Saturday, January 17, 2009

notes about tea & more




Okay my crock-pot love is waning because the breakfast casserole was crappy. It was overcooked, and just not good. Made more bread pudding & that was excellent again!
So I took some photos and have some information to give out about tea in general & our tea in particular.
Did a little photo shoot of tea bags, one regular and two specialty tea bags. So first off let me say if you are using a regular tea bag, open one up and see what is inside. It is probably dust and small pieces of tea, called fannings. It will make a strong cup of tea with flavor, but will not take a second steeping to save it's life. The tea in the tea bag looked similar to ground pepper when we opened the bag up. If you are spending 25 cents for a tea bag and a dollar for a pot of specialty tea it seems that the tea bag is cheaper. You need to factor in the steeps you get, if you get 4 steeps out of the specialty tea, you have the same price value. You also get 4 steeps that especially with oolongs or pearls, can actually change and get better with multiple steeps. They say the 2nd steep on an oolong is always better, because the first steep only partly opens up the leaf.
The specialty tea bags are better, you can re-steep, but some of the twisted types of teas, like ooloongs just don't have enough room in the bag to open up fully. That is one of the reasons I don't like teabags or balls. The best way to get the most out of your tea is to put it in a pot loose to interact fully with the water. Then you can re-steep the tea as many times as you like, basically till you get something that doesn't satisfy you, then you start fresh with new tea leaves.
Okay I am new to this & don't know how to easily change the order of the photos, so they should be looked at from the bottom up.

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