So, you drink loose leaf tea?
Excellent.
Not for you that rubbish that comes in bags. You prefer quality, and taste.
I fully support you in this.
And one thing more we might agree on, is that the ‘convenience’ argument is pretty limp, isn’t it?
“Oh, a teabag is soooo much easier than using an infuser or a teapot or a tea tumbler”.
Unfortunately, no matter how many times this is repeated, it’s still going to make the person saying it either a liar or stupid, and hey, if you see someone with a teabag in their hand, could be they are shooting for both. It makes me even madder when it is in a commercial setting – imagine serving a teabag in a café! What’s wrong with these people?
Anyone who has read a handful or more of my posts would probably have realised have even less regard for two worse products – that damnable excrement called “instant coffee” and that foul substance known as “creamer”.
So if you are a regular reader here on Tea Trade, you are probably a no-teabags, no instant crap, not so-called creamer type anyway.
And completely entitled to feel pretty smug – I know I do.
Or are you entitled? Maybe you are letting the side down in other ways.
Surely there are other examples where the mere hoi polloi use “convenient”, artificially produced, pre-packaged, plastic, chemical filled, bad-taste, no-taste substitutes for other actual foods.
So here is a short list of other products that I don’t believe anybody who drinks loose leaf tea can use with a clear conscience.
Ready Made Bread Crumbs. The brand of these at my local supermarket has FIFTY-SEVEN ingredients. And yet, we all know that bread is water, flour and yeast, a little salt, a little sugar. And the funny thing is, you buy some bread – or bake some- blitz it in a food processor, and voila – breadcrumbs! Buying pre-made breadcrumbs removes all the street cred that you won by knowing a Sourenee Darjeeling from a Daintree Black by scent alone.
Gravy – Yes, some people ACTUALLY BUY PRE-MADE GRAVY. This is an ABOMINATION before <insert your deity here>. What sort of idiot cannot blend stock and flour to make gravy? A teabag carrying one, I’ll bet, so if you’ve ever bought pre-made gravy, I bet I know what you’re hiding being that Keemun Mao Feng – a box of bloody Lipton’s Yellow Label. And don’t be fooled by the ‘gateway drug” – powdered gravy – it’s merely a lesser circle of hell. If I had my way, both of these products would be banned, and force fed to the manufacturers until they die. Appallingly, using these products leads to less use of tea, as explained later.
Custard – Custard is basically sweet gravy with an egg in it. Again, pre-made custard is artificial and awful. It includes way too much sugar to fool you into thinking you want it. Resist the urge! And like gravy, there is a deceitful halfway house here as well – custard powder – for those who don’t know how to crack an egg, get the milk out of the carton and spoon out some cornflour/cornstarch/tapioca starch etc.
Seriously, if you can tie your own shoes or count to twenty-one without taking off your trousers, you can – and should – make your own custard.
Stock – I must say, that there are a few good liquid stocks out there. If you REALLY MUST, buy the best one on the shelf if you are so low on time you cannot make one properly. But how hard is it to make a stock? First you pick the ingredient you are making the stock of, then you pick the tea. Brew the tea, and also add a mildly insane amount of salt.
What tea, I hear you say? I use tea in all my stocks. I use Pai Mu Tan to make a chicken stock, I’ve used Daintree, Assams, a Yunnan Golden Tips for beef, and I’ve even used a nice chai in a vegetable stock. Once I made a fruit stock – from fruit I had ‘liberated ‘ from the neighbourhood plus Gunpowder Green tea and mint to make a sensational gravy for pork. Boil in all together and it’s done. Even a child could do it, though preferably a fireproof child with good culinary skills and the phone number of the fire brigade handy.
And of course, once you’ve made a stock, you can return to the point a few paragraphs back and make your gravy.
I understand that people are going to say they are ‘time poor’. That is because (a) we all love buzzwords (b) people whine all the damn time and (c) all right, we actually are.
So, if you don’t want to make your own ice cream or bread or kulfi or Christmas pudding because you don’t have the 1, 1.5, 2 and 5 hours respectively it takes, well I get that. But to save five minutes by serving your family and/or your loved ones slop from a long-life carton? A travesty.
So sort that pantry out and throw out that errant nonsense. You are a loose-leaf tea drinker. You have pride.
Your pride shouldn’t begin and end with your teapot.
Oh dear, I score minus points on some things here – I confess to using gravy packets as a base. I don’t often use bread crumbs because I don’t like cooking with foods that soak up oil. However, when I do, I pick them from a box. Your idea sounds good though. Custard is not a big issue here in the US, not made much. I make my own for trifle. Stock – how about a recipe? Every cook book I’ve seen seems to say it takes a very long time and has ingredients I don’t always have on hand. Like a bone or two. I pride myself on turning the stock into something amazing once I’ve finished with it. I used organic low sodium ready-made stock to make a roast carrot soup yesterday.
I do bake my own bread frequently, all our cakes from scratch and I don’t buy ready-to-eat meals. You win some points, you loose some, right?
I only use stock when I brine my turkey … I use 2 quarts of vegetable stock that I confess I do not make myself because it is more convenient to buy it (and for the sake of doing a brine, I feel it’s OK to go with the ease of vegetable stock, although I’m sure it would be better to make my own), BUT… as of last year, I’ve started to also use TEA in my brines as well. Last year, I made my brine with 2 quarts of vegetable stock and 2 quarts of Oolong tea. This year, I’m going to go with 2 quarts of vegetable stock, 1 quart of Oolong and 1 quart of Lapsang Souchong.
You know you are talking about things that most people don’t have in their own countries? But I guess I can extrapolate…
I have mentioned many times before I enjoy cooking, although I am not a baker. I have made homemade stock and included tea, delicious.
My gravy always includes homemade stock ingredient.
I attempted once to make a Bread Pudding dessert with two of the ingredients you mentioned above, bread crumbs (unseasoned) and custard. For the bread crumbs I obtained the finest sweet bread, after eating a portion as is, the rest was left to harden for this dish. I also went out and purchased ingredients for the custard, spices and fruit. What a disaster! It reaffirmed I am a better cook than baker. So unfortunately when it comes to both of those I will have to wait until I can enjoy your culinary renditions.
You make cooking sound so simple. As a man who has screwed up EasyMac twice, I can attest that – to some of us, anyway – it is not. Gravy is like intermediate school to me.
OMG!, as they say. I had to look up “EasyMac” on the internet. I don’t want to overstate this, but it is nothing less than THE END OF CIVILSATION AS WE KNOW IT.
Why does that product even exist? Boil water, add macaroni. Drain it when it is ready, add some cheese. Add a sprinkle of pepper if it’s not too much trouble.
It’s not that different to tea.
Just to clarify, the big difference with tea is that when cooking macaroni you KEEP the solid matter and THROW AWAY the liquid, which is the opposite of making tea.