Instead, he said, crossly, that if he were forced to offer advice, it would be to do what he did: he tried to enjoy the life he had as much as possible.
A frenetic, peripatetic life is the one I have. I chose it. It takes me on adventures from tax returns and container ships to silent mountains. I realised that I didn’t need to change my life, only live the life I had made for myself with as much pleasure as possible.
Forgive me for stating the ridiculously obvious: life’s not all good; it can’t be. We have piles of paperwork, to say nothing of stomach-churning email overload, illness, heartbreak and loss. But there are many moments of loveliness. I don’t know what your life is like. I wouldn’t dare advise you how to live it, but there is one small thing I hold true: to find the greatest possible pleasure in tea.
When it comes to matcha, it’s the ceremonial grade. The best is made from leaf that has been shaded from direct sunlight for the last few weeks before harvest, like gyokuro. The stressed plants increase their efforts to photosynthesise, concentrating the chlorophyll, theanine, and umami flavours and causing the intense green colour. The leaf is very rapidly steamed, and dried to become tencha. Then it is destemmed and carefully ground between ceramic or stone plates to make a fine powder. This is meticulously done, as slowly as possible, so as not to produce heat and bake the tea. It can take twenty-four hours to grind a single kilogram of tea.
Ceremonial-grade matcha is sublime, but it really is expensive. It’s made from the most precious leaf and is not in any way cheap to produce, so please don’t be surprised at the price.
Instead of being an infusion of tea leaves, matcha is the leaf itself, ground fine and suspended in water. You drink the whole thing, so you get a big hit of both flavour and caffeine. I would advise drinking it in small quantities; it’s potent stuff. It should always be served with something sweet and sticky to balance the bitterness and coat your tummy. Just as when drinking espresso or whisky, an empty stomach might find it a bit abrupt.
The culinary grades, reserved for cooking, are cheaper because they don’t need to use such expensive, beautiful leaf or be so carefully processed.
If you’re making a matcha latte, I wouldn’t use your best matcha; the milk will muffle the flavour and it would be a bit of a waste, but I’d still use a ceremonial grade. And it’s worth seeking out organic matcha. There is limited farmland in Japan and labour costs are very high, so tea growers are often keen on maximising production with heavy use of fertilisers and pesticides and may rely on very liberal amounts of herbicides to keep jobs like weeding to a minimum.
MAKING MATCHA
Hot
Measure 3g of matcha (two heaped scoops of a traditional bamboo chashaku spoon) into a deep-sided ceramic matcha bowl and heat 60 to 70ml of hot water (half a teacup) to around 70°C. Some people prefer water at 80°C for more intense tannins.
Pour in around 10ml of the water to cover the matcha and mix it to a fine paste with no lumps. Add the remaining water and whisk vigorously in an M- or W-shape to suspend the fine powder evenly in the water and create a fine foam. Try not to let the bottom of the whisk touch the bottom of the bowl. (To make a latte, make the paste as described, then use hot milk in place of the remaining water.)
Drink it immediately from the bowl.
The art of whisking the delicate powder into a light foam with a bamboo whisk is a joy in itself. I really wouldn’t use an electric milk-frother. The whisking is so easy, there’s no point, and it won’t give you the same smooth texture.
Monks use matcha to maintain focus during long hours of meditation. Drinking from the warmed bowl held between cupped hands will lift and transport you.
Cold
One way of eking out your precious ceremonial-grade matcha is to make a cold extraction. It’s not as intense but softer and more approachable, especially for breakfast. You only need 3g per litre of water. Make the paste with your whisk in 10ml of cold water, then dilute it with a further litre and shake vigorously. The fine powder infuses rapidly and will be ready in less than an hour. It’s also good for cocktails and to pick you up without any fuss.
CHAPTER 11
HILE, EAST NEPAL
Tea is, of course, much more than rescue and remedy. It can be a source of pure joy, offering you a proper buzz of elation from its flavour alone.
