Week Six: Chinese New Year

I am becoming a British cliche for Chinese New Year week: I like tea. Originally, all tea was Chinese, it entered Europe via Portugal in the early mid 1500s, Britain in the mid 1600s and we really ran with it once we had it. It was a shame, then, that our supply of it was dependent upon the good humour of China; whilst the tea was imported to Britain via the East India Company, the tea was Chinese and only left China with agreement. It was paid for in opium, grown in the British colonies, and when the Chinese officials cracked down on opium it led to the Opium Wars (in which the ‘right’ to flood a country with drugs was brutally fought for) and the British realisation that we needed to be self sufficient in tea. There was a daring scheme to smuggle tea plants out of China and grow them within the British empire, in India. It was undertaken by a man called Robert Fortune, a Scottish botanist, who travelled China in disguise for several years, gathering samples and spiriting them away to India. It was largely a failure, at least from the perspective of its original aim, as most of the stolen tea samples failed to grow in India and anyway their importance was superseded by the discovery of a tea plant that already grew in the Assam region of India. Today, most of the teas we encounter in day to day life are Indian, but I return to my starting point: originally, all tea was Chinese, and I will also point out that Darjeeling tea - the champagne of teas - is one of the few that is grown in India using Chinese plants. 

Tea forms the basis of Chinese New Year week. 2024 is the year of the dragon, and in that honour I found a dragon fruit green and white tea (this specific one was chosen because it doesn’t include lychee; I love lychee but it’s the only food I’m actually allergic to, so I have to avoid it.) I re-blended it myself with more green tea (I chose this one because the plantation is close to the Mountain of the Nine Dragons) because I wanted the tea to be the star of the ice cream rather than the dragon fruit, and I’ve found fruit in teas can dull the tea itself - a bit like ice cream, my taste in tea is generally favoured towards single notes. So I used a third the dragon fruit tea and two thirds the green tea to make up my amount of tea. As for the ice cream base, both Jarrin and Jeanes have recipes for tea ice cream, Jarrin in a custard base and Jeanes in a cream base. I did consider making both or possibly the custard because up to now I’ve followed a cream-custard alternate pattern, but ultimately decided to stay with a simple cream base so as to not add more flavours to the tea. 

In spite of following Jeanes’s cream base, I used Jarrin’s amount of tea, simply because Jeanes’s used very confusing terms. He called for ‘three parts of a cup’ of tea … which makes no sense. A part isn’t in itself a measurement, it’s a ratio; ‘two parts milk to one part cream’ makes sense, it’s use twice as much milk as cream. Jarrin said ‘a cup’ which is still imprecise but not as bad. A cup has never commonly been used in British recipes, especially for dry ingredients - we favoured weights - but it does have a definition of 10 imperial fluid ounces. There is a measurement called a gill which is 5 imperial fluid ounces, and this does appear in some recipes by the Gunter’s confectioners. So I’m thinking of a cup of tea as being 2 gills of tea. It’s not easy to measure a dry ingredient in a unit intended for liquid measurement, but I think I did ok.

Ingredients 

I made the amount that ‘a cup of green tea’ and ‘a pint of cream’ led to but as always, the percentages are here for scaling. It’s quite tricky to give percentages for the weight of tea leaves, but I’ve tried to make it as simple as possible. 

52.59g single (19% butterfat) cream (4.83%)

525.36g whipping (39% butterfat) cream (48.29%)

224.55g caster sugar (20.64%)

285.43g tea water (26.24%)

So what is tea water? It’s what you get from ‘a cup of tea’ and ‘enough water to cover the leaves’; in my case a total of 73.93g of tea leaves and more-or-less-exactly an Imperial pint of below-boiling water (green tea shouldn’t be made with boiling water, a good guide is when the water is just starting to visibly move in the kettle) made 285.43g of tea water, so I’d say aim for about 30% of your total desired amount of tea water in tea leaves, to leave some margin for error. This means you can either decide on your desired total amount of mixture first and calculate your amount of tea leaves by multiplying the weight of tea water by 0.3, or you can make your tea water first using whatever amount of tea leaves you have/want, then use the following calculation to work out how much mixture you can make:

(Weight of tea water / 26.24) * 100

I used

24.64g dragon fruit tea (33.33% amount of tea leaves needed)

49.29g green tea (66.67% amount of tea leaves needed)

This is very versatile to whatever tea you’re using and your taste preferences, but if you want to taste the tea I’d keep to a third flavoured tea or less. 

Method

I use a stand mixer with balloon whisk, you can use a handheld electric whisk or whisk manually.

1. Prepare tea water by pouring below-boiling water over tea leaves until water can just about be seen on the top; cover the container or evaporation will lead to unpredictable amounts.


2. Leave it to brew for fifteen minutes. Don’t crush the leaves, just let them diffuse.

3. Weigh the creams into a mixing bowl, and once it’s ready add the tea water. 

4. Slowly whisk the creams and tea water together, whilst adding the sugar little by little. 

5. Once the sugar is all added, continue to whisk slowly for approximately half a minute.

6. Place the mixture into the fridge and leave it to chill for at least four hours, preferably overnight.

7. Just prior to churning, rewhisk the mixture; you may also need to sieve it after whisking (see below.)

8. Churn according to your ice cream machine’s instructions, stopping when the ice cream resembles soft serve.

9. Place in a container, then leave it to harden in the freezer for several hours, preferably overnight.

This ice cream is delicious. There’s just enough of the tea flavour coming through, although I think if I were remaking it I’d experiment with a 1:3 or even 1:4 ratio of flavoured tea to ‘plain’ tea, rather than the 1:2 used here. It has quite a tight, astringent mouthfeel, which makes sense given how much tannic acid is in this recipe; if you drink tea without milk (and a lot of teas should not have milk, although that’s a digression I won’t take here…) then you’ll know the feeling I’m talking about. Not unpleasant, just be aware to expect it. It’s this tannic acid that was the answer to a question I had about this ice cream, namely why did the mixture foam so much? That’s why I had to sieve it before churning it, to get rid of the foam. Turns out it’s the presence of the acid affecting the proteins in the ice cream mixture; proteins foam because they unravel, and this is exaggerated in the presence of acid. (The same thing probably explains why the citrus ice creams never really made it to soft serve texture, they resembled whipped cream: citric acid.) This all made me wonder how foamy the custard based tea ice cream from Jarrin might have been, although that’s a question I’ll probably never answer.