Teatorial: Japanese Tea Ceremony

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japanese tea ceremony, matcha, teatorial

Happo-En garden in Tokyo

Greetings, readers!  I have just returned from a two-week adventure in beautiful East Asia.  And since it’s almost 11pm, and I am not even close to feeling tired (jet-lag is a beast), I’m going to write a post.

One of the time-honored traditions in Japan is the tea ceremony.  Green tea was originally imported from China in the 8th century for its medicinal properties.  The preparation and drinking of tea was ritualized in the late 1400’s, and the ritual adopted and propagated by samurai during the Edo Period.  This is no English afternoon cup of tea, though.  Like many attributes of Japanese culture, the tea ceremony is a spiritual and ritualistic act, with every action taken by the partakers having some purpose or meaning.  You can’t just show up, dunk a biscuit, and call it a day.  The Japanese tea ceremony requires a special set of tools, and participants go through a very specific set of actions in order to perform the ritual correctly.

On our trip, I was fortunate enough to participate in a tea ceremony, and I was given some instruction beforehand on how to perform the ceremony correctly.  Tea ceremony is typically performed in a tea house, like the one shown below.

The tea served at the tea ceremony is called “matcha,” a powdered green tea that has a strong, bitter flavor, and this must be prepared by a trained person.  She will use a number of different tools to do this.  She will have to heat water in the kettle or “kama” shown below.

Artifact from the Tokyo National Museum

Tea is scooped from a tea jar into the tea bowl using a very particular type of bamboo utensil, shown below.

Artifact from the Tokyo National Museum

Tea and water are then combined in the tea bowl (chawan), shown below.  

Artifact from the Tokyo National Museum

The maker then uses a bamboo whisk to whip the tea into a froth.

Now the tea is ready to drink, but here comes the tricky part.  This is where the ignorant Westerners have to correctly pull off the consumption of the tea.  The bitter tea is (mercifully) served with some kind of sweet in order to counteract some of the bitterness.  I’ve got to be honest, this tea did not taste good.  It’s not something you whip up to relax before “Sherlock.”  But remember, medicinal properties.

Once the tea is served to you, you may start the drinking process.  Hold the bowl with your left hand under it and your right hand around it, front facing you.  Turn the bowl with your right hand clockwise twice to move the front of the bowl away from you (you don’t drink from the front).  Then, lift the bowl into the air as a sign of thanks before taking your first sip.  The hostess will ask you how it tastes, and you are to reply, “kekkodesu,” which means something like, “This tastes terrible, but I have to lie and say I love it because them’s the rules.”  You are then free to drink the tea.  I have heard other sources insist you have to drink the tea in three gulps, but I was not taught that specifically, so maybe only certain schools teach that.  You drink the tea until it is all gone and slurp the last sip as a sign of appreciation.  Then, you take your right hand thumb and forefinger and wipe the rim of the bowl where you placed your mouth.  Turn the bowl counterclockwise twice so that the front faces you again, and then you may set the tea bowl back down on the table.

The Japanese tea ceremony may be complicated, but the focus should be on enjoying and appreciating the moment, and I think that is what drinking tea of all kinds should be about.

Stay tuned for Korean tea next!

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Sacher Torte II: The Baking

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Hotel Sacher, Sacher Torte, tea parties, Vienna

Ok, Monday I gave you our translation of the Austrian recipe for Sacher Torte.  Today I will discuss the BAKING.  Things started out smoothly.  I beat the butter and sugar until “frothy” in the same way I would cream them when baking anything else.  This turned out fine.

Then, I melted the chocolate and mixed it and the egg yolks in with the butter mixture.  Things are still going alright – I did an AWESOME job separating 8 eggs.  Austria would be proud!

Then I had to beat the egg whites “to snow.”  Looking at other Sacher Torte recipes from the internet, I determined that this must mean to “soft peaks,” so that’s what I did.  You can see the peaks below.  This took several minutes on uber-high speed with an electric mixer.  I have NO IDEA how anyone made meringue before the invention of the electric mixer.  My arm was tired from just holding up the mixer.

This is where things started to go south.  The next step said to fold the egg whites into the chocolate and butter mixture, or “buttermasse” in the recipe.  So I did this, and it was a very large volume of egg whites relative to the buttermasse; a lot of folding still gave me this ugly, spotty consistency.  I felt that this couldn’t possibly be right, but I didn’t want to stir so much that I lost all the volume of the eggs, so I stopped here and went to the next step which was to add the flour.

And that seemed to fix everything!  As soon as I started to stir in the flour, the consistency quickly became uniform and it looked a lot more like batter.  “Phew, close call!” I thought.

So I popped that sucker into the oven and heaved a sigh of relief.  Hard part over, right?  WRONG, suckas!

I pulled the torte out of the oven right on time, but it felt a little overcooked at 60 minutes cook time.  I was concerned about the step requiring I slice through the cake horizontally, imagining a normal crumbly cake consistency, but this puppy was SOLID.  It actually sliced really easily, more like a loaf of bread than cake, and I was able to easily spread the apricot jam onto the bottom layer and restack.

At this point, I’m PSYCHED.  Everything is going really well, and all the things I thought would be hard were actually pretty easy.  All that’s left is the icing.  “Bring it on,” I thought.  Oh, how the mighty fall…

This is a part of the recipe we were pretty confident about in terms of translation and ingredient quantities.  I’ve even done this sort of thing before – boiling sugar and chocolate to a smooth sauce – but this is where it all fell apart.  I think the fault is mine, not the recipe’s actually; I think I should have heated the sugar up more slowly, but whatever the reason, the sugar did not melt and the water boiled out of the chocolate, and the “icing” turned into a grainy gunge.

In a desperate attempt to save it, I threw in some butter and milk, got it boiling again, and prayed the sugar would melt, but it did not.

In the end, I used it anyway.  It was getting late, and the only other option in the house was a can of Betty Crocker vanilla icing.  I really didn’t want to go there, so I slapped the crappy icing on the cake and called it a Sacher Torte.

In the end, the cake was dense and dry – I think probably a little overcooked – and obviously the icing didn’t work out.  The taste was good, but the texture was not right.  I can’t be sure how much fault was mine and how much was the recipe’s (or our translation of the recipe).  We still ate it, but I probably won’t make this for our next Victorian tea party.