The Tea Recipe Book – Nicole Wilson
Today I’m reviewing The Tea Recipe Book by Nicole Wilson. Nicole Wilson is the tea genius behind teaformeplease.com, a blog I’ve enthusiastically followed for some time now. It won Best Tea Blog at the 2018 World Tea Awards, you know. (The very fact that there is a Best Tea Blog award blows my mind, I can tell you.)
Being a fan of Nicole Wilson’s tea appreciation talents, I was keen to get my hands on a copy. It’s a great book. This is primarily a recipe book although there is a handy ‘Tea and Brewing Basics’ section to start you off on your tea journey.
You can tell that this is a book written by an American writer for a predominantly American audience. Like the handy explanation that ‘High Tea’ is not the same thing as afternoon tea. (Americans do seem particularly prone to muddling those two up.)
It also contains a quite lengthy explanation of what an electric kettle is and where it fits into the tea-making process. The fact that not all Americans have electric kettles is a baffling thing to a Brit. Honestly for most Brits, if you had to furnish a house from scratch, the electric kettle is probably the first thing you’d buy. Possibly second after buying a mattress, but you’d still make sure you had a kettle, mug and some tea bags for the morning before you went to sleep that night.
But, as I’ve said, most of the book consists of tea recipes. It was only when I started perusing the chapters (which include Iced Teas, Tea Lattes and Boba Teas) that it occurred to me that this book isn’t really aimed at me. Nicole Wilson has come up with a lot of weird and wonderful things to do with tea leaves.
There’s an awful lot of things I don’t like in here. I appreciate you can’t actually have a recipe book where the only instructions are ‘pour hot water on some tea’. But I don’t really do cold milky herbal things pretending to be tea. I prefer my tea hot with a splash of milk and I want it decidedly unadorned with starchy tapioca balls.
See, I thought I was all open-minded and adventurous when it comes to tea. Turns out I’m quite vanilla.
Undaunted, however, I bookmarked some tea recipes, more-or-less followed the instructions. I made Shaken Black Tea with Raspberry Preserves, Spiced Orange Black Tea, Coconut Milk Oolong with Chia Seeds, White Tea with Lavender and Sage, and Chocolate Chai. Read on to discover how they turned out.
Shaken Black Tea with Raspberry Preserves
The first recipe I tried was one inspired by Russian tea, traditionally drunk with jam rather than with sugar. The main recipe is for iced tea, but Nicole Wilson includes a hot alternative at the bottom of the page.
I went for the hot version because I prefer hot tea. Also, it had the advantage of omitting half the stages in the tea preparation so all I needed to do to follow the recipe was make some tea and put jam in it.
I used Sainsbury’s Tastes The Difference Ceylon and seedless raspberry jam. The first problem I encountered was that jam doesn’t actually dissolve in hot water. I bashed it around with a teaspoon but there was still an awful lot of jam sitting at the bottom of the cup.
The second problem was that it didn’t taste very nice. It somehow tasted less sweet than tea with no jam in it at all. I added another teaspoon of jam. This weirdly made the whole thing taste medicinal.
My disappointing results are almost certainly down to the quality of ingredients I used. If I had made this tea with fresh raspberries, fancy preserves and a fruity black tea from China’s Fujian Province like I was supposed to, then I’m sure my taste experience would have been different.
I have learned an important lesson about sticking to the script.
Spiced Orange Black Tea
You know that important lesson I learned about sticking with the script about five minutes ago? Yeah, I don’t think that’s actually going to happen here. Partly because I’m trying to make these recipes from stuff I already have in the kitchen, but mostly because I’m quite lazy.
The recipe for Spiced Orange Black Tea calls for orange syrup, which one makes by heating orange juice and sugar together in a saucepan over the hob. “Am I going to make an orange syrup?” I asked myself. “It doesn’t sound like something I’d do.” Reader, I didn’t make an orange syrup.
I did stick to the rest of the recipe though and combined Ceylon tea, star anise, cinnamon and orange slices. The only deviation was substituting ground cinnamon for cinnamon sticks, because really who has cinnamon sticks lurking around the place outside of Christmas?
Following disappointing results with Sainsbury’s Ceylon last time, I used a much more satisfactory Ceylon tea from Two Spoons.
I brewed the tea and spices in a teapot and – seeing as I wasn’t going to make an orange syrup – I lobbed some orange slices into the pot for good measure.
The resulting brew was very spicy and really rather lovely. I don’t know if I’ve ever had star anise in a tea before, but it really sets off the orange flavours very nicely and gave the whole thing a punchy, no-holds-barred kick. I did put quite a lot in, mind you.
I tried it without sugar first of all but then decided – in further deference to the omitted syrup – to try it with a teaspoon of sugar. And, I’m sure this would come as no surprise to Ms Wilson but it was even nicer that way.
After a lacklustre start, my second recipe attempt gets a decided thumbs up.
Coconut Milk Oolong with Chia Seeds
In this recipe, Nicole Wilson describes chia seeds as being a bit like boba. I’m not a big fan of boba. I find that starchy balls of tapioca clumped at the bottom of my drink do nothing for me. Nevertheless, I was keen to try this one. Largely because I have an open packet of chia seeds in my cupboard, and I’ve yet to find anything palatable to do with them.
