Understanding Tea with Don Mei

hi everyone welcome back to haste kitchen slight twist this week we did a coffee series about a year ago now and I've recently given up coffee for a new year reason being because I don't love coffee I do absolutely love it but it going to be quite jittery so the reason I'm giving it up is when I was done it spewed little film shoes and things I start getting tea tree hands I couldn't work out what it was it was just the caffeine in my three strong expresso whose a day so I've got Donna here for my tea who is literally an expert in every single bit of knowledge you need about tea so that's what brought me on today and is good to me everything we need to know about the basis of from growing through to serving this is this is going to be your big crash course into right yeah but we're gonna try and get this done in about four to five minute video yeah no no challenge thanks Ian so over to you I want you to take control of this cuz I want to learn as much as you guys probably do as well okay well so the first thing to really point out is that there's a big difference between what we're talking about today and you're kind of commodity tea of course it's from the same plant but it's processed and and grown in a completely kind of different way there's machine picked and machine grown and then there's the top drawer really top shelf stuff right which is what we're dealing with here so this is true tea this is single a stay true tea all loose leaf and it's a it's it's like the way that I'd like you to think about it is just push the reset button because the thing about tea is it's the most consumed drink in the world right after water yeah yeah 99% of people in the West yeah know nothing about it yeah right on that person so it's better to just start from square one there is a plant called camellia sinensis all tea comes from camellia sinensis right but just like the wine plant right which all wine comes from the grape yeah there are many different varieties right thousands of different varieties yes I mentioned wine we're good right so thousands of different varieties and then obviously the same things that affect wine affect tea so the terroir the whole kind of Mike climate where it was grown which side of the the mountain it was it was grown on the soil the surrounding nature the season there was pig one of the big difference but differences between wine and tea is that wine is picked once a year right right tea is picked multiple times in the air so you get different grades throughout the year you get high grades and low grades so there's so much complexity in tea there's so much to understand it to delve into so this is going to be your crash course into it right right there are 6 types main types of tea and the type of tea is defined by the processing ok it's not defined by the plant right so there are varieties which are better suited to white tea and green tea theoretically you could make any tea type out of any tea plant right yeah it's the processing that makes the difference right so we're going to go through these so the main difference in the types of tea is the oxidation level white tea so what you want to find in white tea is young picked it doesn't have to be just buds sometimes its buds and leaves yeah but the processing of it is very very simple what they have to do is pick the leaf and they wither it and dry it under the Sun and that means because it takes a few hours for that to happen it will oxidize slightly so that's about 10% oxidize something like that right yeah then you've got green tea and the idea of green tea is to fix the leaf to try and keep it as fresh and vibrant as possible yeah so what they do is immediately after picking they will heat the leaf up just like the spinach leaf yeah yeah so they'll heat the leaf up usually in pans if they're doing in China and in Japan they steam it which is why Japanese tea tastes different to Chinese tea because you get more of the nuttiness and more of the air force with the pan baked yeah versus the very fresh vibrant steaming so you know this case the process makes the difference so green tea is being heated up yep and that stops the oxidation process it's called the stay green process for obvious reasons or the fixing process and that means that they can then manipulate it you can see that this one here has been rolled up and is very very very fine you can see the period isn't really really fine it almost looks like it's it's powder but when you actually zoom in on it you can see it is really fine individual leaves right next up is yellow tea the most rare tea in terms of production levels hardly any yellow tea is produced scoffs yeah right really really interesting kind of fresh cut grass fresh cuts I know there's some along yeah it's also got some a little bit of raw nuts it's also got a little bit of kind of pears and apples but very very light so in order to make yellow tea they will produce it in a similar way to green tea but then after they've heated it up they'll put it in like a humid environment for about two days okay and what that does is it's it's like saying to the leaf alright we've stopped the enzyme oxidation we've killed that off yeah but now we're going to put you in a humid environment so you can change a bit so you want to change a bit so it kind of takes away some of the green astringent scene becomes smoother who comes around-- ER next up is you know tea the biggest variety of them all in essence the big thing with along tea is that it's semi oxidized so that means that you've got your greens which are kind of 0 to 5 percent oxidation yeah you got your whites which is about 10 percent oxidation something like that you've got your blacks which is kind of like anything about 85% and then you've got this massive window between 10% and 85% and that's a long tea so what they do to make this tea is they'll pick the leaf usually it's it's they use slightly larger leaves if you as you've seen with the with the recipe you did before slightly larger leaves and they will intentionally oxidize it and the way that they do that is by shaking the neath they'll either