Russian Tea

 Russian Tea

The alkaloid caffeine is necessary for sustaining the brain active during nightly hacking sessions. A high-quality tea, however, stimulates cathartic sensations even in those, who drink it for the very first time. It is warming one’s body, mind, and soul. Various societies have developed brilliant styles of making delicious tea. The Chinese, the English, the Japanese, and many others have surmounted the art of this delightful beverage. Here are the way of preparing, serving, and consuming tea by the Russians.

Tea leaves and hot water do not essentially make fine tea. In Russia, the tea prepared using tea bags are called "the postman’s tea," since it comes in envelopes. This tea generates a distinctive flavor of cellulose. If you cook the tea leaves, you will get a liquid almost unlike tea, fit for leather tanning, instead of drinking. The Russian process of tea making is a two-stage one; first, you make the zavarka, the tea concentrate, and then water it down with kipyatok, hot, boiled water. Whenever hot water is decanted onto tea bags from a samovar, the outcome is still postman’s tea.

Before any more action, you must keep enough amount of kipyatok, you need it at various stages of the process. Kipyatok is the only water used in the process of tea preparation. Even a little amount of raw water can spoil the tea.

The essential steps of zavarka preparation are to put a definite quantity of tea leaves into some pot, pour kipyatok onto them, one cup for each five teaspoons, in one resolute spurt, stay until all the leaves settle.

At present, you can make your first cup of Russian tea. Pour some amount of zavarka into a teacup and dilute it using kipyatok in approximately 10:1 ratio. The power of the tea reckons on both this ratio and the strength of the zavarka. The tea color must be alike a chestnut.

The choice is yours to choose the ingredients. Different ingredients are used in the preparation of Russian tea, which are water, tea leaves, additions, and utensils. Poor quality water can spoil the best tea, at the same time as cautious treatment and the exact choice of water in addition to the accurate technology can make wonders with your tea. You must avoid poor quality leaves, instead use best quality tea leaves. The additions can be sweeteners, alcohol, and other stuffs. Different sweeteners are used to prepare Russian teas, which are fruit jam, honey, saccharine, sugar, and other artificial sweeteners. The alcohol includes rum, vodka, and other liquors. The other stuffs include baking soda, cream, lemon, and milk. Different utensils like the zavarka pot, the samovar, other water-boiling utensils, the saucer, and the podstakannik are used in the preparation of Russian tea. The average nutrient contents present in Russian tea are calories 32–190, cholesterol 0 mg, dietary fiber 0–1.6 g, protein 0–16 g, sodium 1–75 mg, total carbs 8.4–48 g, and total fat 0–0.2 g.

Most of the procedures in the Russian method of tea preparation are time consuming and might come out unessential at first glance. To prepare a good Russian tea, you must have patience and commitment; every crosscut cheapens the final product. Hence, do not hurry to make it, take your own time. Please keep the Russian proverb in mind: "If you rush, you just make people laugh."