Food & Fragrance: 176 posts

Andy shares his favorite summer teas in today’s perfume & taste edition.

My love of tea is perennial—but when the weather turns steamy, drinking a piping hot cup of tea just seems like punishment. So, instead of fighting against the weather, I like to use warm days as an excuse to make loads of iced tea. It could be purely my imagination, but a tall glass of iced tea on a hot day seems immediately more refreshing than just plain ice water, and without a doubt is more delicious.

Summer is also a great time to bring out all of your favorite teas and try them iced—sometimes, the most unexpected teas can taste markedly different (and utterly delicious) when chilled. Of course, summer isn’t always about beating the heat—cool mornings and air conditioning can leave me downright chilly, so I’ve compiled a list of some teas below that taste great whether steaming hot or ice cold.

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Andy explores toasted notes and green tea.

When I cook, I am always amazed at how some of the most harmonious flavor combinations arise by fusing seemingly incompatible ingredients. Strawberries and balsamic vinegar, blue cheese and honey, mangoes and cayenne pepper—all of these flavorful groupings work surprisingly well together. In perfumery, classical genres like chypre and fougère juxtapose fresh notes of citrus or herbs with rich woods, moss, and amber to create an exciting fragrant impression. Even in tea, where olfactory and gustatory pleasures meet, harmonious contrasts make for some of the most interesting and popular teas. Such is the case with Genmaicha, a Japanese green tea that blends the savory aroma of toasted brown rice with the freshness and delicacy of Sencha.

When you first open up a package of Genmaicha, the incredible fragrance immediately hits you. The scent of Genmaicha combines grassy sweetness with toasty richness, a cue to the exquisite flavor of the tea, as well as the unique ingredients. Unlike most teas, Genmaicha consists of a steamed green tea (usually Sencha, an early harvest green tea, or Bancha, a lower grade, later harvest tea) combined with kernels of toasted brown rice. Oftentimes, some of these kernels pop during roasting, resulting in pieces that look like popcorn mixed into your tea.

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As a kid I loved munching on unripe plums and apricots that I had picked from the low hanging branches in our garden. This activity was not at all allowed, but as anyone knows, forbidden fruit tastes the sweetest, and I continued to pillage our trees. Imagine my surprise and delight upon discovering many years later that in the Middle East, unripe plums are a special seasonal treat. Since they’re starting to become more available at the grocery stores and farmers’ markets, I can get my fill without threatening my grandmother’s plum harvest.

Called erik in Turkish (and sometimes marked as such at the stores), unripe green plums are in season April through June. They taste intensely tart. Crunchy and hard, they are for lovers of all things sour and mouth-puckering.  They are usually eaten with a pinch of salt, which brings out the delicate sweetness, and they have a faint floral taste. The plums are small, ranging from the size of hazelnuts to large cherries, and if left to ripen on the tree, they turn golden and syrupy sweet.

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Andy describes how seasonal blossoms can be captured in sugar.

If you love spring as much as I do, you may agree that it always seems to come and go quicker than it should. One week, I was strolling under pink clouds of cherry blossoms, and the next, the petals had all floated away from the branches. I didn’t have time to be dismayed though, when richly perfumed purple lilacs had begun to steal the show. The season always seems to play out like a vaudeville show of flowers, with one beautiful act following the next.

A few weeks ago Victoria wrote about salting cherry blossoms, but you can also use sugar to capture the delicate flavors of spring. If you have never tried candying flowers before, it is extremely easy, and after you’ve done it once, you will find the task an irresistible way to extend the season of flowers like jasmine, lilac, rose and honeysuckle, to name a few. This spring, for instance, I found myself longing to preserve the beauty of sweetly scented violets, which are common in my area in the springtime. And since I had so many, I decided to candy them and make some perfumed syrup. My instructions below call for violets, but use whatever favorite edible flowers you can find, from pansies to roses.

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Cherry blooming season is nearing its end in Japan, but our trees are just now bursting into bloom. “The cure for/This raucous world…/Late cherry blossoms,” wrote the great Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa, and as I walk to the subway each morning, I notice how the pink froth lights up the austere grey of the streets of Brussels. I take longer routes so that I can see more cherry trees and sometimes I take my lunch to the park where I experience my private hanami, flower viewing. Then I find stray petals tangled in my hair and clinging to my coat–reminders of our very late spring.

Don’t believe the perfumes named Cherry Blossom–real flowers smell nothing like the cherries we associate with cough syrup or flavored candy. They have a fresh, green scent, with an earthy rose accent. It’s as delicate as the pink confetti of cherry petals. Given the love the Japanese have for sakura, cherry blossom, it’s not surprising that during the spring season you also find all sorts of cherry blossom flavored delights, including soft drinks, chocolate, pastries, ice-cream and candy. Pierre Hermé, the renowned French pastry chef, even offers cherry blossom flavored macarons at his boutiques in Tokyo.

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