Tea and Tsukimi

Photo from Secret Teatime's Facebook Page

This past weekend, I went to a nabe and tsukimi tea party held by friends from my time abroad. At times, I really do regret spending so much time in Japan alone and wrapped up in my hobbies - as much fun as I had trying my hand at aikido, ikebana and others, travelling all over Honshu by local train, and of course wandering everywhere in Kansai on foot and by bicycle, when it came time for JET events, I was so embarrassingly out of the loop that I imagine anyone not from my year would have a hard time remembering my name. My Japanese friends were largely in Tokyo, and many local friends, JET and otherwise, returned to their lives abroad. By my third year I was living the hermit life, and I have come to regret it a little since returning. Where I was antisocial in Japan, I now go out of my way to be social back home, via cultural groups, JETAA events and now, meeting up with a few familiar faces from JET.

I didn't even realize there were so many former Osaka JETs here in Toronto! I attended a dinner last month with a group of six or so and had a great time, though the tsukimi evening eclipsed (see what I did there?)  that by far. The founders of Secret Teatime are tea fanatics and students of the Omotesenke and Youkenryuu schools of tea, respectively, and Helen did her JET tenure in a city very close to mine. In case any of you readers forgot, I am a fan of tea of all kinds, so when she invited me over for nabe and tea ceremony, I could not say 'yes' fast enough.

Friends in Toronto, you absolutely must check out Helen and Sorlie's endeavors with Secret Teatime! They are setting up a studio in Scarborough, and are offering lessons in Japanese tea ceremony in the Youkenryuu style. Watching the ceremony on Saturday was a real treat, and we enjoyed luscious dark chocolates from Ambiance Chocolat. The chocolates were handmade and amazing, and brought me back to my days making trips out to the fabulous chocolatiers and bakeries in Kyoto. I'm really hoping to make it to more of their events in future and perhaps a few lessons as I've only learned the very basics of chanoyu. My roommate is almost certainly sick of hearing me talk about tea (though she graciously supplies me with it at Christmastime!) and I have a lot to learn about it, myself, so I'm looking forward to lots more!

Quest for Kochakaden: Kirin Healthy Milk Tea

I visited T&T Supermarket recently after I found myself up at Promenade Circle, a fair way's out of my usual neighbourhoods. Promenade is close enough to us, but it's past Steeles Avenue, so anyone in the Toronto area will know that it therefore costs twice as much each way to get there on the bus. If you're feeling energetic, though, you can walk from Steeles, and that's just what we did.

At T&T, I discovered something unexpected and amazing:

Healthy!?

!

!!

Admittedly, I've been burned by Kirin before. As I mentioned in in my previous post about milk tea, I find Kirin's traditional blend to be overly cloying. Other people frequently say it is the perfect sweetness level, but I can't handle it, and I didn't have any better luck with Kirin Afternoon Tea Milk Tea Special, the only other version sold here in Toronto. That one is made from Assam tea, but still no dice. The 1/2 calorie Kirin might work for me, but I haven't found it here.

So I wasn't getting my hopes too high for "Healthy Milk Tea, Yasuragu Earl Grey," but the promise on the bottle of lavender and earl grey (this was my favourite Starbucks latte flavour in Japan) wooed me. At $2.99, much cheaper than my imported Kochakaden, I took home a bottle and hoped for the best.

I took it home and kept it in the fridge for a few days, waiting for the right time. Per 100ml, this stuff is just 12 calories and no sugar - I supposed that would be why it's marketed as 'healthy.' Sweeteners abound! This Earl Grey/lavender variant is obviously based on the regular Kirin Healthy no-sugar version that I have yet to see around Toronto, and is imported by Uncle T Food in Richmond.

The ingredients list seemed standard enough. Milk, skim milk powder, black tea, whole milk powder, salt, artificial flavour (I suppose that'd be the lavender), lecithin, ascorbic acid, acesulfame K, sucralose, stevia. With that combination I was at a loss what to expect. After a good chilling, though, I opened it up and tried it...

Fantastic.

It is almost as good as Kochakaden and much better than Kirin's standard blend! I am very pleased. And given how ridiculously fattening standard milk tea is, I think this is a very acceptable substitute while I am hoarding my limited stash of Kocha. Sadly, with my luck, it's not going to stay on the shelves for long...special-flavour products fly off the shelves in Japan. Soon, I'm sure I'll be mourning Kirin Healthy Milk Tea Lavender Earl Grey alongside all those other wonderful seasonal flavours.

Until then...I think I need another trip to T&T.

Tenso 1,000 Yen Shipping Time!

You might remember that in my post about my crazed lust for royal milk tea, I mentioned that I was able to take advantage of a great coupon from Tenso to get the goods. Well, I should probably be charging Rakuten for all the free advertising at this point, but that coupon is available again, until June 28. If you've been waiting to buy something on Rakuten but holding back because of the shipping fees, it's probably a good time to move!

