Spent tea ice cream

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

Table of Contents

i. Background

This recipe uses fermented spent green tea leaves to make an ice cream with incredible depth. Whilst we love more traditional ice cream flavours as much as the next person, there’s something a bit special about this one, as it's got a complexity that is hard to put our finger on and is quite distinct from a ‘standard’ green tea ice cream. It makes us wonder what other unique flavour profiles ice cream made with other fermented ingredients could possess.

We tested different amounts of fermented tea leaves when making ice cream. Rather than identifying an optimal quantity, we found that different amounts suit different applications. 60-80g was the sweet spot for moreishness, with the latter packing more punch. 40g gives a subtler taste that doesn’t fully showcase the tea leaves but may still suit your preference. 120g has a more intensely sour and slightly bitter flavour, perhaps better suited as one component in a dessert rather than something you’d eat by the bowlful. There’s no single correct amount—just experiment and find what works best for you.

ii. Recipe

Ingredients

• 90g heavy cream

• 270g milk

• 56g or approx. 3 medium egg yolks

• 100g sugar

• 5g salt

• fermented green tea leaves - see note above for quantities

Method

1. Blend all the ingredients in a Thermomix at full speed (setting 10) for 1 minute. 

2. Reduce speed (setting 2.5) and heat to 85°C.¹ 

3. Cool the mixture and freeze in a Pacojet container at -20 to -25°C for at least 24 hours.

4. ‘Pacotize’ the frozen mixture twice for an extra smooth ice cream with evenly integrated tea leaves, then serve.² 

iii. Adaptations

We use a Thermo Mix and a Pacojet for this recipe. If you don’t have access to this equipment, try adapting your preferred ice cream recipe to use the fermented spent green tea leaves, using this recipe as inspiration. Make sure to blend 

We’d encourage you to try adjusting the quantities in this recipe to your taste, as you might find, for example, that you prefer more or less tea leaves than we included here. We’d also encourage you to try to adapt this ice cream recipe with any variation on the fermented spent green tea leaves recipe that you might try—green or black, or even white, oolong, or others. One could even experiment with adding other flavours, too. We’re very curious to try making ice cream from other fermented ingredients. If you make or adapt this recipe, let us know how it goes.

Contributions & acknowledgements

Kim performed the original culinary R&D. Eliot documented Kim’s recipe with notes and photography, and conducted further R&D, which he used to help write the article following further discussions with Kim. Josh contributed editorial feedback. 

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Endnotes

[1] The mixture actually only needs to reach 82°C so that all the egg yolk proteins fully cook. However, our Thermomix only had temperature setting gradations of 80 and 85°C, so we set it to 85°C. If using a different method, or your Thermomix has finer gradations, heat to 82°C.

[2] The verb ‘Pacojet’ suggests for describing the use of their machine. Now we know.