I’m particularly partial to a Nepali black tea for elevenses, and perhaps a ginger biscuit. Specifically, the teas of Jun Chiyabari. There is something about the teas from this tiny farm that never fails to make me happy. They force me to pause and enjoy them properly. We drink them a lot at my office and every time a cup is put down in front of me I marvel at the aromas wafting up. It’s not something you could easily become numb to.
Holding a cup of this Nepalese tea, I can travel not just to the farm but back to my childhood. It reminds me of my mother, dressed and ready to go out for dinner, coming to kiss me goodnight. It was rare to see her with her ‘face on’, her eyelashes blackened and her hair held in place by Elnett hairspray. On those special occasions, I’d get a whiff of it as she bent down to kiss me, her cheek smooth and scented with fine powder. And on top of all that was the intoxicating smell of her perfume. It was never engulfing; she was sparing with it, so you had to get in close to catch it.
For my mother, putting on scent is like wearing expensive jewels; it’s not an everyday thing. To me as a child, it made her seem like another person, an impossibly glamorous woman who was momentarily at my bedside and then gone. She even seemed to move differently, more languorously, in a dress rather than her usual jeans. There was a softness too. She wasn’t the brisk, busy, day-to-day mother rushing to work, to get me ready, to arrange our lives and our home and complete the endless tasks that left her no time. I caught the thrill of her excitement. I felt at once safe at home in my bed and afforded a peek into a world of grown-up adventures.
The Nepali teas, grown high in the foothills of the Himalayas, evoke those feelings in me. The most perfumed of black teas, they have a floral fragrance layered over dark depth, exoticism and warm comfort.
I especially need this tea as winter approaches, when everything is shutting down around me. It’s an elevenses tea to drink by the window, observing the rain in the wind clattering against the glass, the autumn light paling. It suits the shortening days of falling leaves like a perfect flavour pairing. Just as a pu’er matches wild mushrooms on toast, or an afternoon tea needs a scone with jam and cream, this Nepali tea soothes the dying days of summer, its sweetness proof against the white sky and rain, the aromas reminiscent of fallen leaves and the fragrant waft of the last honeysuckle winding through the hedge.
When you are drinking the second infusion of a fragrant tea like this, try it with a square of good dark chocolate with a high cocoa content. As I write this, I’m enjoying a hand-rolled Nepali tea with dark chocolate made from 85 per cent cocoa and watching sunlight and shadows spread across a September field. The second infusion is softer, less floral, but deeper. A sip of tea and the last morsels of chocolate melt in my hot mouth. The next sip of tea tastes like hot chocolate, but the texture is clean like water. It has both intense depth and a lightness, like many of the best pleasures.
The tea grows 1835 metres above sea level on a farm near Hile, a small hill town in eastern Nepal. The farm is owned by two brothers, Lochan and Bachan, and managed by a wonderful chap called Morris Orchard. From his name, I wasn’t sure what to expect the first time I flew to Nepal to meet him. I thought he might be an old British planter in a pith helmet. My first conversations had been with Bachan, a Nepalese man of great intellect and enthusiasm, who had brought some of his precious tea to my office in London. His eyes filled with delight as he watched me fall in love with his tea. I don’t have much of a poker face. After a few sips, I was ready to arrange a visit to his tea garden.
That first trip, my friend the photographer Paul Winch-Furness came with me. Bachan met us in Kathmandu to make the rather epic journey to the farm. We bega
n by flying in a tiny dilapidated plane, like a ropey old eagle, from one mountaintop to another. Then we drove down into the creases of steaming valleys, through the straggle of haphazard villages and up into the mountains once again.
On top of a ridge we stopped for masala chai at the side of the road (chai means ‘tea’ in several Indian languages, and the spiced version is masala chai). We waited while a beaming lady in a grass-green sari made us a fresh batch over an open fire in a dark, wooden hut. Her husband and daughter worked beside her, cooking spiced noodles in a large wok. We sat outside on upturned oil cans to drink the sweet, milky brew.