The Quest for Kochakaden

Image via sweets.nifty.com

Kochakaden.

This brand of royal milk tea ranks pretty high up there among the list of Things I Miss About Japan. I would probably put it at the #4 spot. (Someday I should write a big ol' post about that.) After hot springs and mama-chari, of course, and definitely after Authentic Japanese Food. But it's way up there, and the worst part is, while it's not impossible to get Kochakaden here in Toronto, it is pretty prohibitively difficult.

I started out by trying to find it locally. We have a nice selection of Asian supermarkets here, starting with the monolithic T&T and ending of course with Sanko, a mom-and-pop Japanese grocery that has been on Queen West since 1968. I hit more than a dozen stores in search of Kochakaden milk tea, to no avail. While many of them carried Kirin milk tea or other brands, none stocked the kind I sought. The gentleman at Sanko told me that it was likely because Coca-Cola Japan was very stringent with their imports outside the country.

Most people seem to prefer Kirin, supposedly because they find Kochakaden too sweet. Personally, for me, it's the other way around! I literally can't finish a bottle of Kirin, even though they are so much easier to come by here. I found a Korean brand at T&T that I enjoyed enough to buy a huge stockpile, but it wasn't quite the same. I turned to the Internet, but the only supplier I could find was a wholesaler who required a minimum purchase of $1,000. I love tea, but not that much. (Oh, who am I kidding - I really do, but I haven't got a thousand bucks to spend on it!)

Next, I tried buying ready-made "milk tea" teabags purchased in Chinatown and at Lucky Moose. I tried Lipton first, but the Korean-made Lipton is vastly different from the Japanese one. 3:15pm Milk Tea is a good but too-sweet Korean alternative. J-Town carried Japanese-made milk tea powder at one point, but they've been out of stock for some time.

I decided to try brewing the tea myself. I started out with Darjeeling, as the Korean brand listed a darjeeling  base. My friend Gai brought me home a bottle of Kochakaden from her trip to Japan, and I used it as a control group for my tea experiments. Myself and a friend who has a better sense of taste than me (he just completed bartender training) lined them up and tried them. I made a base recipe of 1/3 cup darjeeling tea and a 1/2 tablespoon of simple syrup.

First we tried evaporated milk. The taste was dissimilar to Kochakaden, but very like my Korean milk tea. Next, we tried using 1 tbsp powdered skim milk. It was overly sweet. Last, we tried a dose of half and half: it was just a touch too sweet, but definitely the closest. Matt suggested using unrefined sugar next time in my simple syrup.

Some cafes hand you a pre-packaged creamer with your glass
of tea, so I figured this would work for me too

The follow day, after drinking the massive amount of brew we had made by turning it into bubble tea, I tried experimenting with English Breakfast. It wasn't quite right - I'm going to try Twinings next time. Matt's recommendation was Uva tea or a Ceylon, possibly Assam.

I tried Earl Grey next, as I didn't have Uva/Ceylon/Assam in the house. I went with 1/3 cup tea, 1/2 tbsp simple syrup and 1/2 tbsp half-and-half. It was closer, but still too sweet.

Assam. 1/3 cup tea, 1/2 tbsp 1:1 simple syrup, 1/2 tbsp half-and-half. Brewed the tea too weak. I used 1 teacup of Assam to 1 tsp tea and steeped 3.5 minutes. Might try Assam again sometime, but I'll use 1 1/4 tsp to a cup, and steep 4 minutes minimum.

I went back to Earl Grey. This time, 1/3 cup tea, 1/2 tbsp sugar syrup, 1 tsp half and half. This seems like the closest proportions yet - I could have served it in a cafe, but it still wasn't Kochakaden. I despaired of ever figuring out what gives Kocha that floral taste.

In the end, I bought a case of Kocha from Rakuten for a mere ¥3,062. I was on the Tenso.com mailing list, and they are a proxy receiving company for Japanese goods. They advertised a coupon whereby you could get up to ¥5,000 international shipping for ¥1,000 - in other words, ¥4,000 off the cost of shipping a heavy item. Like a box of 24 drinks. So I paid ¥3,845 for the cost of the drinks and the shipping from Rakuten to Tenso, and waited for the estimate from them on what the final cost would be.

I got the quote a few days later - shipping by EMS (the quickest and default mailing system Tenso offers) would be ¥17,300. Ha ha ha! No. I sent an inquiry as to whether they could send this heavy item by seamail. Luckily for me, they could do surface. The cost before my coupon would be ¥7,800, and after the coupon the bill would be ¥3,800 plus the handling fee. The handling fee was ¥2,980, as the package was between 10 and 20 kilograms. I would have my tea in less than two months.

