Teapigs – Rooibos Crème Caramel
Teapigs’ Rooibos Crème Caramel is delightful rooibos tea doing what rooibos does best – hanging out with puddingy flavours and pretending to be something off of the dessert trolley.
The caramel flavours work beautifully here because rooibos loves this sort of thing. It’s in its element. The ingredients consist of rooibos, caramel pieces and natural flavours.
It is worth noting – if you are mindful of such things – that this tea is not suitable for vegans. The caramel pieces contain condensed milk and butter.
I bring it up because non-plant-based ingredients have been a recurring theme over several of my tea reviews in the last couple of weeks. The Boba teas I reviewed recently were of course full of milk powder, T2’s Bread & Butter Pudding had its own condensed milk caramel pieces and T2’s Terrific Toffee had egg in its nougat pieces.
This is no coincidence. I have been using up all the teas in my tea stash with dairy and egg in them because from tomorrow (drumroll please) The Tea Fancier is going vegan.
Yup, we will be eschewing all animal-based products here at Tea Fancier Towers. (Well, I say “we”. Two-thirds of the Tea Fancier Towers residents are cats and they certainly aren’t going vegan. They will be sticking to their natural feline diet of cow chunks in jelly.)
So what difference will this make to the tea reviews? Almost none at all, I’d wager. Dairy and eggs are not commonplace ingredients in tea blends. Creamy custardy chocolatey sponge cake-inspired tea blends are – as a rule – entirely suitable for vegans.
I have been experimenting with plant-based milk alternatives over the last few weeks. Soya “milk” has come out victorious over its oat, almond and rice compatriots. Oat milk tastes nice on its own and in chai blends, I decided, but it makes Earl Grey taste a bit weird. Soya passed the Earl Grey taste and is – happily – the cheapest option out there to boot. (It’s cheaper than cow’s milk in Aldi.)
Not that this has anything to do with Teapigs’ Crème Caramel of course, which, as I said, is a very nice tea. But, for obvious reasons, it’s not one that I will be drinking in future.
Today’s featured book is Food by Gertrude Stein.
