Flavor Boulevard

Tag: tea

  • Matcha and kabocha mochi

      Another pairing of Japanese tea and Japanese snack. A bowl of matcha is supposed to suffice your daily vegetable need because you’re actually consuming the leaves themselves, in powder form.


      Matcha is served in a bowl. Mix water (205 F) with the matcha powder using a whisk, whose look reminds me of a yard broom in Vietnam, and there is no steeping time to watch out for, which I like. The whisk makes the tea foam up. The lady sitting next to me said that the foam turns her off visually, but actually the foam adds an interesting dimension to the tea. For one, it abates the seaweed taste because the foam is a cushion layer between the tea and the palate, preventing the palate to fully experience the tea. Secondly, together with the powder, it enhances the nuttiness of the tea. Near the end of the bowl, when there is more powder, the tea is extra nutty, akin to mungbean milk.


      Unfortunately, this nuttiness does not enhance the nuttiness of the kabocha mochi but competes with it. The mochi this time has a hojicha-flavored coat and a filling of cinnamon, walnut and kabocha (a kind of winter squash, also known as the Japanese pumpkin). Contrary to my hesitance, the cinnamon was too faint to be detected (no, I don’t like cinnamon), and the mochi is mild overall. It is not too sweet.


      Instead of being steamed-dried like other Japanese teas, hojicha is roasted in porcelain over charcoal, so the green tea becomes much milder than sencha. The kabocha is similar to a plain, grainy, white sweet potato in both taste and texture. (The red mushy sweet potato is sweeter than the white kind.) Because both the tea and the snack are grainy, matcha-kabocha mochi is not a good match together, although I really like them both separately.

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    • Sencha and Mochi


        Sencha in yunomi, a typical Japanese thick, tall teacup, whose name I’ve yet to find out, accompanied by a matcha mochi, whose fillings include: satsuma sweet potato, red bean paste, orange juice and walnuts. (Thanks Masaaki for telling me the name of the cup in Japanese.)

        The mochi, handmade and delivered by a mochi lady every week to Teance, is refreshing both in look and in taste. The green tea flavored chewy coat is cool and light. The filling, although dominated by red bean, is not too sweet. I opted for one with less nuts because I didn’t think that I would want such contrast in texture. The mochi lady is a small, timid Asian lady, who smiled so happily when I described her mochi as “refreshing”, and who showed me that I should dip my fork into tea or water before cutting the mochi so that it would not be sticky. Yes, it worked, the fork went straight through with such ease. Now it makes sense why we can chew without the mochi sticking to the teeth.

        This is my second time having sencha, if we don’t count the time I had genmaicha at Ippuku (genmaicha is lower-grade sencha with roasted rice), and the seaweed taste of sencha has grown on me. However, I am not convinced that the sencha is a good match for the mochi. Both are good by themselves, but I think the sencha should be an entree tea, not a dessert tea. Its seaweed taste would enhance something savory. A mochi would fare much better with a light, floral tea that isn’t too dry, like Yellow Gold, Royal Courtesan, or Darjeeling First Flush.

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      • The new kid in the block


          Introducing a new site I’m working on: Tea and Mai. 🙂

          Now that I’m regularly attending a tea class and seriously inspired to learn about tea, I figure that I should write down what I learn instead of trying to memorize everything in vain. Consider it also my little contribution to the environment by going paperless. 😉 Why make a new site? Because I don’t want to turn Flavor Boulevard into chock-fulls of yellow-tinted drinks. On relevant occasions there will be posts shared on both sites though, such as this one in the picture above: a post on a few Blooming Teas.

        • Four-minute Vienamese tea talk, in Korean

            … with English subtitles. It’s no secret that I’ve been into tea recently, and the interest is going to last for a while. Just in time for my mini-presentation in the Korean class, the topic was open, and I chose tea. Vietnamese tea, to be precise. Neither my Korean is good enough nor my tea knowledge is broad enough to give a more detailed slideshow, but it’s a start. Both will come, in time. 🙂

            The title of the slideshow is “Vietnamese Tea”. I have no idea how bad my Korean pronunciation is, so I’ll just pretend that I don’t sound all *that* bad. 😉 I can understand myself, with the subtitles. 😉

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          • Two hours with Korean tea ceremony


              Between 4 and 6 PM today was the most interesting 2 hours I’ve had this week, and also the most effortless educational experience I’ve had in a long time. That’s how the Korean tea ceremony is meant to be, as I’ve learned: formal but relaxing, and ceremonious but natural.  The rules are rather simple to get acquainted to, the movements make sense, and just watching made my mind feel nothing but calmly pleasant. The kind of pleasant feeling one would get gazing off into space alone, on a grassy hillside, on a cloudy day.

              Now for the logistics. Inje University‘s Traditional Korean Tea Society (TKTS) gave a 2-hour presentation at Berkeley today as part of the “Dew of Wisdom” tour, Stanford and California State University got their tea before us. During the first 40 minutes, the students of TKTS demonstrated two types of tea ceremonies, both accompanied by the slow, deep, hardy rhythm of a 6-string zither 거문고 (geomungo).


              The first type, 들차회 (deulchahue), is to be enjoyed with friends and relatives outdoor during spring and autumn. The setting is lighthearted, the purpose is to relax and to appreciate nature, the gathering comprises both men and women, and both hands are used during the preparation, serving, and tasting of tea.

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            • Black tea rice


              Something occurred to me within the last month: I probably should learn to pair drinks with food, but I hardly drink anything beside water and soymilk. Now I would *love* to learn about the different kinds of water, but living in the city makes it a bit difficult, and soymilk can’t be paired with everything like wine (yet). Coffee, alcoholic beverage, juice? Didn’t quite catch on. So what does that leave me? Tea. A quest takes form: Mai is going to learn tea.

              And Mai will cook with tea, too. Because boiling water to drink tea takes some work, I might as well make it worth a meal. How much influence the ochazuke at Mifune had on me, I’m not sure, but during the two minutes of wringling my brain out for some easy way to use tea in food, the first thing that came to mind was cooking rice with tea. Now that’s the difference between my tea rice and the ochazuke: my tea rice is rice cooked with tea, and the ochazuke is rice eaten with tea, like a soup.

              As with everything, there’s the easy way and the hard way to make tea rice.
              The hard way: use loose leaf tea
              – Pros: the tea quality (fragrance, taste, intensity)
              – Cons:
              —— If make tea first, then use tea instead of water to cook rice: extra step of cooking = time cost
              —— If put tea leaves and rice altogether and cook: you’d have to either eat the tea leaves with the rice (the textures don’t match), or pick it out by hand. This obstacle can be remedied with a small mesh bag, though, if I had one.
              The easy way: use tea bags. The pros and cons are just the opposite of the hard way.

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