it's hitting and if you taste it from a cup you will note that the whole of the front half of your tongue is being missed out the the cold liquid hits the middle of your tongue and moves to the back of your tongue and so you're losing all of the sensory uh taste that will come from the front and sides of your tongue which tends to be more of the sweeter moving to acidic taste so these fresher notes and so if you drink from a bowl it's extremely different the cool water is hitting the front of my tongue moving around the sides and over the top and my whole tongue is experiencing the cooler temperature of that water which shows you that when you're drinking from a bowl it's going to be hitting the fullness of your tongue rather than just the center to the back and therefore you're going to get a much more balanced taste out of your matcha right tip number three is less is more matcha should be a luxurious treat and is designed to be drunk strong and concentrated so please don't make the mistake of making weak watery matcha this is a common mistake made by people who are getting into matcha because they sort of think that they'll make a lighter tea and easier to drink tea and all that will happen is that you dilute the taste and lose the balance of flavor and texture completely this is not getting the best out of your matcha instead matcha should be seen as a short intense hit of flavor and texture that really sort of takes up no more than sort of three to four generous sips so what we recommend is that you use one generous teaspoon of matcha with about 60 milliliters of water or about just under a quarter of a cup of water so let me just show you what that means sort of visually i'm gonna pull it directly from this pouch it's easier for me if you have a teaspoon then just get yourself a teaspoon and sort of you can sort of a flat teaspoon is okay in other words you can sort of you can fill up the teaspoon and just roll it along the sides you can get a flat teaspoon i prefer a little bit more generous teaspoon than that you need to have a luxurious drink which is concentrated so i'm going to put two of these scoops in that equals sort of a good nice heaped teaspoon you can warm your cha one or bowl of course first that's gonna mean that it's nice and warm to the touch but that's not one of my essential tips and we are going to be adding 60 milliliters of water this is 50 so what i'm going to be doing is i'm going to be putting a little bit of water to make a paste and then i'm going to be putting a full shot like this that will be around 60 milliliters of water which moves us on to tip number four which is keep it cool matcha is full of goodness and the two main components which are especially healthy are the amino acid l-theanine and the antioxidants called catechins theanine is rich thick savory and sweet whereas catechins are bright bracing and bitter making good tasting matcha relies on sort of getting the right balance between these two contrasts and one of the best ways to control this balance is through the temperature of the water you see the theanine that savory to sweet creamy thick component of matcha extracts at pretty much any temperature but catechins need hotter water so you want to bring the water to a high enough temperature to bring out the right amount of those bracing bright fresh and bitter notes but cool enough not to overdo it and leave yourself with an unpleasantly bitter matcher we recommend 70 degrees or about 160 degrees fahrenheit as a starting point and then of course you can adapt to your taste and to the matcha which you have in your bowl if you do not have a temperature controlled kettle then here is what you do to get to that temperature you boil the water bring it up to 100 degrees or 212 fahrenheit and then stop the kettle and then you pour in cold water to bring the water temperature down and it's actually surprising how much cold water you need to add in the experiments that we've done what you need to do is add half the amount that's in the kettle already so if you have let's say two cups of water in the kettle which is that boiling point already then you need to add one cup of cold water in order to bring the temperature down to about 70 degrees or 160 degrees fahrenheit right our final tip tip number five is that texture is key matcha should be an ultra smooth and velvety drink which is why the ceremonial matcha has to be ground to under 10 microns usual which is the most common way of drinking pure matcha should also be very frothy this smooth and frothy texture not only gives the match a luxurious mouth feel but also rounds out any spiky notes in the matcher so let me show you how i do that you can use one of these electric whisks but i'm going to be using a pretty beat up old matcha whisk that i've used a lot of and i'm going to show you how to get a good texture so first of all you need to make sure that you make a paste in the bowl some people recommend sieving the matcha i don't think that that's necessary at all you just need to take a splash something like 10 ml of water and then pour that in over your matcha and you're going to see here that it's not combining but once you start to put your whisk in and mix it up you can start to make a paste and