Infused

by Henrietta Lovell

  You can imagine the frustration of identifying one tiny patch of land and one unique varietal that in combination could produce something truly extraordinary and yet not being able to capture it in the tea. Over a decade he experimented with that one field. The answer, however, revealed itself not in the factory but in his kitchen. He was cooking tomatoes, pulling the fruit from the vine, when he suddenly realised where the aroma came from. We buy tomatoes on the vine not just because they look pretty but because they smell better. It is not the fruit of the tomato plant that smells so strongly of tomatoes, it’s the hairy stem. Chefs know this, supermarkets know this, and we are aware perhaps only that we will pay more because somehow vine tomatoes are more ‘tomatoey’.

  I can’t reveal nor do I know the exact production method of the Malawi Antlers. But I can tell you that it is a white tea made from the tender growing stem and not the leaf. It is called an Antler because the shape resembles the new horns of a young deer. It is a very specific harvest and, years later, in full production, this one field can produce only about forty kilograms of finished Antlers a year.

  When I first brought it back to the UK, I had only a few kilograms, and those were sold exclusively to Heston Blumenthal at the Fat Duck restaurant. This was the mid-2000s, and the Fat Duck was at the height of its fame. Not surprisingly, Malawi Antlers got a fair bit of attention. We were all so grateful and delighted that Malawian tea had moved a little further onto the map. I was rather less ecstatic when I got an email from Alexander in Malawi explaining that a very large English tea company had offered him whatever he wanted for the next season’s entire harvest. But Alex is my friend and he came up with a plan. This unique method of making Antlers could be used on any field. Alexander gets a very good price, far more than he charges me, for stems produced from other fields. They look and taste wonderful, but they don’t have the astonishing peach and apricot flavours. That one field he reserves for me; truly a business of kindness, for which I am eternally grateful.

  MAKING MALAWI ANTLERS TEA

  One of the most remarkable things about Antlers is that they get better and better with each infusion. The water penetrates deeper into the stems and the flavour changes with each steep. The apricots remain, but a deeper, woody, umami taste gently reveals itself behind the soft, sweet fruit. It truly becomes more and more divine. I infuse this tea over and over.

  Use 3g per cup.

  For the first infusion, add 150ml boiling water to soften the stems and steep for two minutes. But don’t worry if you overdo it. The woody stems take time and don’t contain much tannin, so leaving them for five minutes or longer won’t be at all disastrous.

  You don’t need to reboil the kettle between each infusion. Each cup will be cooler, but the stems will be softer. You may need to lengthen the infusion times as the stems start to exhaust, and reheat the water if it cools too much, but don’t give up on them. I’ve made eleven infusions from the same pot.

  There is a Hollywood film star who is so obsessed with this tea that she drinks the same handful of stems throughout the day, forgoing all other drinks except water. She has the first cup as soon as she wakes and the last infusion before bed, and she still hasn’t decided which is the most delicious, although it’s her daily habit. We have the oddest conversations, always about the Antlers, and neither of us have ever tired of it.

  CHAPTER 8

  WEST HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA, USA

  There may be nights when you don’t just drink tea. And there might be ensuing mornings when you are tempted to look beyond tea for a rescue. Waking after a brilliant night of overindulgence, there is the temptation to open a bottle of champagne to fight off bitter sobriety, or to pour your hopes of recovery into a Bloody Mary. But we all know the truth: alcohol isn’t the answer; it’s simply deferring the hangover into a deeper one. If a dog bites you, another bite is going to hurt just as much, probably more. I’m not saying I wouldn’t. I’ve had glorious times waking up with a hangover and getting elated all over again. But I want to tell you about a cure, not lead you on a bender.

  There is a hotel in California with a tea on the menu called ‘The Hangover Rescue’. I put it there after a particularly decadent stay following a stint making iced tea for the VIPs at the Coachella Music Festival. I caroused with the habitués and the guests and realised that this was a hotel unlike any other and that I had a duty of care to offer them a rescue remedy.

