Cooking With Tea: TeaChef

A week or so ago, I noticed that Seven Cups Tea had some of the stuff I've grown to like, Rou Gui and I ordered some, along with a little bit of some other stuff I wanted to try. Fast forward to Tuesday, when a box arrived from them. I tore it open to find it full of the items that someone in Florida had ordered.

By the time I got around to contacting them yesterday, I had actually received the right order instead, with a note to not worry about the mixup. So, I now have 3 bags of green tea (which I don't typically enjoy: too grassy). I was sharing this dilemma with a tea-drinking friend and she mentioned cooking with it, which intrigued me. I've cooked lots of Coke/Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, coffee, etc. They are great ways to bring in complex flavors to both savory and sweet dishes.

She pointed me to a pretty cool site for cooking with tea, which looks like a really interesting starting point. It's also a great example of leveraging the web and engaging people with your product. Adagio Teas runs this tea recipe site, called TeaChef. Every month, they choose a tea out out of their catalog and ask participants to come up with recipes for it. They offer free samples to help in that endeavor. They collect the recipes and, after ranking them, etc. present them on the site.

It's a pretty innovative way to engage people and get them excited about a single product that they sell. I'd love to see the sales figures for the selected teas following their feature. I'd be really surprised if there's not a huge spike.

Now, which recipe to try first . . .