take your time here this is really key you've got to take your time when you're making matcha you want to get all of those little clumps of powder mixed in it's very very important and once you're at this stage and you really feel like it's mixed in i could put a little bit a little tiny splash more just to loosen up you're sort of at that stage where you've got like this kind of paste take another 10 seconds and just keep going because there's always some hidden clumps around so just keep going you really want to make sure that all of those clumps are totally combined into the paste and now we can add our 50 ml so that will make about 60 mil in total this is 70 degree water you can just pour that straight in and it's going to look a little bit like this it's going to look a little bit like a mess and you're going to go around the outside and just get all of that paste which is stuck to the sides into that water in the bottom and then get down into the bottom check your whisk itself just make sure that you don't have any of the paste stuck between the bristles just keep working it so what we're doing now is combining the matcha with the water we're not caring about the froth right now all we want to do is make sure it's all from the sides so taking your time here is very important but it yields a much more satisfying drink right now when you're at this stage and you're convinced that everything is combined and you've got a very very smooth suspension then you can start the frothing process now i'm no expert at frothing people are a lot better than me at it but basically you're doing a w motion so www you start off at the bottom hitting the bottom of the bowl and then you start to speed it up and raise the whisk from above the bottom and just come up a little bit and just keep going and you can keep going here you know a lot of people sort of like to make this part of the sort of meditative practice and you see you're going to get this lovely beautiful luminous green very fine bubbled crema on top of your matcha which should stay there for a fair amount of time and you can always go in and whisk a bit more sort of reinvigorate it and now you are ready to drink so put this aside now as i said usually around three sips and you want to make sure that the matcha goes to the front and the sides and over the top before it hits the back which is why you use a bowl cheers everybody texture soft creamy viscous rich the froth really helps to give it a luxurious velvety light feel to it like a like a sabayon like very very light froth taste i'm getting like walnuts avocados i'm getting um like porridge oats sweet porridge final sip and this was done very well because on the final sip i'm not noticing any sediments it's just as smooth as the first sip which is why you take your time texture is so so very very important here you can see a little bit of froth left over so i'm just going to go in i'm not going to waste that matcha should be considered a strong concentrated luxurious drink like that and getting the right texture is paramount right finally our bonus tip and that is to line the stomach matcha is a very rich and potent drink full of all kinds of plant-based compounds including caffeine it is a great way to reduce fatigue and give sustained energy and that's why a lot of people like to drink it in the morning or before going to the gym but because it is so rich and potent it can cause some people me included at the beginning to feel slightly nauseous if consumed on an empty stomach and a lot of people who experience this nausea just sort of naturally assume that matcha is not for them but hold on instead of giving up on the delights of matcha try drinking the matcha after you've eaten something after breakfast or as part of your mid-morning treat oftentimes once your body gets used to the potency of matcha this slightly nauseous feeling will go away but i always advise clients to line their stomachs before indulging in matcha to protect against this feeling well that's it five essential tips plus a bonus to really enjoy your pure matcha if you have any further tips then please write them in the comments section below so others can read them and i hope that this video helps you to get the most out of this delicious treat that's it tea heads check out our other videos taste artists wherever you are in the world by browsing maylife.com and come visit us if you're ever in london other than that i'm don from may leaf thank you for being a part of the revelation of true tea stay away from those tea bags keep drinking the good stuff and spread the word because nobody deserves bad tea bye

Channel: Mei Leaf

Views: 97,153

Keywords: tea, mei leaf, don mei, loose leaf tea, green tea, matcha tea, websites for tea, tea tasting, tea shopping, high quality tea, japanese tea, tea ware, teaware, gong fu tea, gong fu brewing, matcha, usucha, koicha, ceremonial grade matcha, culinary matcha, how to make matcha, expert matcha, matcha tips, choosing matcha, selecting matcha, yabukita, hikarii, uji, uji matcha, how to choose matcha, matcha differences, matcha whisk, matcha advice, matcha health, green tea powder

Id: 8GyfQAwU9FM

Length: 18min 59sec (1139 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 30 2021