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Drink

Green Tea

A brewed beverage made from green tea leaves steeped in boiling water, optionally sweetened with sugar and served hot or iced.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Green Tea

Why it works: Green tea and lemon work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 104 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Green Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and steep

  1. Scald the teapot.

  2. Add ½ pint of boiling water to 2 teaspoons of green tea.

  3. Let it steep for 15 to 20 minutes.

  4. Add more boiling water to achieve desired strength.

Make iced tea

  1. For iced tea, scald the teapot and add 1 quart of boiling water and 2 teaspoons of green tea.

  2. Strain the tea into a pitcher without stirring and let it cool.

Serve

  1. Serve over ice with 2 teaspoons of sugar and a squeeze of lemon if desired.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Green tea + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Green tea + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together159 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Green tea
Provides the main flavour and aroma of the drink.
Boiling water
Extracts flavour from the tea leaves and sets the strength of the brew.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the tea's natural bitterness.

The step that matters

Steep for 15 to 20 minutes, then strain. Tea leaves keep releasing tannins the longer they sit in hot water. Oversteeping makes green tea bitter and astringent, so the timing matters. Straining without stirring keeps loose leaf particles and extra tannins out of the drink.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (green tea, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Pineapplefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against green tea, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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