First af all I have to admit I am far from being a professional tea taster: I barely recognise strawberry taste from Karkade one. This not prevent me to collect green tea, pretending to be an expert, even if I don't have a clue of how a tea cerimony has to be conducted, or how Japanese people use to prepare it and stuffs like that.
The truth is I like tiny boxes and green powder (not always its smell) and I have learnt so much by my own only after having drunk liters of smelly and untasty 'dirty water', like I use to call a super-bad green tea!
Let's start a tour of the most refined Japanese tea variety I jealously keep in my corner cupboard.
1. Maikonocha is a famous leaves tea produced in Kyoto, near Uji. I got it from a good friend of mine who used to live there. It smells terrible but it is the best one to be infused in hot water whenever you need a cup of tea. The colour is light green, almost similar to a golden yellow. No way, it's my favourite to drink.
2. Kombucha is a sweetened tea produced by effervescent fermentation. Despite of its powder it is not a green tea, actually. I must confess: I bought it by mistake and I tried it once to make a white chocolate & green tea plumcake. A really nasty one.
3. Matcha. I was totally obsessed by it when I was in Japan. I used to have big glasses of matcha milkshake, slices of matcha cake, matcha Kit-Kat ...
It is made of thin bright green powder and it smells good, but as soon as I came back to Italy it lost its special taste and now it is just "another ordinary tea", as you understand what I mean...
If you have some great recipes using green tea leaves or powder, feel free to share them here. I will pleased to try them!