The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea - Michael Harney [10]
While the Japanese fix their teas by steaming them, Chinese tea makers use a panoply of methods, each with their own flavors. Legend tells us the first tea was blanched when a fresh leaf fell by chance into a bowl of hot water. Tea makers later steamed teas—it was from the Chinese that the Japanese learned the technique in the ninth century—but then began fixing the leaves in hot woks. Today, some tea makers in China also fix teas in bamboo cylinders or ovens with blasts of hot air.
Woks and ovens affect Chinese green teas in two ways: They sweeten the leaves further by searing them, and they fix the leaves more slowly, allowing them to develop a wider range of aromatic compounds. The searing occurs because woks and ovens get much hotter than boiling water. Boiling water peaks at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, but an oven ranges from 300 to 400 degrees Fahrenheit, and a wok can get as hot as 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit. This much higher heat causes what chemists call “the Maillard reaction,” the creation within the leaves of compounds called “glucosides.” These glucose-derived compounds give the leaves pleasant toasted, sometimes nutty, sugared notes much as a skillet gives a pancake. The sweetness is very subtle; those who like their tea with two teaspoonfuls of table sugar may still want to add something extra. But compared with the decidedly unsugared, darker, and more vegetal Japanese green teas, Chinese green teas have a distinctly honeyed edge.
Wok and oven fixing also makes Chinese greens slightly more aromatic, with slightly sweeter scents than Japanese greens. All teas begin to develop their aromas as soon as they are plucked. Cut off from their nutrient source, the stressed leaves send warnings in the form of aromatic compounds to alert the rest of the plant of an attack. Among the first aromas to emerge are scents of lemon and fresh-cut grass. In the case of oolongs, these warnings change to jasmine and gardenia as tea makers “wither” the leaves, letting them desiccate slowly over a period of hours. Chinese and Japanese green tea leaves wither over just the short trip from the field to the factory. Chinese green teas wither a little longer than Japanese green teas because they are fixed more gradually—since wok fixing takes much more time than steaming. If you’ve ever stir-fried broccoli as opposed to blanching it, you know the difference: Stirring the raw vegetable over even a very hot pan cooks it more slowly than boiling-hot water will. That added time means the plant can continue to send out its scented distress signals. A comparison of the aromas in a Japanese Sencha and a Chinese wok-fired green tea shows that the Sencha has more lemony “linalools,” while the wok-fired tea has more carroty “beta ionones” and “neriols,” floral aromas more common to oolongs, which wither for a much longer period. (It’s important to note, however, that neither Japanese nor Chinese green teas have anywhere near the concentration of aromas in oolongs or even black teas.)
Moving in order of lightest and sweetest to darkest and most intense, we’ll start with Pan Long Ying Hao, the green tea with the largest bud, most closely resembling a white tea in its sweetness and pale hue. We’ll taste progressively more vegetal greens, including China’s famous Lung Ching, considered a standard for its flavors of honey, toasted nuts, and steamed green vegetables. Then we’ll try Dragon Pearl, a green tea perfumed with jasmine blossoms. We’ll end with Gunpowder, perhaps the darkest green tea available in China or Japan, wok-fired to give it a rich, roasted, smoky flavor.
Pay close attention to the leaves in this chapter: From Lung Ching’s slender grasshopper wings, to Bi Lo Chun’s coiled snail shells, to Taiping HouKui’s spindly, chartreuse filaments resembling shards of spinach linguine, you won’t find this variety