Adding salt to tea
Recently read that the chinese used to add salt to pop the flavour of tea.
Anyone else heard of this and got info on it?
I can totally see it working as marine character tea isnt bad (although not to my proper tastes), I drink more fruity sweet stuff, but that can be balance with a bit of salt I guess.
Im a bit bothered about potentially ruining my nice oolong with this though.
I think this was a thing long, long ago, in the time when ground-up tea bricks were prepared by boiling. I’m pretty sure it was one of the steps in Lu Yu’s instructions.
I sometimes make boiled laochatou, and have added a pinch of salt to the water. It is easy to add too much.
Can you expand on how/if it pops the flavours or not? etc
on a side note I had white peach, black olives & marjoram the other day at a nice tasting menu (counter culture clapham common) and it totally worked. sweet peach, salty olive & aromatic marjoram :)
Sounds interesting! I think the idea is to bring out the umami (savory flavor) in the tea. Not sure about black teas but I’ve tried adding 2-5 grains of sea salt to my gyokuro (8 oz) before and the result is amazing!! It gave the tea a very marine-like profile. As for black tea, I almost want to suggest adding a dash of cracked black pepper. Haven’t tried it yet… I’ll let you know how it goes!
Well, if you add too much it makes the tea taste salty :)
Seriously though, salt in small quantities has a sort of “like it is, only more so” effect on a lot of flavors. You should try it for yourself. I’ve only ever tried it with very strong shu puer.
Yeah, I mean I do know this from cooking. i’ll have to try some side-by-side tests to see if it works ok or ruins to delicate oolong flavours
@soleiltea – any more umami in some of my greens and they are getting used for soup stock! lmao
Other herbs or flavourings may have been added as well. It is in China that we are talking about. I just read that.
Why not eat a salty snack to go along side the tea?
Anyways, you don’t need salt to taste umami, it has its own receptor.
By the way, farmers actually taste pesticides to see if they are salty, because they will ruin the twa plant.
Just mentioning a few ideas. Now if only I could drink tea without sugar. :)
why not eat a sugary snack along with the tea?
lol sorry.. Mr Quackers i’m looking at your tealog & there isnt much there. What do you drink?
I’m getting back into tea drinking, so there won’t be much there. I drink Matcha several times a day. Sencha, as well. I have some aged darjeeling that is amazing. There’s an aged Bai Mu Dan. Somewhere is a pile of high quality ceylon.
The mongolians drink tea with milk and salt all the time, it’s suposed to balance the flavour adding special notes.
Salt is also added to noon chai (literally “salt tea”) in Kashmir and butter tea in Tibet. As with food, salt enhances the flavor of the tea. I’ve never added salt to straight tea though that might be an interesting experiment some day.
I could see using a little salt in a hot climate, where you sweat all the time. Generally there is already salt in a lot of Arab food including pickles or hummus etc. And really, if you think about it, Asians get too much salt in their diet currently. Soy Sauce, etc.
LuckyMe: I’ve been to Kashmir and stayed with a local family. They added baking soda to their tea, not salt, and it was…weird, to say the least. Not something I’d want to try at home. :D
Not sure if the idea is to bring out savory notes or if to add mineral content to the water. If it’s the latter…
To create great tasting mineralized water, add just under 1/4 teaspoon of pink Himalayan sea salt to a gallon of reverse osmosis water. This water is great for tea in the case that you don’t have access to spring water. :-)
This is interesting! I’ll definitely give this a shot, as I have an RO filter for orchids, but had heard the RO water wasn’t good for tea. My tap water certainly is not fantastic.
RO water + Himalayan sea salt is actually really great for tea :-) I recommend that over everything except for spring water.
This is what I use, but I also add bamboo charcoal sticks into the water kettle.
RO water on its own is very flat, but adding in salt, charcoal and minerals improves it greatly.
Now that you have reminded me. Soft water is supposed to better for making tea. Mineral waters can interfere with the taste of a tea. There was a whole list of products that were acceptable to use, on a case by case basis.
By the way, I just returned from eating some chinese fish soup, and my Matcha was so good. Either a fluke because I added a little extra or perhaps there was msg in the stock or a ton of salt.
Oh and that reminds me Rasseru, the practice of making tea from bricks and boiling with salt was the start of Matcha. Buddhist monks carried the practice over to Japan. Thankfully, the practice evolved ;)
I’ve added salt to a Mojito black tea, made the flavors really pop. Also put a bit of lime juice in it.
I’ve seen salt mentioned in an exhibit at the Hong Kong Teaware Museum. Salt was added to the water, and the water used for tea. I’ve tried it and it did seem to enhance the flavor a tiny bit.
This is probably a bit too mundane to count as much input, but salt works well in a very small quantity in masala chai.
And this next part is completely off the subject, but I remember once when my niece and I both botched our Mongolian barbecue dishes by making them too hot I recommended adding a bit more salt. It couldn’t possibly reduce the heat / spice (although cooking a little more with sugar might), but it helped the flavors balance better. I can’t imagine that working for teas I drink, although maybe I’d be surprised.
I tried batabatacha, a regional Japanese dark tea both with salt (traditional way) and without.
I liked it better without salt. Didn’t understand how it could possibly improve the flavor.
Login or sign up to leave a comment.