Green tea with ginger and lime + tea bag labels

When I was a child I passionately hated every kind of food that had even a slightly bitter taste. Poppy seeds, chicoree and radicchio salad, roasted onions, dark chocolate, coffee and wine naturally,… they all made me just want to run away and scream. Later, this changed of course, and I learned that bitter is the most complex and sensitive of all five tastes and the one that develops later than the others. Today I love a lot of those foods I just couldn’t swallow when I was younger: lemon poppy seed muffins, dark chocolate, tonic water, Aperol, Suze, Crodino – can’t get enough of it.

My cordial relationship with green tea started only later, too. But for some years now it is my favourite all-season drink, hot in winter, as icetea in summer, most times flavoured with a slice of lime or lemon and/or ginger. It is just a rounded combination of fresh-sour-tart flavours. This was the origin for the idea to produce my own, ready-to-use, tea blend. I had lately made some experiments with drying vegetable and fruit zest at low temperature in the oven, so I came back to this easy method when adding ginger and lime flavour to my green tea.

The idea to make not only my own flavoured tea, but to fill them as well into some homemade tea bags came from some blog posts I had read recently here, here and here.

Making tea bags
To make the tea bags you can use special tea bag paper. I tried another method and made my little bags out of organic cheese cloth. I sewed simple little bags (zigzag stich, to prevent the cloth from fraying) that I left open on one of the smaller sides, turned inside out, filled with 1 teaspoon of the tea blend and closed the open end with the sewing machine. With the help of a needle I fixed the thread (a thicker one than all-purpose-sewing-thread) and tea bag label.

If you like the cute little tea bag labels I’ve designed: they’re free for download and print. If you like to create your own japanese inspired pattern (f.ex. for desktop wallpapers), try the Japonizer. It is a lot of fun to play around with it.

tea blend

ingredients
250 g green tea (I used sencha, because I like the fresh and slightly tart flavour, but you can take whatever you like), 3 tablespoons chopped ginger, 1 tablespoon roughly grated lime zest (from about 3 limes)

preparation
Spread lime zest and chopped ginger on the bottom of a casserol or baking tray and dry them at 100° C . It will take about 1 hour. ( You can mix ginger and lime before this step or dry them separately to adjust your tea flavour later individually.)

Mix green tea with dried ginger and lime zest. If you want to fill your tea in little tea bags, I recommend to wait for another day with that, so that the aroma can fully develop.

Finally: Enjoy your cup of tea!