Buckwheat tea

Roasted groats brewed with genuinely boiling water, and then eaten as well as drunk.

Vegan.

Ingredients

• 60 g hulled buckwheat groats
• 800 ml water

Method

1. BOILING WATER, AND THAT IS THE OPPOSITE OF THE SENCHA PAGE. There is no leaf here and nothing to scorch into bitterness: this is a roasted grain, and it needs full heat to give anything up at all. Water at 75C produces faintly beige nothing.
2. ROAST THE GROATS DRY FIRST, in a heavy pan over a medium heat, 8 to 10 minutes, shaking constantly. They go from pale to deep gold and start to smell of toast and malt.
3. SHOP-BOUGHT SOBACHA IS ALREADY ROASTED; raw groats are not, and brewing them unroasted gives something that tastes of wet flour.
4. WATCH FOR THE TURN. From gold to burnt is about forty-five seconds, and burnt buckwheat is acrid in a way that cannot be diluted out.
5. Tip them straight out of the hot pan onto a cold plate or they carry on cooking.
6. Groats into the pot, boiling water over, 5 MINUTES. It is a far longer brew than any leaf tea because a hard grain gives up its flavour slowly.
7. A longer brew does no harm either -- there is nothing in it to turn bitter, so ten minutes is merely stronger.
8. Strain into cups. It should be clear amber, not cloudy; cloudiness means the groats were broken or stirred.
9. EAT THE STRAINED GROATS. They are soft, nutty and perfectly good scattered on rice or a salad, and throwing them away is the ordinary mistake.
10. Good hot or cold, and it is caffeine-free, which is why it is drunk in the evening.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under Japan · All recipes