Less Sugar, More Sweet -- Mighty Leaf Teas and Linn's Olallieberry
Today we’re looking at obscure taste sensations: two Mighty Leaf teas — Coco Chai and Geekalicious — and Linn’s Fruit Bin’s olallieberries in preserve and syrup forms.
Mighty Leaf’s loose leaf Coco Chai is made with some of chai’s usual spices: cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, but it also adds coconut to the mixture (not chocolate, in case you were confused). Coconut is a great flavor to mix with those spices and has the additional benefit of being a little sweet of course. It makes the chai much easier to drink without the usual accoutrements of milk and sugar (not that you need to go without!), and so is perfect as a desert tea, especially if you are looking for something light and low on calories.
Did I say desert tea? Like late at night? Yes. In addition to adding coconut, they switched the standard black tea for a rooibos. I generally prefer the richer and less astringent flavor of a rooibos tea, so they made me very happy, and rooibos also has the advantage of being caffeine free.
Might Leaf also sent us a sample of their new Geekalicious tea — a Japanese genmaicha green tea blended with popped and roasted rice. Geekalicious is a fairly standard Japanese green tea, if it a bit fresher. The popcorn bits and roasted rice give it a very pleasant appearance and a slightly heartier taste that tones down the bitterness of the green. Most high-end tea stores I’ve been to carry some variant of this Japanese tea (my friend calls these places “frou frou tea shops”). So for me the main appeal of this tea is the packaging. The label “Geekalicious” makes it a cute gift for the geeky tea lover. Geekalicious tea is $9.95 for a 4 oz. tin and the Coco Chai is $8.95 for a 4 oz. bag of loose tea (or $35.35 for a 1 lb. bag on Amazon).
We also tried out the Linn’s Fruit Bin olallieberry preserves and syrup. Linn’s Fruit Bin’s website lists the olallieberry as a berry that is approximately 2/3 blackberry and 1/3 raspberry. Wikipedia gave a much more complicated description of the olallieberry lineage and listed it as a cross between the loganberry and the youngberry, which are both themselves crosses of blackberry with raspberry and dewberry respectively. I, for one, agree that it tastes like all of the above.
The olallieberry is quite a pleasant taste, in fact. Raspberries are one of my favorite fruit, but they can sometimes be a bit bitter. Blackberries are nicely sweet, which is why they are often added to mixed berry pies, but somehow lacking in the strong and addictive flavor of the raspberry. The combination of the two (in whatever form they are combined) creates a very sweet raspberry-like flavor that is perfect for preserves and syrups.
The preserves, which emphasize “more fruit-less sugar” have just five ingredients and a very nice thick texture. The syrup too is very thick, almost to the point of being a runny jam, and I would highly recommend the syrup with homemade whipped cream (light on the sugar, it’s plenty sweet!).
If you live in California, Linn’s products will be local, and you can also perhaps take advantage of their pies. The Olallieberry preserves are $4.95 for a 6 oz. jar and the syrup is $6.95 for a 12 oz. bottle.
