This day, 6 April, 1963, the first Chinese medical team departed by train for Algeria, fulfilling international humanitarian obligations. Since then, batches of Chinese medical teams have...
Chinese food was the ultimate treat for me. You may sneer at those British-Cantonese restaurant dishes which so excited me: spare ribs, crispy noodles, crispy beef with carrots, etc. I am unrepentant. In our family, we each ordered one dish. Mine was always Lemon Chicken. Sure, the take-away version usually comes in a gloopy sauce with the same lemon-ness as “lemon-fresh” bathroom cleaner. But fresh lemon (word order is important here) is always used in the best restaurants. And, thanks to BritishChinese food evangelist Ken Hom, it’s a dish...
The bad news is that you’re possibly going to be confused at some point here. The good news is that, at the end of this Strainer, you’re going to know about a really cheap, great Chinese tea.
Ask anyone around here (in Jiangnan, I mean) about White Tea and they will talk about Anji Baicha . Fair enough. That’s a great one, a must for anyone slightly interested. And Anji’s claim to the “white” name is somewhat legitimate; the relative lack of chlorophyll in the leaves results in a...
There are things I might perhaps do differently if I were starting the Strainer column for the first time in 2021.
I’m not saying I would be right to do them differently; I’m not saying the results would be better. But let’s scratch that counter-factual itch anyway.
For one, I might be tempted to use the “Tea Opinion Leader” moniker. The whole KOL thing hadn’t kicked off in 2016. If starting this gig afresh, the pun might just be irresistible.
Another asset I might feature prominently would be the image of Chinese-tea-in-a-wine-glass.
I’ve...
Strainer readers may recall, about 3 years ago, reading about a new concept in tea preparation. It was called InWE Tea (因味茶). It exerted on the tea leaf high pressure as well as high heat, much like brewing an espresso. I was excited.
Maybe I was wrong to be too excited. While most of the company’s tea bars do still exist, my prediction that we would all start fracking our tea leaves has been unfulfilled; tea capsule machines have not become mainstream.
Except that aluminium tea capsules are appearing. Maybe you’ve...