I am not often a fan of adding milk to my tea – this is entirely my personal preference and please don’t think I am disparaging your taste if you like a drop in your cup. Each to their own pleasure. I just want to taste every subtlety, and milk can smooth those out. But masala chai is not a subtle tea. It’s a dark black tea boiled in milk with aromatic spices.
The people of India, Nepal and Sri Lanka had no history of drinking tea. The British introduced them to it (along with other wonderful and many dreadful things), but they kept the best for export. And what remained was expensive, far beyond the means of most people. What they could get their hands on were the lowest grades, the bitterest, finest particles left over at the end of the production process. To make it delicious, they had to doctor it a bit. Tea is still not often drunk at home in India, certainly not outside the houses of the wealthy and those in the big cities. Masala chai is a drink mostly for journeys. You get wonderful chai in the street or on the train. It’s safe, boiled, hot and sweet. It will get you through, lift you up, keep you going.
Not only do I not often put milk in my tea, I don’t have a sweet tooth. I don’t put sugar in my tea either. But masala chai is not just tea. It’s a drink made with tea, where tea is an ingredient, not its focus. Tea might impart malt, caramel or nutty notes or give grassy, vegetable flavours and many things besides when used as an ingredient. It’s a herbaceous plant, after all, with many variations. There are more teas than there are types of oregano, for example, or cardamom or basil. For masala chai, tea is the deep, dark, bitter base on which to build a sweet, spicy brew.
It is both tea and food – so quite a decent all-in-one elevenses.
MAKING MASALA CHAI
Without Milk
If you use good tea to make chai, you can enjoy it without having to boil the tea in milk. It’s a different drink, of course: a subtler spiced black tea that’s not too tannic and so doesn’t need the civilising influence of milk and sugar to make it palatable. But it is also good with a spot of cold milk added to the cup.
The balance of these spices is at your discretion, but these are the main ingredients from my personal recipe:
250g Nepali tea
3g black peppercorns
3g cloves
8g green cardamom pods
One cinnamon stick (or 20g of powder)
6g dry ginger (or slice a fresh piece into your cup instead, which is even better)
Grind the spices in a pestle and mortar or run them through a spice grinder. Add the ground spices to the dry tea, stir and leave to mingle for a couple of days.
To infuse, use 2.5g of the spiced tea per 150ml of water heated to 80 or 90°C.
With Milk
If you want a more traditional masala chai, substitute a strong Breakfast tea or Assam and boil the tea in a saucepan of milk with the fresh spices as per the previous recipe. Use 2.5g of spiced tea per 150ml of milk. Use fresh ginger, not dried. Add sugar to taste.
You can also make a strong pot of black tea separately to the spiced milk and combine the two.
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On that mountain road in Nepal, I was curious to see the quality of the tea being used and I asked the lady to show me the leaf. It was a CTC (machine-made) not an orthodox leaf. This was a small hut with a tarpaulin roof by the side of the road in one of the poorest nations of the world. But that CTC she showed me was vastly superior to the grade that goes into most British tea bags. As the processed leaf comes out of the machine, it is graded by weight and size of particle. The largest, heaviest particles are the highest quality with the best flavour. That was the tea the lady held in her hand by the side of the road, not the tiny dusty particles known as ‘fannings’, the lowest grade and cheapest output of the vast industrial machines, which you might find if you tore open a British bag. Interestingly, the best CTC grades are often bought by the poorest nations: in North Africa, Afghanistan and the Urals. In places where tea is drunk and life is hard, they drink the highest quality tea they can afford. Ironically, the British can afford the best but for the last seventy-odd years have mostly drunk the worst.
That first visit to Nepal and the tea gardens of Jun Chiyabari is riveted in my mind like a steel girder, the memory firmly secured. I can still taste that roadside masala chai and picture the thick ceramic cup it was served in, patterned for a 1970s kitchen. However shabby my memory – and it seems to get increasingly so, sacrificing names, the details of conversations and promises – flavours and the most brilliant adventures don’t get lost. The colours of Nepal are still right there, so intense they are impossible to forget. Not in an ‘Oh that was pretty’ sort of way, like a pink front door in a grey London terrace, or a pot of red geraniums in a white Andalusian street. I mean everything. Everywhere you look in Nepal is embellished. You see poverty, real poverty, people with so little, but what little they have they make splendid with colour. The humblest shack is jewel bright.