do that on a bamboo mat so they'll hand shake it or they'll put them in rollers and they kind of shake it and that just bruises the leaf it it starts to to cause a little bit of damage to the leaf and that releases the essential oils and the plant SAP and that reacts with the oxygen and oxidize so they're stimulating the oxidation process which is why you can see it's quite a lot darker so I don't have this is just my nose but I don't think that smells have hardly anywhere near as strong as the yellow tea but once you put water on there I find that a lot stronger than them yes see the key thing with judging quality of tea unfortunate is that the dryly there gives you apart from the visuals the smell of the dry leaf gives you very little indication of the quality you have to it has to be hit with hot water and when once it's hit with hot water then you can judge it and this is a big problem for tea sellers right because you go into a tea shops and you're like everyone wants to smell the tea and that's why sentient teas and artificially center teas have dominated the market right because everyone's going into these tea shops going well I can't smell anything here I'll buy that one which is a brand yeah exactly exactly I can't get it so when you hit it with hot water all the artificial fragrance goes and you're left with usually met very technical term for bad tea yeah so which one's the yorkshire tea and so technically York City is a black tea which leads me on to this one here so black tea is fully oxidized so they take the leaf and they roll it Felipe's now sometimes the most expensive stuff is actually hand rolled so I'll actually take leaf by leaf and they'll roll but most of the time it's done in small batches in kind of manual machines they just twist up and what you don't want to do is break the knee so you again you can see it's whole leaf gnarly I mean in the production process see that's got chocolate e times to it yeah absolutely dark chocolate notes on that research so that's the big difference between these five right yeah and I should say there's lots more right that's roasting there's a lot of people don't realize that after a tea is made it's usually sent to Roasters just like coffee yeah and they have their own parameters you get light roasted dark roast there's lots and lots to to keep diving into but that's the basics on those teas the sixth type of tea is like a world unto itself okay right it's post fermented tea okay so what they do is they pick the leaf and they usually pick it from a very specific plants that grow in relatively wild environments you need that kind of very ecosystem because what you're looking for is microorganisms that live on the leaf right okay we want bacteria you want good Fung you want like you know really kind of interesting ecosystem and then they'll heat the leaf up but not too hot they want to kill it off yeah and then they'll usually compress it into these cakes and then what happens is because this tea is technically still alive feel free to open it am i oh yes I know these are not there no yes Wow so the this tea is technically kind of still changing and it's reacting to the environment so the place that you store it is really really important so this is a 2016 this is nearly two years old so this is fermenting now then yeah okay because it's got a tobacco smell right exactly fresh roll tobacco yeah you get those kind of more plummy dried fruit notes to the tea this is this is the this is the so you have tea lovers and you have post fermented addict's right okay there are people that will only search for this kind of tea right because it is and it all depends on the age of the tea tree so this is 500 year old GU shoe when you have older tea trees what that means is you've got longer deeper roots right it's not competing for the same soil don't you goose shoe means ancient tea tree usually anything over about 150 to 200 years old can be considered goose ooh yeah and because it's got longer deeper roots yeah it's able to draw from soil that the other plants can't reach right so it's much much more mineral rich I'm really really mineral rich we try that one today we can try whatever you would like really yeah of course just the final the final thing is if you want right so producers so this is this is what we call raw yeah post fermented tea yeah so that's changing over time slowly over years and it will take about 20 years for it to get to this color right okay this is what they do is they they speed up that process so what they'll do is they'll take the leaf and they'll put it in a hot humid environment it's fermenting superfast it's like your computers or your curfews yeah yeah so that's gonna smell a lot more earthy a lot richer a lot doc yeah that is a you won't smell a soil yeah so you're smelling the tech while you're smelling those wild forests right so that's it so you've got your your white your green your yellow your along black and your post fermented - that's your crash course did you get all that because I think that was a brilliant way of explaining it especially to me I'm fascinated by this so there's so many important things about - you're so you got the flavors in there you brewing time you've got the the way it's broken down one of the essential things is as you a lot of you know I used to zip tap I'm part of their brand ambassador for the company if you like one of the things it does is it controls temperature which with tea is one of the most important things right absolutely one of the biggest mistakes that people make is they use boiling hot water on delicate teas and it's not about scolding the tea or scorching the to burning tea a lot of people talk about that it's all about extraction when you have really hot water extracts very quickly but the problem is then you've got less control because there are some notes in the leaf that you want a little bit but you don't want too much just like cooking right you don't want to over flood it with salt right so for example green tea has very high catechins we talked about that and those are really good for you for you for your health etc but they can