Honeydew Green Tea Frappe
Green tea is especially clean tasting, grassy, and refreshing served iced. Here the intoxicating perfume of a hauntingly sweet honeydew melon is perfectly layered with the crisp spring taste of green tea, either Chinese Dragonwell (Lung Ching), Japanese Sencha, or even a green darjeeling tea from India. This frothy drink, the pale color of Chinese celdon procelain, cools you even during the most sweltering hot spell.

3 tablespoons/42 grams loosely packed green tea leaves of your choice
2 ounces/60 grams crystallized ginger, roughly chopped
4 cups/1 liter cubed ripe honeydew melon
2 cups/500 milliliters ice cubes made from distilled water
superfine sugar to taste
Garnishes: Thinly sliced honeydew melon, crystallized ginger in long pieces, and fresh ginger juice

Chill 4 tall glasses. Brew the tea leaves in 1 quart/1 liter of 185°F/85°C water, allowing them to steep 4 minutes. Pour the tea through a fine-meshed sieve, pressing hard on the leaves to extract all the liquid. Add the crystallized ginger to the brewed tea and let cool until it becomes infused with the ginger flavor, about 15 minutes, or longer if time allows. Chill in refrigerator until cold. Pass liquid through sieve to remove ginger pieces. (The ginger pieces can be saved to add to a chicken salad or fruit compote, as desired. For a more spicy flavor, fresh ginger root can be substituted.

Purée the melon and ice in the jar of an electric blender. Add tea-ginger infusion and process just to blend. Pour into tall chilled glasses and sweeten to taste with superfine sugar. Add a dash of fresh ginger juice if available. Garnish with a thin slice of honeydew wrapped with a slice of crystallized ginger. yields 4 12-ounce/350 grams servings.


This recipe is part of the book Cooking with Tea by Robert Wemischner and Diana Rosen.
Photography by Sysan Bourgoin



Click here for printable version.

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