Iced Tea Ice Cream Floats
Hi there friends. I’m looking to get a little creative with my tea and I am wanting to make iced tea floats for some guests. My question is what kind of tea do you think would translate the best with this idea? I would just be using vanilla ice cream.
My first thoughts went to puerh as it has the right look of darkness similar to root beer. And then I thought I might find a root beer flavored tea and use that.
Any suggestions or recommendations to make this a reality in the best possible way?
Simpson and Vail used to sell a root beer flavored black tea. I don’t know if they still have it and I don’t think I ever tried it but I will list the website if you want to take a look.
Maybe something like a really chocolatey Yunnan black tea? I’ve had ones like that with triple cream brie and they stand up well
Vanilla ice cream and tea? Hmmm… not for me. But some people like milk in their tea and some people like vanilla tea, so maybe this could work.
I wonder what it would be like to try this with lemon sorbet? People already add lemon to their tea, so this might work.
I would like to try something new with tea. Most of time black tea will be my first choice. I like yunnan dianhong tea.
It seems like it would work well with a version of Thai iced tea, a spiced black tea blend made up to taste like that. It would take a lot of messing around to get your own version right, unless you already had a line on a decent loose pre-prepared version. A lot of them taste a good a bit like star anise (which could be too much if not balanced right, with an almost artificial sweetener type of taste). Some cinnamon could fill in background, and it seems to me that just a little clove would be nice to add spice, and vanilla to round out the sweetness, or nutmeg in the background for complexity. I researched what the most classic version of it was, before it became an artificially flavored, colored tea by convention, and it may have been based on black tea, orange blossoms, and crushed roasted tamarind seeds (per one reference). Of course those would be hard to find. As for black tea CTC Ceylon would do as well as any, or Assam, or maybe better yet mixing a CTC tea (to add plenty of astringency) and an orthodox black to add complexity. As for preparation simmering all of it a bit like a masala chai might be best, to extract a lot of flavor out of the spices.
Or skip blending and go with a cocoa-like Dian Hong (Yunnan black), much simpler.
I love the thought and detail in this. Thank you! I’m really tempted to try out your thoughts and ingredients
I’ve made a version like that before, and list what I did and an online suggested recipe in this blog post. The trick is getting things to balance but adding ice cream would short-cut the whole thing quite a bit; that much cream and sugar is going to offset any amount of spiciness. Masala chai would work as well, and it’s not so far off this. I think a touch of salt would play a bigger role than it might seem (not included in that standard online recipe version) but if it actually tastes like salt it’s way too much. That post: http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2016/08/making-thai-iced-tea-from-scratch.html
I agree with john-in-siam! My friends and I once made thai iced tea milkshakes with vanilla ice cream and they were THE BOMB, so I definitely think it would work great with a vanilla ice cream float set up as well. Iced masala chai would also be great, I think. Let us know how it turned out! =)
I tried my hand at blending this. It was decent but I was missing the right proportions, I believe. So, when my book club gathers on Tuesday, I’m going to give them the option of using the chai tea base or the root beer flavored black tea as a base. I’ll try to report on their impressions.
Blend tea, such as black tea and jasmine, matcha is also a good choice for it’s powder. With oolong tea, you can make it special.Besides, why not try them one by one, white tea, black tea, green tea, red tea, dark tea nd oolong. I think that would be very interesting.
Related to the black tea idea, I have a compressed Yunnan black tea that would work, sweet, rich, on the earthy side, with some mineral undertone. You can brew it at any strength and it doesn’t pick up any astringency or off flavors. I’m reminded of it because I’m wrapping up tasting of a tea that seems a lot like that, very similar in aspects range, a 2007 Xiang Yi “Hei Cha Zhuan” Hunan Brick Tea.
It might seem strange to say that an aged hei cha would work well with ice cream, since one might imagine mustiness or overly earthy tones relating to them, but this tea is sweet, rich, and clean in effect, with main flavors of plum, sourness, and dark wood bark (or something like that; sometimes describing earthy aspects gets strange). I might try it with ice cream and pass on how that went.
I actually ended up blending some root beer black tea with a root beer rooibos after not finding the right ratios with other methods. Let it cold brew for a few days and then served with over top of vanilla ice cream. Everyone really liked it. It was good. Lighter on the root beer flavor but it was there. It seemed like a lighter version of the classic. Very tasty! I was surprised at how much everyone else liked it as well. Great success.
I so appreciate all of your inputs on this. What a great tea community we have here.
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