have a bitter astringent note in some time and some astringent see in bitterness is a good thing you want that you don't want it to be totally flat right but if you use boiling hot water it's all going to come out in one go so you have no control right whereas if you use 80 degree water or even you can then control it you can brew it the right kind of length of time pour it and you will not get so much of the catechins so the way that I look at it the analogy that I like to make is the temperature is like EQ on a sound system right it's a it's your way of balancing it's balancing and that's why the brewing process is so fundamental you getting into the brewing process is so fundamental to enjoy tea do you want to go for something light or do you want to try going for something a little bit a bit darker let's go for a little bit of punch yeah I think you should try the oolong because a lot of people when they want when they kind of first get into tea they're they're trying the greens but they haven't had really experience with who knows hold on I love I've had it just with food so you know the cooking process I've used it with so yeah I've got to try that let's try this so this is a medium roasted ulong which means that you know it's been roasted and we're gonna do it in a guy one here so that's that's a guy right yes is the very basic but I love the primitive nature of just a bowl with a zero today we're gonna put some oolong in here I'm just gonna eyeball it but that's probably about five or six grams no one knows measurements on my channel yeah because I always just say a handful of you're gonna see how much this expands though it's really really interesting so some hot water so it's important as I said to make sure that you have the right temperature with along tea you want about 95 degree water it's a lot hotter so it's a lot hotter than your green teas as I said it's larger leaves right and so they have less catechins so you don't have to worry so much about the business you want to extract a nice strong flavour what you like to do what we like to do is rinse the tea yeah pour it on your tea pit if you've got one of those what is that it's just for fun and it changes color but it's its it they use it for kind of offerings sometimes you have kind of religious ceremony yes it's just the ceremony part of its company and then have a smell so you can smell wow this is strength so very different right you said that the dry tea didn't smell of too much now you can really smell it oh my getting on there assembly the difficulty this is what we always have to try and come up with what is the smell there's a real sweetness in there mmm it's almost like this is gonna sound really crazy you know pantry smell you get mmm you have a pantry with all your herbs and spices and flowers and mixtures it's almost that sort of smell so it's not really one yeah it's complex isn't it so this is a Taiwanese oolong right it's called amber GABA I thought it was and the reason why it's called amber gaba is because this is actually been put into a nitrogen chamber right right that's the next level so that's the next level exactly right and the nitrogen chamber point is that the leaf ninh freaks out a little bit and it naturally produces gaba gaba is a neurotransmitter it already exists in your body and it's like a brake on your nervous system so it's kind of calming relaxing it's got a chilled-out kind of feel to it this tea remember a lot of people drink tea just for the flavor but for those psychoactive effects so you can get lots of different effects like you got to be careful with that one what's psychedelic effects you can get very tea drink yeah especially with the old with the older tea tree stuff like that but you know she's fasting when it's fermenting away exactly so cheers Cheers cheers everybody oh it's a nice cuppa so you can see it's got that it's got a little bit of that astringent drawing it's got a little bit of sourness but it's also got sweetness has also got some caramel yeah yeah especially at the end after you swallow if you breathe out through your nose afterwards get that nice slightly burnt caramel kind of note to it it's toffee yeah exactly and you can see that this has literally just started right this is not even close to so 10 to 15 yeah yeah I mean 10 just lends me weight then isn't it sure would look tea for what you're getting for a hand produced product like this we need the level of artisanship yeah it's incredibly affordable look this has been fascinating for me hopefully you guys have enjoyed this one as well let me know if you want to see more of this style video thank you so much to come on the channel absolute pleasure check out Don's website and check out his YouTube channel but some fascinating videos that really going a lot more depth than this we're talking proper 30 minute long wrong no geek Oh interesting it's called a mighty go and check it out as a link in the description box down below it's takes you straight through to his website going a click Subscribe give him some love as well now following on from this we couldn't have all this tea without making a really interesting recipe so following on we're going to do a braised belly of pork Chinese style with some bok choy and rice so watch out for that and then we have got your cocktail which is a ruby storm a riff on the dark and stormy but with tea and that's going to be on Don's or next week okay so next Saturday check out I'll be posting Instagram for that as well and then finally I couldn't do a big bulky mane with not doing a dessert so I've come up with a matcha tea coconut sorbet I suppose with a chocolate crumb and a beautiful black forest glaze I'm going to check them out in a week's time thanks so much for watching comment down below if you enjoyed this video anyone see more like this I want to see you next week cheers then bye-bye see ya

Channel: Haste's Kitchen

Views: 73,837

Keywords: Food, tea, don mei, mei tea, hastes kitchen, tea making, brewing tea, tea ritual, fun vid, learning

Id: 3EZVEJG1M6g

Length: 18min 7sec (1087 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 09 2018