  The hotel is the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood. It’s a pretty, white, 1920s castle perched on a hill above Sunset Boulevard. Howard Hughes made it his home, Greta Garbo sought out its secluded garden cottages for her romantic trysts and Ava Gardner could once be found at the bar. John Belushi OD’d there. If only I had got there sooner. The Chateau is still a fine place for a party, protecting its inhabitants from prying eyes and the paparazzi. In the bathroom cabinets are sets of wax earplugs and the rooms are stocked with full-sized bottles of booze instead of trifling miniatures.

  It was conceived as an apartment building, so most of the rooms are more like suites and many retain the original art deco kitchens, complete with hulking great white fridges with rocket-shaped chrome handles and enamel gas stoves. It’s the ideal place to make tea. Or cocktails. Which I had promised to do. I’d met a few random people from Los Angeles while I made possibly the finest iced tea they had ever tasted at Coachella. An English Tea Lady at a music festival in the Nevada desert is bound to turn a few heads just by virtue of her incongruity. And I made really good iced tea. I met a lot of people. I added booze to the tea. In my cups, I invited a few of them to join me, a few days later, for cocktails back in LA. I did have a vague memory of the invitations.

  Iced tea is an interesting one. When I first started working with the chaps at Momofuku Ssäm Bar in New York, they offered me a strange conundrum: they wanted tea, but they wanted only cold tea. By this time I had been battling for years to get tea into restaurants as the perfect way to end a meal. Dave Chang and his head chef, Matt Rudofker, didn’t want that. They wanted a tea that could be drunk with the meal. Iced tea. I’d never really considered it. But Dave is a man who’s made a massive impact on the restaurant scene in the US. I wanted to make a massive impact on the restaurant scene in the US, so I started considering.

  I had a low opinion of iced tea back then. When I’d lived in New York, in my earlier life, I’d tried it countless times and been consistently unimpressed. It was either bitter and dull or not much more than sugary tea-coloured water. It seemed to me that the tea was mostly there for the colour and caffeine rather than any discernible taste beyond tannin. But Momofuku is a collection of brilliant restaurants that don’t follow the norm. They didn’t want what was already on offer.

  Iced tea in the US has typically been made with lots of cheap black tea in boiling water that’s left for a long steep and then chilled and heavily sweetened. In New York they don’t always sweeten it the way they do in the south; they make it weaker and pour it over a glass full of ice with a slice of lemon. It was not, in my experience, the most delicious drink in the world.

  Our first revolutionary thought was to use good tea. It was a definite improvement, but there was no stability. We made some delicious tea, but it just didn’t last. Within twenty minutes of making the tea, the flavour changed and continued to change as the flavours flattened. We worked for some time on the infusions, but the trouble was the cell structure of the leaf. Once you add hot water you rupture the cells and the tea begins to oxidise. This oxidisation quickly dulls the flavour. I did some experiments with a few sommelier friends. I set out glasses of the same chilled tea, each one twenty minutes older than the next. If the tea had been sitting in a restaurant for four hours during service, this experiment would replicate how the flavour changed over that period. Every single sommelier thought that each glass contained a different tea, and they all preferred the first one.

  I couldn’t produce a tea that was unstable and deteriorating. I couldn’t expect the restaurant to serve some
guests a good iced tea and others a not so good one. Even worse, if the tea had been sweetened, it started to ferment after a few days. I adore kombucha (a tea infusion fermented by a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast known as a SCOBY) when it’s done well, but it needs great care and control to make it delicious, and it can’t just be knocked up willy-nilly. So any leftover tea had to be ditched – a painful, expensive waste.

  I had heard about people in Australia making ‘sun tea’, which is basically tea leaves left to steep all day in cold water on a window ledge. This tea supposedly lasted all week. The flavour softly seeps out of the leaves by osmosis without rupturing the cells. After some experimentation, I found you didn’t need the sun; in fact, it’s safer in the fridge. You can keep a cold infused tea for days on end with no reduction in quality. The flavour is stable.

