Well, my pledge to cut back on the teaware buying didn’t get too far.
I was bimbling around town on my bike the other day when I realised that I was but a few turns of the old cranks away from a charity shop I hadn’t visited in a good while.
This one doesn’t usually get new stock in very often, so I wasn’t really expecting to find anything of interest, but then on a side shelf I spotted some small bowls that looked as though they might make nice tea bowls.
A quick inspection showed that they were nigh on perfect, and the price sticker said 5 Swedish Crowns a pop, so I trotted off to the checkout with 2 of them.
I was too busy to christen them the same day, but today I had plenty of time on my hands thanks to the weather.
We woke up this morning to the sound of rain lashing against the bedroom window, a real monsoon like tattoo that was better than any alarm.
The whole of Southern Sweden was awash, and there was no way I was going out in that oomska unless lives depended on it. The only sensible solution to that intense precipitation was to stay in, make tea, and bake crispbread.
So the new bowls, or one of them at least, got its first run out.
I decided to try it out with the Wu Yi Shan Qi Lan Oolong I currently have in, to test a theory of sorts.
Now, Oolongs, Black/Red tea, and Pu-erh generally speaking tend to do best when steeped in water that is about 95°C or hotter, but for me at least the resulting tea liquor tastes better when it’s cooled down somewhat. My idea was that this new bowl, being somewhat wider, shallower, and thinner walled in construction might assist in cooling down the tea to a point where it was at that temperature sweet-spot sooner.
And that was exactly the case. The bowl was also a very nice snug fit into the palm of my hand, and at 100 ml capacity held enough tea for a good prolonged slurp before a top up was needed. In fact, I found it worked very well in tandem with my recently purchased side handled teapot.
As I polished off the third steeping the crispbread was ready, which I ate for lunch with a quickly made avocado and roast garlic spread.
The rain then decided to play nice, and held off for long enough to allow me to dash to the supermarket and back.
I think I’ll give the bowl another workout this afternoon with some Darjeeling, as I fine tune my tea plans for our upcoming holiday…
Northern Teaist 
Avocado tea… that would be a wonder.
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Interesting idea, that…
Avocados are quite fatty, and the Tibetans have a tradition of making tea loaded with Yak butter.
Hmmmmmm….
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Nice tea bowls. I saw what looked like a gong fu set in a charity shop but the quality was not so good.
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I know what you mean, but they can come in handy as part of a travelling “on-the-road” kit…
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Mr Teaist, I also have to restrain myself. 🙂 Thankfully, my gaiwan is part of a travel set.
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I’m seriously going to have to invest in one of those…
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Very nice. I’ve just been to Hong Kong and had to practically sit on my hands so as not to buy every teapot/cup/general tea thingy I could lay my hands on.
A question if I may – my tea pots don’t have a strainer inside and to use them for 2 or more people is a bit of a faff with small steeping balls. Do you have any teapots without ‘built in’ strainers? What do you use?
Ta
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If gong-fu-ing Asian style with a small Chinese clay teapot I always run the tea through a Chinese tea strainer, which is conical shaped and has a much finer mesh. That tends to be with the better quality teas, mostly.
With the everyday drinkers steeped in a more traditional glazed teapot I more often than not use paper tea filter bags. The ones I use are unbleached, so don’t alter the taste of the tea, and can quite happily be re-steeped several times without disintegrating. They also capture even the finest of tea dust, too….
I did a post about this very topic a while back… 🙂
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Excellent! Thank you, I hadn’t considered tea filter bags
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