Posted on 06/15/2007 9:47:49 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
More than 140 years after the Civil War ended, a Mason-Dixon line of sorts still persists when it comes to iced tea.
Order an iced tea at a restaurant in the Deep South or Texas, and the frosty beverage set before you likely will be a world away from what you’d be served in New York or Chicago.
Sweet tea, as Southerners call their iced tea, is named for its two key ingredients – tea and lots of sugar. There’s no such thing as an unsweetened sweet tea. And unlike its summer-loving Northern counterpart, sweet tea is consumed year-round.
“About 85 percent of tea consumed in the U.S. is iced. And no one in the world except for us drinks sweet tea, and no one in the U.S. sweetens their tea as much as they do in Southeast,” says Peter Goggi, president of Lipton’s Royal Estates Tea Co.
Sweet tea is something people either love or hate. And often that relationship is determined by geography.
“It’s just very, very sweet. Most people who try it in the North don’t like it,” says Linda Stradley, food historian and founder of food history Web site www.whatscookingamerica.net. “The first time I tried it, I didn’t like it. But then I got addicted to it.”
Why the emphasis on sweet in the South? Stradley speculates sweet tea may have started as a sugar-and-tea punch.
Another theory is that sweet tea may have just been a cheap and convenient stand-in for wine and other alcoholic beverages, which historically were less available and frowned upon in the South.
“Sweet tea has always been a substitute beverage for what wine was doing in other regions,” says Scott Jones, executive food editor at Southern Living magazine.
“The tannins from the tea cleanse your palate, there’s sweetness from the sugar and then the acidity from the lemon,” he says. “It goes well with a lot of food.”
Nonetheless, there is nothing delicate or ethereal about sweet tea.
In addition to the loads of sugar, sweet tea is characterized by an extremely strong tea taste. Sweet tea usually is brewed hot, with tea bags squeezed to get every last bit of flavor.
Sugar then is mixed in while the tea is hot to maximize the amount that dissolves. Water then is added to dilute some of the potency and increase the volume, then the tea is refrigerated to chill.
“Everything they tell you not to do with tea today is pretty much how sweet tea is made,” says Jones, referring to the lower water temperature and more nuanced approach most hot tea drinkers use. “My mom would boil the tea bags in the water, and then squeeze the living daylights out of them.”
It turns out, though, that sweet tea’s role in Southern cuisine is evolving. Twenty years ago, it was hard to walk into a restaurant in the Southeast and find anything but sweet tea.
But increased health consciousness as well as the growth of chain restaurants that cater to a national audience means unsweetened tea is becoming increasingly popular.
“A lot of these old-school men and women who were weaned on sweet tea you now see them drinking unsweetened iced tea with a lot of pink and blue packets,” Jones says. “There’s been an explosion of diabetes in the South, and the doctors are saying you have to cut the sweet tea out.”
But, it’s hard to undo generations of loyal drinkers. Sweet tea tends to be more about memories than health trends or precise recipes. No one, it seems, can quite make sweet tea as well as your mom or grandmother did.
“I make it how my mother made it, with regular tea bags, sugar and boiling water. There’s no new-age tea making kit or anything like that,” says Whitney Sloane Sauls, 27, of Ocean Isle Beach. “It’s just so refreshing and it brings back good memories of childhood and of growing up.”
Sweet tea recipes
While many iced teas are made by steeping tea leaves in cool or sun-warmed water, the authentic sweet teas of the South are made by brewing black tea in boiling water. The recipe for blackberry iced tea uses pinch of baking soda to preserve the vibrant colors of the berries in the tea.
Southern sweet tea
Makes 1 gallon
12 bags black tea
6 cups boiling water, plus additional cold water
1 to 1 1/2 cups sugar
Ice
Lemon wedges or fresh mint sprigs (optional)
Place the tea bags in a large heat-proof 1-gallon pitcher. Add the boiling water and steep for 5 minutes. Spoon out the tea bags and squeeze them into the tea, then discard the tea bags. Stir in 1 cup sugar. Add enough cold water to fill the pitcher. Taste and adjust with remaining sugar as desired.
To serve, pour into ice-filled glasses, then garnish with lemon wedges or fresh mint.