We passed slowly through small villages, seeing glimpses into private lives. A man bent forwards, washing his hair with a hosepipe in front of a flamingo-pink corrugated-iron door. Faces peering out of shady rooms from peacock-blue window frames. Drivers snoozed in the backs of their rainbow-festooned cycle-rickshaws, waiting for a ride. During the long journey up to the farm, and we are talking a full day of bumping along, the colours were everywhere and everywhere vivid.
Painted lorries streamed past like carnival floats. People lined the roads. We passed men and women sitting in doorways, sitting under trees, sitting on chairs outside their stalls, patiently enduring until the action arrived or passed on by. The men were mostly dressed in short-sleeved checked shirts and jeans. But the women were wrapped in brilliant saris and draped in scarves threaded with gold and woven like exotic tartan.
As we climbed up and up into the Himalayan foothills, the air became thinner and the colours softer. The higher villages were less jubilant and more dusty brown; the vegetation got sparser and the houses simpler and shabbier – until we reached Jun Chiyabari, shimmering green with tea.
The farm manager, Morris Orchard, walked out to meet us as we drew up in front of his simple bungalow. Behind him came his wife, his shy daughter and an ebullient little boy darting between them. Despite what I had imagined from his name, Morris is Nepali. His great-grandfather was a British tea planter, and the name endured. He comes from a long line of tea people working across Nepal and India, but none of them were quite like Morris.
Over a cup of chocolatey black tea that tasted a little like melted Maltesers, he explained his reasons for crafting this truly extraordinary leaf. He had argued many times with his tea-growing father as to the sanity of this tiny garden making only the finest hand-rolled and orthodox tea, and all under organic cultivation. To ignore the expedient use of chemicals can seem to some farmers like Christian Scientists eschewing medicine; focusing on quality over volume can look like financial suicide. Nepal is not somewhere that enjoys a luxurious margin for error.
Morris respects his father, but he is proving the possibility of this new outlook with Bachan and Lochan. Their argument is a simple one of reputation and sustainability. If their land is going to prosper for many generations to come, it must produce valuable tea and maintain a rich biodiversity, which is never improved by killing off all the insects and herbs. We spoke about the decline in the bee population in Europe as we walked through tea spun with wild flowers
, butterflies and ladybirds and loud with crickets. You can always tell a farm is organic by the dense greenery bordering the rows of bushes. Although these weeds compete for nutrients with the tea bushes, with careful husbandry and weeding they can work symbiotically with the tea to enrich the earth and counter soil erosion and water evaporation. They foster a rich environment for wildlife. And make astoundingly good tea.
Like several farms I work with, Jun Chiyabari is too small to carry the vast expense and amount of red tape required to certify it as organic. Some farmers don’t own a computer or have the skills needed to deal with acres of foreign paperwork. I have the tea tested in Switzerland. It’s better that my tea company bears the burden of proving that their tea is good and decent, rather than the good and decent people making it. I wouldn’t want to penalise the small farmers just because they lack the wherewithal for certification enjoyed by the vast corporations.
Morris has a round face that creases easily into a deep smile, but there is a seriousness about him, as with Alexander at Satemwa, that comes from the responsibility he carries for the land and the people who live and work on it. Both men are very gentle, thoughtful, quiet even, but with the mischievous streak of revolutionaries and a concrete determination. It takes a man or woman of great delicacy to produce really fine tea, but in a world that has lost an appreciation of the value of what they do, they also need an incredible strength of purpose. They are banking on a world that doesn’t exist yet. They are pinning their futures, and those of all the people whose livelihoods, if not lives, depend on them, on a very brave, visionary risk: that if they produce something really good, the world will want to drink it, and together we can break the cycle that has no future.
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