Easy ways to add tea to your food

Tea has many types and has a variety of flavours. It has so many complex flavours that they can be combined with food to enhance the taste even more.

If you are only drinking tea, you are missing out some of the greatest culinary opportunities; from soup to smoothies, ice cream, salads and what not.

Here’s a few ways that you can infuse tea to food.

Swap water for tea. When making pasta, risotto, any legume or rice that is usually cooked with water, instead of using water use tea. Choose a tea that matches the flavour of your dish, brew it and replace the water with the brewed tea. Try adding Dilmah Green Tea to a Spinach Pasta dish. And not just that. Green Tea and seafood are a great match. If you are a prawn lover, here’s a very simple thing you can try. Put 3 liters of water into a big saucepan and let it heat in high temperature. Add 3 tablespoons of the Dilmah Fragrant Jasmine Green Tea leaves into the water and stir. Place the prawns in a bamboo steamer over the boiling water and cook for 3-5 minutes until prawns change its colour and start to curl.

Step up your smoothie with tea. Dilmah offers a range of flavoured teas. While maintaining the taste of Pure Ceylon Tea, these flavoured teas add a gentle fruity flavour that enhances the whole tea drinking experience. Try the Blueberry Vanilla Yoghurt Smoothie. All you need is one cup of Dilmah Blueberry flavoured tea brewed strong using 2 tea bags, 5tbs of yoghurt, 3tbs of blueberries and 1tbs maple syrup. Blend all ingredients. Just keep changing the flavours and fruits to get the smoothie you desire. It’s just simple as that.

You could include a hefty pinch of tea leaves, alongside the other ingredients, to your soup stock. Green and black teas usually go well with soups. Using tea in your food isn’t just an alternative for water but has amazing health benefits too. Green tea and black tea has high amounts of protective antioxidants called polyphenols that can reduce heart diseases and cancers. These teas can also improve your brain function and keep you calm and relaxed because they’ve got amino acid L-theanine present.

Burning the tea leaves to smoke certain food items like meat, fish, poultry and even vegetables is a classic technique that Chinese use and it adds a great smoky flavour to the food. Any type of tea leaves would work for this, although chai, jasmine and green tea are always perfect options.

Dilmah has been and is constantly trying to push the boundaries of the culinary world by using tea as an infusion, seasoning, tenderizer, dessert or even a garnish. There’s so much that one could do with tea. To learn more about how tea can be used in your meals visit https://www.teainspired.com/tea-appreciation/sense-of-taste.html