  What’s more, the flavours that dissolve in cold water are sweeter and softer than those released in hot water. You don’t dissolve as much tannin, so it needs no added sugar; it’s perfect just the way it is. Gentle and refreshing, yet fascinatingly complex, the best teas made in this way beat almost anything as an accompaniment to food.

  It makes me very happy to think that a British Tea Lady started revolutionising iced tea in America. I now work with restaurants around the world to put iced teas on pairing menus, sitting alongside wines and replacing juices, or just as a sensational alternative to that dull, parsimonious bottle of water.

  For a more classic iced tea you need black tea. I know you know what I’m going to say before I even write it: use a good tea and it will taste better. But, somewhat surprisingly, you don’t have to use the best black tea to make a cold infusion. A whole-leaf tea has a small surface area to volume ratio, which makes it harder to get the tea to infuse in cold water. Some broken-grade leaf teas can work better. The tannins that might overpower when brewed hot won’t do so in cold water because they need heat to dissolve. The sweeter, more nuanced flavours get a chance to dominate. Of course, this is all relative. A cheap industrial tea won’t make your heart sing however you infuse it. You need a decent tea from a farm where they are crafting the good stuff, just not their best.

  One more thing to add: after you’ve made tea by infusing great leaf in hot water a couple of times, retain those leaves and put them in a lidded jar with some cold water. A dessertspoon of infused leaves will make a decent jam jar’s worth of iced tea. Pop them in the fridge for a good few hours or overnight. Then, strain the tea and you have a lovely chilled third infusion. It won’t stay stable for very long, but it’s still good the next day. And it’s a lovely way of not wasting a trace of deliciousness. Some of the restaurants I work with do this with used leaves and serve it at the staff meal the next day. We once made a whole afternoon tea, on the roof of Selfridges with New York chef Dan Barber from pre-infused leaf, to showcase the value of what we can too readily discard as waste.

  MAKING COLD INFUSED TEA

  Every tea responds differently to cold extraction, just as every tea responds differently in hot water. The best advice is to experiment with each one until you’ve achieved the exact flavour profile you are after.

  The most delicious flavours are easily dissolvable in cold temperatures, and a little leaf goes a long way; it just takes time. The steeping is generally eight to twelve hours. By then all the flavour that is dissolvable in cold water will have been released from the leaf. You don’t have to worry about over-steeping and can happily leave it overnight. Rolled oolongs are the exception – it might take forty-eight hours for the water to fully penetrate the leaves and draw out all the flavour.

  For green or white tea you need roughly 6g of leaf per litre. For oolong, 6 to 10g. For many black teas you may need more leaf: 10 to 12g per litre of water. I would recommend starting with 8g per litre and increasing by 2g each time until you hit on the perfect ratio.

  Once infused, strain the tea through the finest filter you have. This will remove all the particles of tea and keep the liquid crystal clear. Then pop it back in the fridge in a sealed bottle, where it will keep perfectly for three days.

  It is important to remember that these cold infusions pack quite a punch. Though they taste sweet, silky and elegant, they are laden with caffeine. All that time in the water has allowed the caffeine to fully dissolve. You can’t taste it, but it lies there quietly, ready to raise you up. It kept us going deliciously in the desert.

  *

  I was staying in one of the cottages at Chateau Marmont, set in the garden among lush vegetation and gentle fountains that drowned out the gasoline roar of Sunset Boulevard below. The evening I arrived, I washed the desert sand away in the original tiled bathroom that Marilyn Monroe might have bathed in, and slept for twelve hours.

  The next day I felt revived and in need of tea. My cottage opened onto a patio with wrought-iron tables and chairs set under fragrant branches. Hummingbirds flew in and out of banana palms heavy with fruit. Lemons lolled from branches. Three other cottages shared this space, and in the seclusion of the garden everyone felt safe to leave their doors open and wander in and out. It was too lovely in California to sit inside. I made friends with an actress, an art collector and a shoe designer and his wife, over endless pots of my loveliest leaves. Good tea can be like a puppy in the park: it draws people to you.

