Tea Experiments

Hey folks ... What's going on?

Had any delicious tea based vittles lately? Well, I have at least one every week. Sometimes it's as simple as experimenting with sweetened condensed milk in my Earl Grey or Bengal Spice. Other times, it's baked Bengal Spice Chicken or tea-infused rice. I've even made up random muffins and sodas using various tea flavors. It's sooo much fun to see just how many things I can use my tea for infusing and just adding a slightly more complex flavor profile.

Recently I experimented with simple Sweet Tea as defined by me.

{Steps on soapbox}

I am from GA and I enjoy sweet tea from time to time. If you serve me ice tea and it's not sweet, I will judge you something awful. If I wish for that mess, I will ask for unsweetened tea. I know. I know. These days it's all about less sugar and the whatnots, but I am not on that boat - and you can't force me into it. I don't drink enough sweet tea for that anyway. It takes me all week to actually drink all of my experiments ... sometimes 2 weeks. And don't hand me no doggone sugar packets to sweeten some ice tea. That foolishness doesn't work!! And it just ain't right - forget what ya heard! I will take simple syrup though.

Now, I've only recently learned of the folks who actually care about it even more than me. Did you boil it and add sugar while it was still hot? Did you sweeten it after it cooled with simple syrup (or its like)? I don't care which way you did it because I think each one holds it's on depending on the crowd. I just began experimenting with simple syrups and I'm still working on the perfect consistency for using it to sweeten tea. I especially like that you can add various other flavors to add to the tea flavor. It'd also help with being able to do more with cold tea drinks that I want to play around with.

{Steps off of soapbox}

Last week I brewed an Oolong Sweet Tea, a Tangerine Honey Sweet Tea, and an Earl Grey Simple Syrup. They each were delicious with various sweet levels. Of course, the Oolong sweet tea was the sweetest because I brewed it the way I normally brew sweet tea adding in a heap of sugar. The Tangerine Honey Sweet Tea was brewed like normal as well except I just sweetened it with just a bit of honey instead of sugar; It was for lil man so yeah. As for the Earl Grey Syrup, I used it with the SodaStream and enjoyed some Sparking Earl Grey; Not too sweet, not too (un)sweet, jjjuuusssttt right for a sunny afternoon. It reminded me of a sort of cream soda.

Whelp, those are my tea experiments of the week. I'm sure I'll come up with something else this week. I have some meat to bake (or slow cook) that I think will go well with a cup of strong brewed tea. What are you steeping these days?