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May 21, 2008
How to avoid denaturation of milk proteins.
There’s nothing like a good cup of tea, especially, as Brian Emsley of the Royal Society of Chemistry remarks, after carrying a heavy bag of shopping in the cold rain.
But what constitutes a good cup of tea? There are some horror stories around, some disturbing habits at the kettle, some frightening behaviour in the House of Tea.
The increasingly common practice of putting a teabag in a mug and adding hot water is a crime. Apart from anything else the resulting infusion is far too hot, especially if the mug in question is some stupid thin china affair. For tea you need a teapot, end of story.
A charming vessel, designed especially for brewing the dried leaves of the shrub camellia sinensis.
The basic idea is to get the leaves immersed in water as near boiling point as makes no odds. A lot of countries, to the East, actually boil the water with the tea in it, but their cause is not ours.
To facilitate this heat factor it’s important to warm the teapot before the tea leaves and boiling water meet. It is also important, heh heh, to take the teapot to the kettle not the other way round. Then - do nothing, let it brew.
There’s always a lot of debate about whether you put the milk in first. Well, it does make a difference, the resulting cup of tea does taste slightly different depending on whether the milk goes into the mug before or after the tea. This is due to the denaturation of proteins at temperatures above 75°C. So a little bit of milk hitting a mug of hot tea gets heated up higher than a lot of cold milk getting hit by hot tea.
As is explained in a scene I wrote some years ago:
I know, I know this is all picky stuff, but when you get people pouring UHT milk [dear god] into a mug with a teabag in and adding water too long off the boil, it ain’t tea, and, after a long walk with heavy shopping in the cold rain, it simply doesn’t do.
UPDATE: oh, yes, tea is also nice served with a sweet biscuit, thanks Paula
Posted by john at May 21, 2008 12:32 PM
Comments
.............Shock & horror, where please tell are the biscuits....................
Paula x
Posted by: paula at May 21, 2008 06:18 PM