  By evening I decided I was ready for anything again and I promised my new friends I would make cocktails. I called reception and asked for martini glasses, ice and a shaker. My fridge was furnished with a bottle of decent chilled gin. A string of white-jacketed waiters arrived with silver trays at their shoulders and white napkins draped over their arms. The trays were heavy with buckets of ice and glasses. I felt as though F. Scott Fitzgerald was still in residence, tapping away at the desk in the cool gloom of his room, or that Errol Flynn might stride down from the pool, his hair wet, shirtless and in cream linen trousers, to join us for a livener.

  The waiters laid out the gleaming chrome and glass in my drawing room, while I infused jasmine tea in gin. I stirred us all Jasmine Martinis. Not long after, the calls from reception started on my room telephone, telling me I had guests. I had to go to the garden gate to let them in, recognising only dimly characters I had met at the festival. The bottle of gin turned to four as we all emptied our fridges and more glasses and buckets of ice were called for.

  JASMINE MARTINI

  The method is almost the same as for the White Silver Tip Martini in Chapter 2.

  Measure 25g of Jasmine Silver Tip into a jug. Pour in a 750ml bottle of vodka (my preference is Grey Goose for this). Stir and leave for fifteen minutes.

  Strain through a tea strainer. (If you want to keep it for any length of time, strain again through an unbleached coffee filter, to remove any tiny particles of tea.) Stir or shake over ice and strain into chilled martini glasses.

  *

  At some point we went up to the bar and I found the secret smoking terrace. There was Anthony Bourdain, being charming and kind. And there was a once-famous pop-star showing off her jewellery collection for dogs. ‘I designed them for people, but they look so much better on my dog.’

  I started chatting to a man who said he was a director. I asked him to name his films, and he reeled off some titles I’d never heard of. I didn’t believe him. A very angry man came through the heavy curtain screening the terrace and accosted the fellow.

  Angry Man: Why the hell don’t you answer my calls, man?

  Director (smiling and holding up a flat palm at arm’s length): Hold on, buddy, I haven’t read the script yet.

  Angry Man: Just read the script, okay? Read the fucking script!

  You can’t slam a curtain, which slightly diminished the drama of his departure.

  The director asked me if I believed him now.

  I did, but he was less intriguing somehow. Sensing I was losing interest, he asked me what I did.

  ‘Tea.’

  This often gets translated in the human brain as ‘teeth’. Clearly, teeth makes more sense as
a profession than tea. I suppose there are many more dentists than tea ladies. What usually happens is I repeat the word ‘tea’, and they repeat the word ‘teeth’ back at me. This goes on like a series of tennis volleys until I make a gesture with my left hand as though holding a saucer and with my right as though holding the handle of a teacup I lift to my mouth. (I would never, ever raise my little finger.) I mime sipping tea. At this point they say, ‘Ah, tea!’

  That night I couldn’t be arsed to do the mime. After the usual back and forth, I just agreed. ‘Yes, teeth.’

  ‘What exactly do you do – are you a dentist?’

  I had my little yellow suitcase of tea samples with me. I tapped it confidently and said, ‘This is where I keep most of Hollywood’s smiles.’

  Veneers have a habit of popping off in the most inconvenient locations and situations. Imagine you’re about to do a press conference for your latest film in Shanghai, or you’re shooting on location in Sienna or Sydney or Saigon, and you wake up with a missing veneer. You might not trust a local dentist. You need ‘the Teeth Lady’. At any moment she is ready to hop on a plane or the private jet you send and be at your side and in your mouth. The Teeth Lady travels the world, voyaging from film star’s maw to pop-star’s gob. She’s like a superhero, always arriving in the nick of time. When everything is about to fall apart because you are due on stage or on set with a missing veneer revealing a filed fang, she’s always on hand to save the day.