Genmaicha Rice Vs. Sencha Rice

If you aren’t following Tea Curious on instagram, you need to! She encourages experimenting with your tea instead of just accepting what people say about tea. She often tests ways of brewing, tasting etc! She recently had a challenge to drink down your green tea collection and guess what, I really needed to participate.

I started out with having some of my old, but surprisingly still good matcha every morning until that was finished and then I turned to my cabinet where I have a few green teas. I’ll be honest, while I don’t dislike green teas they aren’t what I reach for first so they often fall by the wayside. I actually really enjoy cold brewing green tea and drinking it out of a fancy glass with my dinner :)

Since today was the last day, I decided to help drink down my stash by experimenting with cooking! I was set on cooking rice in tea because I love doing that :) I’ve done it a few times and you can find those recipes here:

Gyokuro Rice

Matcha Rice

Oolong Rice

Tamago Kake Gohan - gyokuro

Long Jing Quinoa

In this post, I will talk more about the teas as opposed to the cooking method, so if you’re interested in that make sure to check out the linked posts.

Let’s meet the teas: Genmaicha and Sencha.

Both of these teas are actually fairly fresh. The genmaicha is from ippodo tea that I was given to photograph for one of my birthday giveaways! The sencha is a gift that my cousin brought me from his recent trip to Japan. I’m almost 100% certain it is sencha after asking some friends who know Japanese and also comparing it to my other green teas.

Now, I broke several rules of here for the sake of the experiment. I’ve cooked with tea many times and there is a balance between bitterness and all the flavor cooking off. I decided to cold brew the tea with 3 tablespoons of tea to make sure I got a potent brew since I would be using the brew as the water for the rice. I know this sounds like a lot but I need it to be potent so that it isn’t all cooked off which can happen.

So, at first glance the Sencha (on the right) is way darker in color and looks like it will give more of that flavor into the rice. This is the first interesting part of the experiment because this also speaks to when brewing this tea. Both of these brews had the same amount of tea and water and cold crewed for about 10 hours. I didn’t open the leaves up with warm water first, I just filled with vessels with cold water. I cooked each 1/2 cup of rice with one cup of the brewed tea.

At this point, I also kind of knew which rice I would like better. But, let’s continue!

When I cooked the rice, I also put a little less than a tablespoon of the leaves into the dry rice. It may seem like overkill, but I wanted to see which tea would hold up best to the environment.

After cooking, there was a large difference in how green the two rices turned out. You may be able to guess based on the darkness of the brews above.

Since I used tea in the rice as well, the sencha was a little bit more potent in terms of turning the rice color.

So after taking a few bites of each, here is what I thought. Genmaicha was the winner! If we talk about the flavor of green tea, the sencha rice is definitely more overpowering but it is present for the genmaicha but in a more pleasing way.

The sencha was strong but also a bit bitter. I would still totally eat this whole bowl and pairing it with either an egg or veggies and meat will be delicious. But on it’s own, it was just a bit too bitter and it seemed like the leaves kind of fell flat in the cooking process. The one thing that this rice did hold over the genmaicha is that the leaves incorporated better into the rice and it was a bit easier to eat.

The genmaicha rice was my favorite for a few reasons. First, I thing the brew was an nice, even flavor that really shows up in the rice. I think the genmaicha is much better quality tea than the sencha. The genmaicha flavor shows up in the rice but it is also mellow enough to let you enjoy the flavor of the rice as well. I think this would pair well with something a bit heavier. The one downside to the genmaicha was that the larger leaves and rice made it a bit more difficult to eat incorporated as there were some chewier aspects to it.

Sencha Margarita

Spring is finally here and I’m excited to bring you a new recipe for a spring themed drink! I got to work with First Leaves tea and their Sencha tea! What better way to celebrate spring than with a green drink?

If you’re unfamiliar with Sencha, it is a Japanese green tea. First Leaves tea’s sencha comes from Fuji City in Shizuoka. You can choose loose leaf or for an easy, on the go solution, the tea sachets. Check them out here to get 15% off your purchase!

Although I made a recipe with this tea, I highly encourage you to brew the tea first to try if you’ve never had sencha! When it comes to brewing in this recipe, you can do either brew it hot and let it cool down or cold brew in advance.

If you want to cold brew, run warm water over 2 teaspoons of leaves just to wake them up a bit. Place the leaves in a container and fill with 2 cups of water and leave in the fridge for about 12 hours. Make sure to taste it after 12 hours to see if the flavor is strong enough, if not you can leave it a bit longer.

The way I brewed the tea for this recipe was with hot water and let the mixture cool before creating the drink. The tea pot that I used (pictured) can hold about 2 cups of water and it is suggested to use about 1 teaspoon per 8 oz so I placed 2 teaspoons of loose leaf sencha in my tea pot.

At this time, I also placed the honey that I used to sweeten the margarita in with the leaves. I normally wouldn’t sweeten tea this way but it’s nice for the margarita to have a little bit of sweetness to it!

Brew the your water to no more than 175 F. It is really helpful for teas like sencha to have a kettle that shows the temperature. If you don’t have one don’t panic! You can let the boiling water stand for a little bit, maybe 5-10 minutes and it should cool enough to use.

Pour your water into the tea pot with the leaves + honey and brew for 30-40 seconds. Give it a stir so that the honey dissolves and strain your tea!

Let the tea cool enough to use in your drink! You can refrigerate it to speed up the process or use ice in your drink to wait less time. I wanted to note that I used a matcha honey in this recipe because I had it and thought it might be fun but it is not a necessity!

Salt! Who doesn’t love a salt rim?? If you don’t, skip this part :) If you do, take a lime wedge and wet the rim of the glass and then dip the glass in a plate of salt. What salt to use? You don’t have to have that margarita salt that you see at the store. If you don’t have that, you can use most sea salts that aren’t fine grain and they’ll work well. I used maldon sea salt flakes I had for this drink!

In your salted (or non salted) glass, combine the juice of half a lime + 1.5 oz of your favorite tequila! I used Altos tequila. It is my go to because it’s priced well and tastes great in margaritas! I also love espolon tequila!

Please feel free to alter amounts of lime + tequila to your liking!

Finally, fill your glass up with the sencha + honey brew, mix, garnish with a lime and enjoy!

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