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wombat1138I have a vague memory of reading that during the first century or two of tea's introduction to the West, it wasn't unknown for people to take steeped-out tea leaves and eat them like any other boiled vegetable, seasoned with salt and butter. (Apparently fresh tea leaves were sometimes consumed as a vegetable back in China, so the categorization wasn't completely without precedent.)
This morning, I decided to make some green-tea concentrate; I couldn't get the pantry to cough up the spices I'd had in mind for green tea chai, so limited the extra flavor agents to a few lightly pestled pods of black cardamom and rather a lot of rose-flavored raisins which I hadn't been able to think of much else to do with. Afterward, I had a strainer full of the usual dead tea leaves and less usual bloated raisins, and remembered the above anecdote. Hmmm, I thought. I may not want to eat tea leaves straight, but at the least they've got to have some useful digestive fiber.
Result: a batch of bran muffins with the tea/raisin mixture substituted for the bran. As an unexpected bonus, the cardamom bits have a slightly nutty, crunchy texture with concentrated bursts of flavor. It's difficult for me to gauge what other chances have been effected from the original recipe, since I've never made the original version; also, I made several other substitutions such as simplifying several component mixtures (honey/molasses -> just molasses; white/whole-wheat flour -> just whole-wheat), using an extra egg so the last egg wouldn't languish orphaned in its carton, and due to inability to locate the baking soda, using double its volume in baking powder instead.
I can't really tell if they taste like tea, since I've already been overloading my tea palate by taste-testing the liquid concentrate. I think the raisin flavor is still there. The texture is the usual sort of dark, moist bran-muffin texture with a strong taste of molasses (duh). Possibly green tea is slightly too subtle to stand up to molasses, although black tea might still come through; it might be an interesting exercise to try this again with less molasses and a different range of teas-- the bergamot note in Earl Grey would probably go nicely with honey, or maybe poppyseed.
...of course, now I'm probably going to be stuck eating all of these muffins by myself, since the wombat-consort is usually dubious of my kitchen experiments unless they involve chocolate. Alas. My first impulse for tea-leaf baked goods had actually been to substitute the leaves for the grated veggies in carrot cake or zucchini bread, but the bran muffins won out due to considerations of convenient serving size.
This morning, I decided to make some green-tea concentrate; I couldn't get the pantry to cough up the spices I'd had in mind for green tea chai, so limited the extra flavor agents to a few lightly pestled pods of black cardamom and rather a lot of rose-flavored raisins which I hadn't been able to think of much else to do with. Afterward, I had a strainer full of the usual dead tea leaves and less usual bloated raisins, and remembered the above anecdote. Hmmm, I thought. I may not want to eat tea leaves straight, but at the least they've got to have some useful digestive fiber.
Result: a batch of bran muffins with the tea/raisin mixture substituted for the bran. As an unexpected bonus, the cardamom bits have a slightly nutty, crunchy texture with concentrated bursts of flavor. It's difficult for me to gauge what other chances have been effected from the original recipe, since I've never made the original version; also, I made several other substitutions such as simplifying several component mixtures (honey/molasses -> just molasses; white/whole-wheat flour -> just whole-wheat), using an extra egg so the last egg wouldn't languish orphaned in its carton, and due to inability to locate the baking soda, using double its volume in baking powder instead.
I can't really tell if they taste like tea, since I've already been overloading my tea palate by taste-testing the liquid concentrate. I think the raisin flavor is still there. The texture is the usual sort of dark, moist bran-muffin texture with a strong taste of molasses (duh). Possibly green tea is slightly too subtle to stand up to molasses, although black tea might still come through; it might be an interesting exercise to try this again with less molasses and a different range of teas-- the bergamot note in Earl Grey would probably go nicely with honey, or maybe poppyseed.
...of course, now I'm probably going to be stuck eating all of these muffins by myself, since the wombat-consort is usually dubious of my kitchen experiments unless they involve chocolate. Alas. My first impulse for tea-leaf baked goods had actually been to substitute the leaves for the grated veggies in carrot cake or zucchini bread, but the bran muffins won out due to considerations of convenient serving size.