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Shay bil Nana
- 3 teaspoons green gunpowder tea*
- 16 spearmint sprigs (set six aside for garnish)
- 4 tablespoons cane sugar (set aside an additional bowl of sugar or sugar cubes to taste)
- 4 cups water, boiling
- Pour small amount of water into tea pot, and swish it around to warm the pot.
- Once the pot** is warm, combine the tea leaves, hot water, mint leaves, and sugar in the pot.
- Serve each cup of tea with a mint garnish and with a small bowl of sugar.
*The most traditional type of tea to use in this recipe is green gunpowder tea, a Chinese green tea (and sometimes oolong) that is rolled into small pellets. You can substitute almost any type of plain green tea, and even oolong and black teas if you're feeling especially bold. Stay away from flavored teas, tisanes, and blended teas (such as genmaicha).
**The most traditional type of tea pot for this type of tea has a long fluted spout.
***In order to get the full Moroccan experience out of your small cup of tea, grab whatever tea is handy, throw in enough sugar to kill a small weasel, brew in whatever dingy metal container available, and serve in small glass cups, preferrably the type that are chipped and stained.
Comments
Also, I recall most of the time being given mildly sweet tea and a whole bunch of sugar to sweeten it myself -- and typically I do add sugar until it tastes like candy. In Morocco do they typically just mix in tons and tons of sugar prior to pouring it?
Personally I plan on being very haphazard with how I prepare my tea (I'm certainly not going to whip out measuring spoons). Chances are if I'm at work the tea will be prepared in a paper cup.
I think what happened with this post was that I got out my "let's write everything very clearly so even a simpleton can make this" hat on. And, even for putting that hat on, I went pretty light -- I didn't even start getting uppity about the type of water to use, when I know that this is a big stickler for tea fanatics.
My one question for you is this: If you throw some mint leaves into a cup of tea, what else do you call it besides garnish? I mean, really. :P A guerilla mint hit?
Anyhow, I added a section for you, and yunger, and rezendi to my recipe. :P I love you guys to death and desperately need to have the three of you prepare a pot of tea for me.
And the name is "tea with nana." (Nana == mint in both Hebrew and Arabic)
Part of the reason why my interpretation (and I was very particular about using that word when I made this post) is so Americanized is because I've never been outside of America. (Yeah, thanks and fuck you to my parents on that one...I'm still bitter.) All of the tea I've been served in this style has been Americanized and it has been served with a mint garnish, and it's been absolutely tasty. It really hasn't suffered any from being served in nice tea pots with clean water (still in slightly stained glasses though -- I'm not sure how that managed to remain the same). And so while I'm sure that this isn't an exact representation of what's served in Morocco, it's a damn close representation of what's served to me in America mixed with a more traditional recipe.
I would still love to try more traditional "stuck for weeks in the desert" Moroccan tea. Maybe we could get some dirt and mix it in, just to be really authentic.
One slight quibble is that I think that black tea is more commonly used for this than green; a fairly full-bodied one is probably better because it has to compete with the taste of mint and/or sage. (Although granted, when one adds sage the point very often is to mask the taste of the underlying tea. Sort of like adding hot peppers until you don't know what the meat of the day started out as, or which day it was originally of.)