This day, 25 August, 2004, the 10th Conference of Diplomatic Envoys to Foreign Countries was held in Beijing, with 222 ambassadors, consul generals and representatives to international...
Chinese food was the ultimate treat for me. You may sneer at those British-Cantonese restaurant dishes which so excited me: spare ribs, crispy noodles, crispy beef with carrots, etc. I am unrepentant. In our family, we each ordered one dish. Mine was always Lemon Chicken. Sure, the take-away version usually comes in a gloopy sauce with the same lemon-ness as “lemon-fresh” bathroom cleaner. But fresh lemon (word order is important here) is always used in the best restaurants. And, thanks to BritishChinese food evangelist Ken Hom, it’s a dish...
Strainer readers may recall, about 3 years ago, reading about a new concept in tea preparation. It was called InWE Tea (因味茶). It exerted on the tea leaf high pressure as well as high heat, much like brewing an espresso. I was excited.
Maybe I was wrong to be too excited. While most of the company’s tea bars do still exist, my prediction that we would all start fracking our tea leaves has been unfulfilled; tea capsule machines have not become mainstream.
Except that aluminium tea capsules are appearing. Maybe you’ve...
Let’s say that it halves with each cycle. Each consecutive steeping produces half the flavour of the last. With each pouring, the drink more closely resembles water. Eventually, water is all that this drink will have become. The exponential decay curve. Pretty normal.
In fact, this is rather a pessimistic outlook for green tea. There’s drop off, but each infusion surely matches more than 70 percent of the previous infusion. And the observation of today’s Strainer is that, although the taste profile of each infusion worsens as well as the...
Take a trip to a tea plantation. Nanjing is surrounded by mountains where tea grows. You’ll bump into one soon enough if your eyes are open to it. If you already know one, go to that one.
Steal a handful of leaves. Not many. Just a handful. The farmer won’t see you. Don’t worry.
If he does, just blame me.
Now, if you put those leaves into your mouth, they will taste like “leaves”. And that’s pretty much all they will taste of. Infuse them in hot water and the liquor will...
