PASSIONATE ABOUT TEA: With Claire Keys Tea is good for you… a well-known fact, but walk into a tea store and your jaw drops and your head spins. You are confronted with so many choices: black, green, white, oolong, matcha, pu-erh, rooibos, herbs and fruit tisanes, yerba mate…….HELP! Deciding what to try makes you want to run for a bag of Red Rose. The flurry of discoveries about tea’s health benefits, plus renewed appreciation of its ancient heritage has pushed tea to the forefront. In the last decade, North America’s tea consumption has gone up tenfold. It is the second most consumed beverage in the world next to water and has been cultivated for over 4,000 years! There is fascinating variety of finely made teas from around the world that are fun to try and they make supermarket tea bags seem dull by comparison. Most mass produced tea is made from “ fannings” or tiny pieces and dust so that it will steep quickly and produce a generic brew. Fine quality teas consist of whole or large parts of the tip of the leaves and have a greater depth and complexity of flavor. The difference is like comparing fast food to a meal at a fine restaurant. While there are a great variety of teas, they actually all come from the same plant called “Camellia Sinensis”. Different flavors from different varieties, differences in processing, different soils, climate, elevation and even what time of the season they are picked. There are four main types of teas – White, Green, Oolong, and Black. Each one can work in different ways and have different health benefits. Black teas are fully oxidized, meaning that once the leaves are picked and allowed to soften, they are rolled and crushed. This releases the juices within the leaves to react with oxygen, turning the leaves from green to a coppery red. They are then baked or “fired” to dry them out. Oolong teas are partially oxidized. After picking, the leaves are shaken in baskets to bruise and oxidize only the edges of the leaves. They are left as whole leaves and fired to dry. Green teas are not oxidized but are either pan fired (China) or steamed (Japan). White Tea is carefully picked taking just the tips of the leaves. It is very lightly oxidized by withering the leaves and naturally drying them. It has a very delicate flavor. Pu-erh is the only aged and fermented tea usually sold in cakes. The cakes can be made from black or green tea. Pu-erh can be aged for many years and like fine wines from a cellar cam fetch hundreds of dollars. In China, people drink pu-erh after a heavy meal to aid digestion and the metabolism of fats. Chinese women drink pu-erh on a regular basis to help stimulate weight loss. Herbal teas called tisanes, technically are not teas at all, but infusions of various herbs, fruits, flowers and spices instead of camellia sinensis leaves. A few examples of these tisanes are mint and ginger blends for digestion, chamomile for relaxing and aiding sleep or raspberry leaves for breast feeding. Rooibus, sometimes referred to as “red tea” or “bush tea” has also become a hot trend in the tea industry. It comes from a bright bush grown in South Africa. It goes through a fermentation process and turns from vivid green to a deep rust red. It contains no caffeine, and has been proven to contain many flavonoids, free-radical fighting antioxidants. Tea has been consumed daily throughout the world for centuries. Chinese herbalists have long revered the healing properties of tea. Today the health benefits are getting the “seal of approval” from scientists in the West. Tea contains substances capable of the bolstering our bodies’ defenses to help fight chronic diseases such as a cancer and heart disease. As previously stated, the plant nutrients in tea that have fueled the enthusiasm of researchers are called flavonoids. Flavonoids have antioxidant functions that are capable of mopping up and de-activating potentially harmful free radicals, which, if left to roam the body, may spark chronic health problems. Tea not only helps maintain your daily fluid balance (unlike coffee), but has no fat, no calories, no salt and contains fluoride for strong bones and teeth, and has about one half the amount of caffeine found in an equally sized cup of coffee. There are lots of reasons to enjoy tea: the wonderful aromas and various flavors, the soothing warmth in the winter, the refreshing lift of iced tea in a hot summer day, and the knowledge that tea is good for your health. So relax, take a few moments for yourself and enjoy “a cuppa”!
Posted on: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 23:31:30 +0000
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