In the end, I was happy - the box of tea will easily last me for a year, especially if I'm drinking Korean milk tea and home-brewed on occasion instead of Kochakaden. (And really, I'm trying to cut down on my sugar consumption, so I'm trying to drink more green instead!) I made this handy breakdown so that you fans of Kochakaden (or any heavy Japanese product that's hard to come by here!) can decide whether the cost is worth it:

¥3,062 - Purchase of tea from Rakuten drugstore

¥   783 - Tax and shipping from Rakuten to Tenso

¥2,980 - Tenso Handling Fee (10-20 kilo package)

¥3,845 - Shipping from Tenso to Canada

-------

¥10,670

In the end my total cost was equal to about $140.62 Canadian dollars. Oh. So I'm paying about $5.85 per bottle of tea.

Double "oh."

Beautiful, beautiful milk tea in the motherland.

Sometimes, though, people are willing to put a lot of money toward having a good experience! I'd pay six bucks at a bar for a cocktail. Why shouldn't I pay six bucks to have a plastic bottle of tea at home...right?

Right?

Tea

One of my many regrets is that I only became a bona-fide tea drinker since leaving Japan. I have always enjoyed iced tea and will take it over just about any other drink. Imagine my glee when I arrived in Osaka and found that iced tea was available in multiple varieties. Everywhere.

It was a happy discovery. I swore the first time I walked into a Lawson, just outside of the Keio Plaza Hotel in Shinjuku, that I was never leaving this country.

At the time, I favoured (iced) milk tea, iced and sweetened matcha, and really any kind of iced tea that crossed my path. I've loved Tazo passion tea, iced, ever since I spent a year working next door to a Starbucks, and I have always enjoyed black teas in general, but it wasn't until recently that I began to really drink and enjoy loose-leaf brewed and hot green tea. I've never been a big fan of hot drinks, and I've preferred my tea sweetened - which green almost never is in Japan, unless it is the kind of iced matcha you buy from a fountain dispenser! For a time, trying to get used to the taste and enjoy it, I was drinking Lipton green tea made from teabags and sweetened with honey (sacrilege!).

Recently, though, I have begun collecting loose green teas and brewing them myself, to help me get sugar out of my diet. I enjoy my English tea with cream and sugar, so a switch to green seemed like the best approach to have my daily tea without the daily sugar cubes. A friend gave me loose hojicha and genmaicha for my birthday, my roommate and best friend gave me a beautiful teapot for Christmas, and I recently invested in some quality tea strainers (the ball-shaped tea infusers are no good for green - the leaves can't 'breathe' enough!) that fit into the teapot. My mother just gave me a set of Japanese-style miniature cups as well - so now I've been nursing this pot of pre-strained hojicha for the last three hours, as it sits on its little ceramic teapot-warmer. Nice!

I've been learning about brewing green tea, in the meantime. Did you know the leaves will burn if you try to brew them in boiling water? That's where the bitter taste typically comes from. You should brew green tea in water that's ideally 85 degrees Celsius. After you boil your water (you want to boil the chlorine out of it), let it sit for a few minutes to cool to the right temperature. Or you can use a programmable pot or kettle to bring it down to 85 for you - right now, I own an electric pot of a style that's very popular in Japan. We kept a very nice one in the English department, and on those infrequent winter days when I did feel like a hot chocolate or a strawberry latte was in order, the hot water was always ready to go.

I picked up my Panasonic electric pot for about ¥3500, or $40.
Overseas models will cost you twice that.
This one was bottom-line and had no temperature gauge or electric dispenser.

Now I own a fancier one that has settings for black tea, green tea and baby bottle milk. (Handy for new parents - useless to me) The insulated pot keeps it at that exact temperature for you at all times. I rarely used my Panasonic pot pictured above, though I bought it to encourage myself to drink more tea. Now, I use the one I have, every single day. I lucked into it on Kijiji one day as I was searching for Japanese house furnishings. A university student here was moving out of his dorm and looking to sell his pot on Kijiji for $25. There was no instruction manual and all the buttons were in Japanese, so I guess he figured it wouldn't sell, even though the overseas models of these things will run you $110 or more here in Toronto. I snapped it up; downloaded the English version of the manual online, cleaned it carefully with vinegar and baking soda. Works like a charm and so useful.

The thing I haven't quite gotten the hang of is finding green teas that I really like, as opposed to just drinking because they are sugar-free. That changed when I received a packet of quality hojicha for my birthday. Love this stuff! It's a nice, mellow taste. The genmaicha I got is also fantastic. I think in the past when I prepared green tea, I didn't really know the proportions...I always made it way too strong and with water that was too hot, and I ended up ruining it. I always wondered why I could drink cup after cup from the local kaitenzushi restaurant, and be absolutely disgusted with my own home-brewed teas!