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Thank you Leo! You know, I’m always glad to write about tea, especially from a more technical point of view! 🙂
As tea, the fruit is rich in tannins and simple catechins (collectively known as polyphenols) that make proteins in saliva to precipitate and stick on your mouth and tongue (this results in astringency: the sensation of friction of the tongue to the walls of the mouth, not to confound with bitterness). They are also less water-soluble than they were after meeting those fruit polyphenols. Also the proteins involved in taste perception are affected. This explains why it takes a while for the saliva to solubilize fruit polyphenols and detouch them from your taste receptors, and why you can taste its peculiar astringency for such a long time. During this time, taste receptors in your mouth are “busy” and cannot sense properly the texture of your White Peony.
Thank you Leo! I learn from you!
And thank you for your detailed answer. I think that the latter LJ I was writing about is an high quality one, especially because, as declared by the producer, fertilizers are used as low as possibile, it is hand-harvested, hand-roasted, ancient trees, etc etc. Anyway, I also think it is not a perfect LJ, in that it completely lacks of that umami note that would have added an additional level of complexity in this tea.I’m happy to discuss and learn about tea with you!
Have a nice day!
I usually pack green tea (especially long jing) into small plastic bags covered by a sheet of paper inside to better buffer residual humidity left in. Than, I put the bags into small metal airtight cans with a label. The avarage temperature of the room is about 19°C during winter, but can raise up to 35°C during summer. There’s very low humidity.Last year I tried to put a can in my fridge to make the tea better survive the hot summer, but I found a changed texture in my LJ a week later that I didn’t find in the tea left at room temperature.I think putting tea in a fridge slightly modifies it immediately, but allows a better storage over time.What do you think about it?
I think one could explain the degradation of freezed green tea with that of freezed meat once at room temperature, although they are not the same, obviously. Simply, freezing in one’s home freezer produces low density water cristals in meat cells, thus breaking the cell membrane and releasing all the content as a watery solution (have you ever noted some water forming under your unfreezing meat? Most vitamins are right there!). This does not appear on deep-freezing (done by food industries), because this type of freezing is done by decreasing dramatically and immediately the temperature, with no possibility of large cristals to form. In this way, meat retains more than about 95% of all its substances (included vitamins).The basis of this is that water molecules acquire different conformation in the space in becoming ice, due to temperature and time of freezing (just to visualize, think about the difference you find between snow cristals and grains of hail).I know, dried tea has very little water inside, compared to meat, but I think the behaviour is the same if you freeze your tea at home: once at room temperature, moist oxidation quickly wastes it.
