Spent tea green sauces

Recipe

11 Mar

Written By R&D by Kim Wejendorp; words by Eliot Beeby, with Josh Evans

This is part of our series on upcycling tea by-products.

Table of Contents

i. Background

‘Green sauces’—found across many cuisines and made with an assortment of herbs—are usually used to lend brightness and a flavoursome punch to dishes: think salsa verde, chermoula, chimichurri, zhug, gremolata, pesto and many more.¹ In her wonderful book, Flavorama, Arielle Johnson breaks down the culinary science behind classic green sauces and offers a ‘choose your own adventure’-style guide for improvising and constructing new versions.

The conceptual familiarity of the green sauce illustrates how different regional cuisines can arrive at similar culinary conclusions about what a dish needs. Some of these sauces can even follow a similar grammar, rules about how recipes or meals—or in this case condiments—should be structured and prepared.² These sauces are always green and herby; usually acidic or sour; mostly fatty; often pungent, spicy, umami and/or funky; and sometimes fragrant or fruity.³ Although they might use different ingredients—or ‘words’, to continue the linguistic metaphor—green sauces all follow broadly the same grammatical rules. Flavour is constructed with combinations of ingredients that make sense together in much the same way that sentences are constructed with nouns, adjectives, and verbs.

Paying attention to this grammar is one way of doing food innovation more discerningly, as novel ingredients can offer new words with which to construct sentences. Here we use fermented spent green tea leaves to make two new versions of green sauces, one with more of a South East Asian flavour profile and another with a more Mediterranean profile.

ii. Recipe

(a) Fermented spent green tea ‘Lahpet-style’ green sauce

This green sauce could be used as a dressing in a Burmese lahpet thoke-style salad, harking back to the original inspiration for the fermented tea leaves, or for any South East Asian-style dish needing a herbal kick.

Ingredients

40g fermented spent green tea leaves
20g fresh coriander leaves
5g fresh red chilli
30g lime juice
5g fresh ginger root
5g salt
10g sesame oil

Method

Blend all the ingredients together in a blender until smooth. Adjust seasoning if required.

(b) Fermented spent green tea salsa verde

This Mediterranean-style green sauce is delicious on grilled fish, meat or vegetables.

Method

Blend all the ingredients together in a blender. Adjust seasoning if required.

Ingredients

60g fermented spent green tea leaves
7g garlic
14g fresh mint leaves
20g fresh parsley leaves
15g mustard
45g vinegar e.g. apple cider
100g extra virgin olive oil
6g anchovies

iii. Adaptations

These recipes are just two possibilities. You could add the fermented spent green tea leaves to any of your favourite green sauce recipes, used as some or all of the green, acidic, sour, umami and/or fruity components. We’d highly recommend Arielle’s book for more ideas on improvising your own green sauce.

Contributions & acknowledgements

Kim performed the original culinary R&D. Eliot wrote the article in discussion with Kim. Josh contributed editorial feedback. Emil Hornstrup Jakobsen (@fotoemil.nu) photographed the green sauce in our food lab.

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