/ck/ - Food & Cooking

[Anonymous No.4695990]

I decided that I'm fed up with drinking Twining's English Breakfast and I want a strong but cheap English tea of the kind that people from that country actually drink.

At my grocer I can obtain Tetley's, Red Rose, and PG Tips. Are any of these worth buying? Should I look elsewhere?

[Anonymous No.4696000]

To be honest with you, teabag tea is the post-process dust gathered up and shoved in at a premium and it is not going to taste good no matter the "brand". Ideally you want the tea that's sold in the metal tins with the foil packs inside, the ones that have the whole leaves and if you absolutely must have a strainer, they sell the disposable teabags at daiso/dollar stores. they turn out to be far cheaper in the long run than the prepackaged teabags.

[Anonymous No.4696017]

>>4696000
I have a good deal of loose tea, but it's all green tea (Japanese sencha) and it costs a lot more than I'm willing to spend for the amount of tea that I want to drink, and moreover doesn't taste anything like the tea that I'm looking for as a daily-drinker.

If you can tell me what kind of tea I should be getting and where I can find it, that'd be great. Ordering online is annoying but I suppose I can deal with it.

[Anonymous No.4696030]

Yorkshire tea is nice. Darvilles of Windsor is what the queen drinks. Bit pricey, but it's still 1/100 the cost of going to a starbucks.

>>4696000
That doesn't add up. There must be hundreds of thousands of tea bag users for every one person who drinks loose leaf tea.

[Anonymous No.4696033]

>>4696017
You can get English Breakfast and Earl Grey if that's the kind of teas you prefer in loose forms (English Breakfast and Earl Grey are just teas fermented with other items such as bergamot oranges giving their distinctive flavour), depending on how "high end" your grocery store is you should have seen the metal tins next to the teabags. It doesn't really matter where you get it from in terms of brand.

Also, if you are just getting run-of-the-mill sencha and saying it's pricey, you're probably getting overpriced shit (sencha is a generic label given to not particularly special any old green tea). Check the immigrunt dollar stores next time.

[Anonymous No.4696041]

>>4696030
Oh there are differences in teabag tea (there are some fancy loose-leaf teas prepackaged in organza teabags and so on) but tea by virtue of its production (fermented dried leaves) tend to crumble easily and machine picking/sorting means a lot of chipped and crumpled leaves and tip stems compared to flawlessly whole dried leaves. For every pound of good looseleaf tea, the byproduct is something like 8-9 pounds?

Smaller artisanal companies that handpick/process their teas and have much less wastage of course produce very little or no teabag tea at all.

[Anonymous No.4696045]

>>4696041
Also adding in: teabag tea when you open it up contains very little tea. "Natural" colourings and flavour enhancers are added, and the stuff destined for teabags is finely grounded, pre-steamed and toasted one more time to get the most bang for the buck so that as soon as the teabag hits the water, you see the tar shade.

[Anonymous No.4696048]

>>4696033
None of the grocery stores here stock much in the way of loose tea.
Admittedly, haven't gone to somewhere like Whole Foods yet (don't know if there is even one within a half-hour drive).
There are East Asian grocery stores around here but it seems unlikely to me that they'd stock high-quality loose black tea.

[Anonymous No.4696054]

>>4696048
Oh you'd be surprised. If you do not know how to read the moonrunes, ask the slanteye working the shelves or the counter.