A pot of saffron tea

After my recent post about mint tea, I checked our cookbook collection just out of curiosity, and to my surprise I discovered that we’d had a recipe for Moroccan Mint Tea all this time, hidden away in a Swedish language collection of Moroccan recipes.

On the same page there was also a recipe for a similar tea, although this time a green gunpowder base was jacked with the flavour of saffron.

I had to try it out, didn’t I….?

Make sure you pull your best glass teaware out of the cupboard when making this tea in order to fully appreciate its beautiful colour!

Ingredients

• Green gunpowder tea – 2½ teaspoons
• Crushed saffron threads – about 1/5th of a teaspoon. Here in Sweden we can buy saffron in 0.5g bags, and I used a half-bag, 0.25g
• Mint – a few leaves, rinsed
• Lemon – 1 half slice
• Sweetener – here I used coconut sugar, about a ½ teaspoon to a cup. Honey would also work well.

Method

• Place the tea and saffron in a paper tea filter. Steep them for 2 minutes in a 500ml glass teapot, with water heated to 80°C.
• Pour into glass cups. Add sweetener to taste, stir well, and garnish the tea with a lemon slice and a few mint leaves.

A nice cup of saffron tea…

The saffron gave the tea a wonderful deep orange colour. The taste and aroma of the saffron worked really well together with the green tea as well as the coconut sugar, mint and lemon to produce a sweet, warming beverage with a pleasing suggestion of bitterness.

I enjoyed this tea with a small bowl of cashews and Medjool dates on the side…

Medjool dates and cashews

Perfect for a grey, rainy, February afternoon!