Rice made with Tea?

I watched a kind of strange Chinese TV show this morning (one of those things that catches your eye when flipping channels). It was a documentary/interview/literary/cooking program that featured a reclusive Chinese woman writer who was cooking in her kitchen throughout the interview while espousing her feminist, spiritual, culinary and decorating philosophies. She was an interesting character. Anyhow, she made rice with tea. It wasn't Jasmine tea either, it was dark brown. I think she said it was an English Black tea. I had never seen this before. Is it a common practice? Is it worth experimenting with?

Do you mean she had a chawan (rice bowl) and she poured tea over the rice? That's a common Japanese practice which started during wartime Japan when all they had to eat was rice and green tea. They would pour the green tea over the rice to give it some flavor. My parents usually used black tea when I was growing up, but any tea would work.

d4v3 wrote:I watched a kind of strange Chinese TV show this morning (one of those things that catches your eye when flipping channels). It was a documentary/interview/literary/cooking program that featured a reclusive Chinese woman writer who was cooking in her kitchen throughout the interview while espousing her feminist, spiritual, culinary and decorating philosophies. She was an interesting character. Anyhow, she made rice with tea. It wasn't Jasmine tea either, it was dark brown. I think she said it was an English Black tea. I had never seen this before. Is it a common practice? Is it worth experimenting with?

I just talked to a Chinese coworker about this, and she said that her grandparents would sometimes use tea to cook rice, to infuse it with flavor/fragrance, but this may be different than what you saw on TV. My coworker also thought it might work to fry tea leaves to mix with rice, but she couldn't picture the tea alone serving as rice.

This is an aside, but my coworker also said that her grandparents liked to use tea stems as filler for pillows. The stems would make the pillows more firm than other fillers and also fragrant.

Fujisan wrote:Do you mean she had a chawan (rice bowl) and she poured tea over the rice?

It was a little hard to follow (the English subtitles were intermittent), but from what I could see, she actually simmered the rice in a sauce pan with prepared tea from a pot (the liquid not the leaves), although she may have added the tea to partially cooked rice then let it steam for a while.

Thanks for the recollection of adding tea to a rice bowl, I will have to try that. It is interesting how some practices are born out of necessity then continue to persist after the underlying need has abated.

Not that this in anyway confirms authenticity, but I've run across several recipes from large U.S. publications (Real Simple, the Trib, etc.) that call for cooking rice in green tea.

There's a Sichuan recipe that involves rice and tea. Basically they're both dry roasted over a hot wok and used to smoke cooked chicken but the tea and rice are not eaten and discarded afterwards. I've done this a couple of times and the lesson to be learned is to control the heat well or risk having the apartment smell like burnt tea for a week.

In addition to Fuji-san's post, the dish described is called chazuke:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochazuke
The wiki entry lists several toppings to go on cooked rice, but I prefer thin sliced raw white fish and nori. Pour hot green tea over it to cook and it's done.

Another Japanese preparation is gruel or porridge. Essentially a blank canvas for experimenting with Japanese ingredients, one of the variations is cooking the short grain rice with green tea instead of plain water.

kanin wrote:In addition to Fuji-san's post, the dish described is called chazuke:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochazuke
The wiki entry lists several toppings to go on cooked rice, but I prefer thin sliced raw white fish and nori. Pour hot green tea over it to cook and it's done.

Ah, that's the name of it. I can never remember what the Japanese words are for these things since I only heard them once a year when we went to visit my grandparents. We normally used tsukemono or kimchi as toppings.

There is also a delicious tea made in Japan called genmai cha which is toasted rice and green tea...combining the elements in a different way.

I have purchased it a H Mart in Niles but Mitsuwa also has it.

Well, I finally got around to trying rice made with tea. I used Kokuho Rose rice and fairly strong brewed green tea, which I substituted for the plain water. I strained the tea and let it sit for a while so the solid bits settled out. I used a touch more salt than normal (I usually go pretty light) to balance out any bitterness and 1/2 teaspoon of sunflower oil.

The rice came out a buff color, a little lighter than brown rice. It was absolutely delicious. The tea gave the rice a nutty and slightly grassy flavor that was not overwhelming but very noticable. It added a whole new dimension of flavor to the rice, which made it edible all by itself (I am not a fan of plain rice).

I want to try this with other types of tea and steeped infusions, and different types of grains. I may even try it with some whole hops. The rice is such a nice neutral medium for showcasing flavors. It is such a simple concept, but it opens up a realm of experimental possibilities. Maybe some mint infused basmati served with lamb?