Saturday, May 10, 2008

Adjusting...

Well there is an adjustment curve for every new country I visit (and it seems to get easier every time). One of the things I ran into in Afghanistan is the love of tea, which I share, but they like it the Limey/Yank (Yank = Americans from the north) way, hot. Being from the Southeastern US I often crave sweet iced tea which seems to be a culinary anomaly found just in the SE US (I have found many other places that serve sweet hot tea but not sweet cold tea). Another thing I have noticed is that most teas around the world are pretty damn bitter, à la earl grey. In the US (and perhaps the rest of the world though it seems rare) we have a few brands (varieties?) that are not bitter and also caffeine free (caffeine is fine but it only takes alittle to keep me up into the wee hours of the morning).


So, here I have taken on a combination of tea drinking preparations to come up with my own tea here. Mainly chilling the tea (southeast US), adding Sugar (many different places), and adding milk (ok, in my case soy milk but its the adding of a protein that is the key here, its an Britain/Indian thing [I never have figured out if the Limeys got it from the Indians or the other way around]) to take away the bitterness.


Side note: I was a miserable chemistry student (even though I did pretty well even in the higher levels of collegiate biology) but one of the few things I took away from Chemistry 101 was how milk (more specifically protein) neutralizes the bitterness in tea (for more details on that try here or here) so when drinking bitter tea I thank Chemistry 101, and of course the Indians/Brits.

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