A few weeks (months? time flies) ago thanks to The Twitters I was connected with the folks at one of my fave tea shops, David’s Tea. They sent over 3 different teas for me to do some experimenting in the kitchen with: Exotica, The Glow and Honeybush Lemon Ginger.
The obvious thing to make was some iced tea with some inclusions. Those will come, but with fall setting in I’m not really in the mood for iced tea. Then I remembered reading about a technique called tea-smoking. Tea-smoking is just what it sounds like – you smoke food using tea leaves. The tea leaves are combined with rice and usually sugar and you smoke away.
I’ve heard about this technique being used with fish and even chicken. Since I’m not much of a chicken fan I decided to smoke some salmon. I smoked salmon a few months ago using my wok with great results. I did a traditional smoke with wood chips. Knowing that my wood chip smoking worked I was totally pumped to try it with tea.
I wanted to do salmon with Asian flavours so I put together a simple marinade with a bit of soy sauce, ginger, garlic, honey and chili flakes and let it marinate for about an hour. My tea of choice in this case was the Honeybush Lemon Ginger because I thought that it mind lend a nice hint of citrus and ginger to the fish.
To smoke the fish I combined equal parts of the tea, brown rice and sugar. I lined my wok with aluminum foil and added my smoking mixture. Then I placed my bamboo steamer (loaded with the salmon) on top and started smoking. The mixture didn’t have any trouble smoking and burnt out quicker than expected. After about 10 minutes the salmon was cooked through.
For an extra blast of flavour I made a glaze of honey and ginger that I brushed on top of the finished dish.
Unlike wood-smoking, tea-smoking imparted a very subtle flavour to the fish. I definitely picked up on the grassiness of the tea leaves and also picked up a bit on the ginger (and not because it was in the glaze and the marinade). I think next time I’d play around with upping the amount of tea in the mixture to see how that works out.
Tea-Smoking Technique
Use your favourite marinade for salmon to give it flavour throughout and then use the technique below to tea-smoke it!
What You’ll Need…
1/2 cup tea leaves (I used David’s Tea Honeybush Lemon Ginger)
1/2 cup brown rice
1/2 cup sugar
Foil
Bamboo Steamer
A Wok
What You’ll Need To Do…
Combine the tea, rice and sugar in a bowl.
Line the bottom and sides of a wok with foil and dump the tea mixture on top of the foil. Turn the heat up under the wok to medium heat and allow the mixture to smoke.
Once things are smoking put the bamboo steamer on top of the mixture, place the fish in the steamer and cover. Allow the fish to smoke for about 5 minutes and then flip and cook for about another 5 minutes or until the salmon is cooked. If you find the mixture is burning to quickly turn the heat down a smidgen.
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love that anyone can do this without a ton of equipment!
it really is super easy!
Mmm this looks fantastic! And surprisingly simple to do as well. Great post!
Thank you! I need to try this again.
I tried this out, but my salmon was not cooking out, so I had to leave more time, which turned out to be bad, as the final taste of smoke was way to strong. Any tips on that?