This recipe uses chia seeds, milk oolong tea and coconut milk. Milk oolong is more properly known as Jin Xuan, it has a naturally sweet milky taste and is grown in Taiwan. Sadly, I didn’t have any milk oolong about the place. I did, however, have some Dong Ding oolong from Comins tea. It’s not the same but it is at least an oolong from Taiwan. So I figured it would have to do.
(This was the first time I tried Dong Ding oolong. I tried a cup before I started mucking about with it and it was very nice indeed.)
I also didn’t have any coconut milk, so I used creamed coconut instead. The flavours of coconut and oolong work really well together. Sure, using creamed coconut made it look a bit greasy, but really once I’d added the chia seeds, that was the least of my problems.
As instructed, I soaked the chia seeds in water first. They soaked up the water and expanded into a speckly gelatinous mass. Adding the chia gunk to my tea resulted in a green flecked drink that looked a bit like blitzed kiwi fruits and tasted – well it tasted both slimy and crunchy. I’ve discovered I don’t like seeds in my tea. And I really, really don’t like it when those seeds have the look and texture of freshly hatched frogspawn.
Oolong and coconut is a combination I would like to try again as long as I can try it far, far away from any chia seed gunk. The chia seeds have yet to find their true purpose and will be returned to the cupboard. Where most likely they will stay until their expiration date when I will guiltily chuck them away.
White Tea with Lavender and Sage
This recipe requires white tea, sage sprigs and lavender, and – in what I appreciate is a recurring theme in these recipe reviews – I didn’t have all the necessary ingredients to hand and had to improvise a bit.
I was sorted for white tea – I had some very nice Satemwa Zomba Pearls from Curious Tea. And I had fresh sage in abundance growing in the garden. But I didn’t have any lavender. I did have an exceptionally lavender-y Lavender Earl Grey from Chai Wallah Margate though, so I decided to use that instead.
The result was a very lovely flowery, sagey concoction that I enjoyed far more than I thought I would. I was a little dubious about adding a herb as savoury as sage to a cup of tea but it worked very well.
I appreciate that using a lavender-based tea rather than actual lavender meant that I had some black tea and bergamot that wasn’t supposed to be there in the mix, but I think the white tea and sage made it feel very welcome.
This tea got me pondering. I may not have lavender in the garden but I do have an awful lot of rosemary and now I want to find out what a white tea, rosemary and sage blend would taste like. I feel like Nicole Wilson would approve of this train of thought. She has opened my eyes to the pleasures of bunging a bunch of stuff into my brew.
Chocolate Chai
This is the last of my Tea Recipe Book recipe attempts for now and, as you have no doubt come to expect by now, I went a bit ‘off-menu’ with the prescribed ingredients list.
Chocolate Chai should contain Assam tea, whole cardamom pods, black peppercorns, cacao nibs, dried ginger root and a cinnamon stick. And of that lot, I could successfully tick off three – a nice Assam from Chai Wallah Margate, peppercorns and cacao nibs. Which just left me to source some ‘close enough’ spices from the spice rack. I used ground mixed spice and ground ginger. I also added some nutmeg and cloves because I wanted some non-ground spices even if they weren’t on the original list.
(I even considered putting some juniper berries in for the same reason but I decided that was going a step too far. Although, I reckon that might be potential for an Earl Grey and juniper combo. I could try it as an alcohol-free alternative to the gin-infused Earl Grey Tea and Tonic in the “Cocktails and Mocktails” section of the book.)
Although my spice selection might have been a little random, it all worked out very well and I got a very pleasing hot, spicy, chocolatey chai out of it. In fact, I would go as far as to say that cloves should feature in more spicy chai blends. I reckon it adds a bit of pizzazz.
There may – on balance – have been a bit too much of a spicy kick to the tea. I was pretty generous with the spice amounts. Nicole Wilson, of course, gives precise measurements in her tea recipes whereas I was chucking stuff into the teapot with frivolous abandon. I like my spices spicy though. I’m hardcore.
Conclusion
I had mixed success with the recipes in Nicole Wilson’s Tea Recipe Book. (Slimy chia seed gunk was an episode of my life that I wouldn’t want to relive.) That said, given that three out of the five teas I made were nice, I’m counting it as a win.
I would have counted it as a win anyway because I had an awful lot of fun doing it. Admittedly, not once in my quest, did I actually stick to Ms Wilson’s original recipe, but it certainly inspired me to try a bunch of new things that I wouldn’t have previously put together. And that’s what recipe books are all about really.
It’s a great book. I love the very informative Brewing Basics section and there’s a whole chapter on biscuit and cake recipes that I haven’t even mentioned. I would have liked it if there had been more photos alongside the recipes. It would have been handy to have seen what the finished product was actually supposed to look like. I assume that this is a budgeting issue that will no doubt be rectified once this book becomes a bestseller and hits the top of the book charts. And the photos that were included were very, very pretty.
Nicole Wilson’s The Tea Recipe Book is beautiful, practical and inspiring. It’s a very welcome addition to my ever-growing tea book collection.
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