I published an essay on making tea with birch twigs a few days ago.
A reader named Rev emailed me, ‘Hi Robin, this silver birch twig tea is an absolute winner.’ Thanks, Rev. I’m glad it worked for you.
So, in keeping with the theme of brewing a nice cuppa, here’s a reprint of an article I wrote in 2017 on making tea with dried beech leaves.
Winter is an exciting time for me as a forager.
While others bemoan the decline in wild edible plants, I, on the other hand, get all excited, wondering what I can find and what I can prepare from the limited availability out on the land.
A couple of days ago, as I was taking the grand-urchins outside to play, my eyes saw the beauty of the ‘skeleton trees’ against the grey sky and the patterns and shapes they make.
When I do this, my senses open up. I love natural form and structure devoid of human mingling—natural art right before us.
From the corner of my eye, I noticed some honey-golden beech leaves on a hedge. I was immediately taken back to when I worked with chef Paul Wedgwood in Edinburgh in 2013.
At our event, Paul served a broth—well, actually, it was more like a Japanese Dashi.
Dashi is a simple stock usually made from water, dried kelp and bonito fish flakes.
Paul had served his forest floor Dashi as a non-alcoholic aperitif using various dried tree leaves.
So, this ‘memory whisper’ creeping in my mind made me pay more attention to the Beech (Fagus sylvatica) I was walking past than usual.
Something was tugging at me to gather some leaves and plop them into hot water.
I’m wary of gathering straight from the forest floor, particularly in urban environments, due to the amount of domestic pet waste that seems to litter the environment.
The joy of skipping and kicking the dead leaves these days is more of a hazard than when I was a boy.
So, with leaves in hand, I returned to my kitchen.
I tested various steeping times and came to a happy balance, where the flavours came through by using 5 grams of leaves and 500ml of boiling water.
I allowed the brew to infuse for 15 minutes, and the flavours (and colour) came out.
Less time than that, and you won’t experience the true delights of this slightly off-beat recipe.
Next time, I will try 3 grams of leaves and brew it for 25 minutes.
The flavours are reminiscent of sencha tea, a type of Japanese ryokucha.
If you think of traditional black or green teas, the flavours are developed through oxidation/fermentation.
For some reason, I have a niggling in the back of my mind of someone mentioning that winter leaves left on the tree go through a similar process.
I have no evidence for this, but it is worth exploring.
A word of caution, though.
Tannins in the leaves give black tea its flavour. This beech-leaf tea is best avoided if you cannot drink black tea due to kidney problems.
Talk soon,
P.S. Shortly, I will publish the new edition of my out-of-print Eatweeds Cookbook. The first edition came out in 2011.
The new edition will keep with the traditional cookbooks of the past. No photos.
That’s going to upset some folks, but really, my work is to be used, not just displayed on a bookshelf looking pretty.
Let’s be honest here. How often have you avoided making a recipe because the photos of the result look like something out of masterchef!
I love old cookbooks, which were just text: an introduction, a list of ingredients, and the method (how to cook it).
So that’s what I’m doing. It’s a cookbook, not a book on plant identification.
If you want one of those, my other books have been written to help make plant identification easy. See here and here.
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