Matcha Green Tea

The folks over at Culinary Teas, whom I may have mentioned a time or two, have a nice blog, where one of the owners of the company writes about teas she is enjoying and current specials.  They also sometimes do a sort of hat raffle give-away, where if you're interested, you post on the blog entry, then she puts all the names in a hat and picks a winner.  Some months back, the give-away was Matcha green tea, something I've always wanted to try, and to my surprise, I won!

So, then Matcha is a finely milled green tea.  The leaves are essentially ground into a fine powder, which is then whisked into hot water to create a unique cup of tea.  The fact that you're consuming the tea leaf itself puts Matcha pretty high up there in the good-for-you scale, but sadly makes it pretty difficult to make.  I don't own a "tea whisk" and don't have current plans to shell out money for an apparatus that's really only useful for a small bag of one type of tea.  My attempts at Matcha without a whisk were...well, hot water with clumps of tea in it.  Not exactly appetizing.  So the tea sat in the cupboard for a few months, while I wondered what, exactly, I would do with it.

As one of my other selves, when I'm not being a highly renowned tea expert and writer*, I spend a good chunk of time running.  I run more days than not, and sometimes for very long distances.  I find running enjoyable for a lot of reasons, but a downside is that it can leave your legs pretty sore, especially if you've spent two or three hours pounding away at rocky trails.  A while back, I read a suggestion that protein, consumed as quickly as possible after exercise, can ease some of the muscle aches, since the muscles repair themselves more quickly with ample protein.  So, like a ridiculous body builder, I buy and consume whey protein.  And it works...really well.  Unless I actually damage myself, I'm rarely sore, even the day after a rather punishing run.

I write this not to brag about my running "prowess" **, but because one morning, looking for my big canister of powder, I noticed the Matcha sitting in the cupboard, looking all lonely and forlorn.  I then looked at my vanilla flavored whey protein and the milk, and thought, hmm, why not?  Vanilla green tea protein smoothie is pretty good, it turns out.***  I'm sure it's kind of a waste of quality green tea, but it was just sitting on my shelf otherwise, and Matcha is used to flavor ice cream and other foods.  The tea itself has what I consider a typical Japanese green flavor profile, mild natural sweetness, and a fair bit of vegetal plant flavor, but not nearly as much as some teas I've had.  The vegetal notes are pretty washed out when mixed with vanilla protein powder and milk or water, leaving a more run-of-the-mill green tea flavor.  Overall, though, a great use of an otherwise wasted tea.  I don't think I'll grade the tea, this seems a bit outside the box for a tea review.


*In my own special fantasy world, I get paid to write about tea.  And Scotch.

**I may not be fast, but I usually have a smile on my face.

***The protein powder mixes very well with black coffee, too.  I usually get the standard whatever you can find at Walmart, but Trader Joe's makes a protein powder as well, with fewer weird chemicals in it, that we get from time to time.