There are only limited supply of tea grown in Hawaii for commercial purpose and often times they are not available for raw leaf purchase, but some home gardeners have tea plants in their yard, not knowing what to do with them. All you need is a few ounce of fresh tips. You can easily pick this from one mature plant. Ask around in your neighborhood. I'm sure you will come across one soon enough.
You can also plant tea in your garden. It takes about a year to produce a few ounce of tips from small starts, but if you like green tea in your mochi, it's well worth the effort. You can find tea plants at local nurseries and garden stores sometimes.
If you live in a colder climate, obtaining raw green tea leaves might be a bit more challenging. Planting your own is always more certain than relying on non-local producers. If you want to plant your own, it is better to use Chinese or Japanese cold hardy variety or seeds produced from those varieties are even better.
At last, but not the least of all three recipes is coconut Mochi with cooked green tea accented on top of coconut Mochi. This recipe is based on Kashiwa mochi, or Mochi wrapped in oak leaf. Oak leaf on Kashiwa mochi gives a pleasant bite of tannin to the plain mochi while not being too overpowering. Typically, oak leaf is removed before consumption.
Tea leaf on this mochi, on the other hand, is not removed, but consumed with the mochi. Because soft leaves of the green tea variety are used, flavor is milder. We also blanched the leaf a bit to keep the tea leaves from getting further oxidized.
Ingredients:
2 oz fresh green tea tips 1 lb mochiko 2 1/4 cup sugar 1 tsp baking poder 1 can coconut milk 1 can water Potato or cornstarch to dust
1. Preheat oven to 350F. Grease a 9x13 inch pan.
2. In a large mixing bowl, stir the mochiko, sugar and baking powder together.
3. Add coconut milk and water to flour mixture. Stir until the batter is smooth.
4. Pour batter into pan. Cover tightly with foil. Bake for 1 hour.
5. Lightly cook tea leaves by blanching, steaming or microwave until wilted. Watch for overcooking or burning. Set the tea leaves aside to cool.
6. Remove mochi from oven and let cool for 5 minutes. Carefully remove foil. Let mochi cool completely before cutting.
7. Wrap cut mochi with tea leaves or place tea leaves on top and dust with potato or cornstarch. Let rest 12-24 hours.
* If you experience mochi being too sticky, wait overnight or a day. Mochi will firm up a bit and you can peel the mochi off the pan easily.
This is our second recipe that we experimented with. The flavor of green tea is subtle, yet more fresh than using fully dried leaves. It also gives flexibility of using partially processed green tea which is less likely to be oxidized and can be stored in a freezer.
The recipe follows the same coconut Mochi base replacIng raw green tea with cooked green tea.
Ingredients:
2 oz cooked green tea tips 1 lb mochiko 2 1/4 cup sugar (we used pure cane organic sugar) 1 tsp baking poder 1 can coconut milk 1 can water Potato or cornstarch to dust
1. Preheat oven to 350F. Grease a 9x13 inch pan.
2. In a large mixing bowl, stir the mochiko, sugar and baking powder together.
3. Add coconut milk and water to flour mixture. Stir until the batter is smooth.
4. Pour the batter and green tea leaves into blender. If tea leaves are previously frozen, let it thaw out without heating to minimize further oxidation.
5. Run the blender until green tea is cut up small to desired particle size. Occasionally pausing the blender, we run it for 3 minutes.
6. Pour batter into pan. Cover tightly with foil. Bake for 1 hour.
7. Remove from oven and let cool for 5 minutes. Carefully remove foil. Let mochi cool completely before cutting. Dust with potato or cornstarch.
* If you experience mochi being too sticky, wait overnight or a day. Mochi will firm up a bit and you can peel the mochi off the pan easily.
We picked tea and put aside small handful of green tea tips to put in some green tea mochi. and we made three kinds of green tea mochi.
Green tea mochi using raw green tea leaves gives most vibrant green color and also stronger and more fresh green tea flavor, almost minty or citrusy. Depending on which variety or harvest type of tea leaf used, e.g. Black tea variety tip and 2 leaves, the flavor changes. Green tea variety works quite humbly without expressing itself too much. This green tea mochi also pairs well with all our green teas.
This recipe uses raw green tea in mochi mix before baking. Make sure you have access to fresh source of green tea leaves. Also, you need to work fast to avoid oxidation of green tea after it is chopped up.
Ingredients:
2 oz fresh green tea tips 1 lb mochiko, or sweet rice flour 2 1/4 cup sugar 1 tsp baking poder 1 can coconut milk 1 can water Potato or cornstarch to dust
1. Preheat oven to 350F. Grease a 9x13 inch pan.
2. In a large mixing bowl, stir the mochiko, sugar and baking powder together.
3. Add coconut milk and water to flour mixture. Stir until the batter is smooth.
4. Pour the batter and green tea leaves into blender. Make sure to use only soft succurent parts of green tea.
5. Run the blender until green tea is cut up small to desired particle size. Occasionally pausing the blender, we run it for 3 minutes.
6. Pour batter into pan. Cover tightly with foil. Bake for 1 hour.
7. Remove from oven and let cool for 5 minutes. Carefully remove foil. Let mochi cool completely before cutting. Dust with potato or cornstarch.
* If you experience mochi being too sticky, wait overnight or a day. Mochi will firm up a bit and you can peel the mochi off the pan easily.
When it comes to mochi, Taka is so particular about his mochi especially about density and texture. and most importantly it has to possess beauty in its simplicity when presented.
Greener batter is made from raw green tea leaves. Browner batter is from half cooked green tea leaves.
Today was my Kona day so I checked out a new spot by honokohau harbor. I started out on harbor side, and slowly worked my way around to the park. Nice shallow reef structure typically has good feeling for papio, but it was super low tide in the evening so ended up just catching some reef dwellers.
at one point honu came right up by my feet and slowly drifted away.
It felt like only 3 feet deep in most area. I could relly feel the egg sinker bouncing on the bottom even with fast retreive.
Catch includes moano, goatfish, poopaa, moi etc, but no papio.
It's so humbling to see weeds grow so fast and occupy their niche while tea plants are growing so slow.
Ecological farming teaches us to look at weeds differently.
Weeding can be such a tedium if one keeps fighting weeds, but it can also be enlightening experience if he is humble enough to see the purposes each weed has. Many low growing weeds start from seeds and they need disturbed soil. Forest fire, animal activities, etc can create disturbed soil. Many so-called noxious weeds grow particularly well on disturbed soil.
Farming especially tillage and weeding is also disturbing soil so weeds are just a nature's response to lost balance. Keep the cover on.... by keeping ground cover, weeds germination and establishment significantly decrease. Simply favoring one type of weeds that do not interfere with farming activity can reduce other unwelcome weeds.
For example, Honohono grass (also called Spreading dayflower, latin name: Commelina diffus) crawls fast and grows back from tiny bits of stems left on the ground. Honohono grass is very suited for disturbed soil condition since it quickly spreads and covers open soil surface. However, maintaining thick ground cover weakens honohono activity.
Summer weeding has just started. Idealism doesn't keep our farm weed resistant or no weeding condition, but it gives direction to which we should be aiming for minimal work while maximizing the benefit of cover crop.
We've been waiting for green tea harvest from this young field. While plants are young, it's good time for handpicking though it's not the most productive form of tea making. We had clear blue sky this morning unlike most other days and went ahead with harvesting. While plucking our way through the tea field, fog drifted in and and soon enough rain started to sprinkle. We were just finishing up with the harvest. Rain is always a big factor that determines our harvest quality. Understanding and being able to predict weather forecast is a big advantage to getting better tea quality.