Recipe adapted from Southern Living magazine
Blackberry tea
3 cups fresh or frozen blackberries (if frozen, thaw before using), plus additional fresh as garnish
1 1/4 cups sugar
1 tablespoon chopped fresh mint, plus additional sprigs as garnish
Pinch of baking soda
6 bags black tea
4 cups boiling water
2 1/2 cups cold water
Ice
In a large pitcher, combine the blackberries and sugar. Use a wooden spoon to crush the berries and mix them with the sugar. Add the chopped mint and baking soda. Set aside.
Place the tea in a large heat-proof measuring cup. Add the boiling water and steep for 3 minutes. Spoon out the tea bags and squeeze them into the tea, then discard the tea bags.
Pour the tea into the blackberry mixture. Let stand at room temperature 1 hour. Pour the tea through a mesh strainer and discard solids. Return the tea to the pitcher.
Add cold water and stir well to dissolve sugar. Cover and chill until ready to serve.
To serve, pour into glasses filled with ice. Garnish with fresh mint and fresh blackberries on short wooden skewers. Makes about 7 1/2 cups.
Recipe adapted from ‘Southern Living’ magazine.
OOh, like milk and Pepsi, something *Laverne & Shirley* used to drink. I guess it was supposed to be a poor girls’ ice cream float or something. Ugh. No thanks!
Mmmmm! *copying*
Wanting some cornbread salad now.
I don’t pick them myself anymore but when I was a kid I picked enough every day for my breakfast the next day and enough for a cobbler on weekends. Poison ivy and snakes keep me out of the berry patch now even though we have acres of them. I havn’t even bought any in years.
Daughter sent me a recipe she has that Rachel Ray did. It's fried cornbread with okra in it. Like fried "okry" with lots of batter. Haven't tried it yet though, Been pretty busy here. She had it and said it was goooood. Grandson asked what it was - was it pancakes" LOLL She said sorta and he loved it, so did 3 year old granddaughter and 10 month old granddaughter, but then again Hooey (10 month old) will eat anything! and lots of it. LOLL She's been eating "real" food for months and months.
I waited tables at a place that had a couple of tea machines. One for sweet and one for unsweet. They made about 5 gallons at a time and, yes, part of operating the sweet tea machine was making sure the corn syrup bag wasn’t empty. It automatically injected a certain amount of corn syrup into each batch that was brewed. My guess is that these machines are standard equipment in the restaurant industry.
BTW, I’m a southerner and prefer my tea unsweetened.
I've noticed this. Anywhere I've seen an iced tea tap next to Coke, Sprite and the other soda taps, it's usually tea syrup mixed with water and dispensed. No thank you...I prefer my iced tea properly brewed...and unsweetened, although I have been known to enjoy a southern sweet tea from time to time. :)
Wow, that’s great! I had to “grow into” okra my own self. Fried was first, then pickled, sometimes gumbo - but stewed? No way!! Love it fried, tho!
Aww, hate to hear that! I haven’t picked any in a very long time, myself. But I think you’re right that dewberries are only in the wild. They are sweet and great to eat out of hand.
I hadn’t thought about commercial blackberries not being as “user-friendly,” but you’re right, now that I think about it. That’s probably why they’re good for tea.
Luzianne or somebody makes a peach sweet tea that comes in gallons at the grocery, but I don’t like it. Love peaches, love peach cobbler more than life itself (with BlueBell HMV, of course) - but do NOT like it for flavoring tea.
I have a favorite cake that is blackberry, but no berries are used in it, lol. It’s made with blackberry jello (hard to find) and blackberry wine in it, with a blackberry wine or brandy glaze - it’s Bundt cake. Yummy and moist.
Also had a FReeper share a tasty recipe with me for sweet and sour German red cabbage that has seedless blackberry preserves/jelly stirred into the liquid at the end to thicken the sauce. Very good!
Our machines used giant commercial sized tea bags of real tea. You’d stick a teabag in the compartment, hit the button, and the machine did the rest. It brewed really good tea actually, though to me the sweet tea was too sweet. I know there are some places — like Subway I think — that use the Nestea tea syrup, which I agree makes for some really foul tasting “tea”.
The biggest problem with ordering unsweet tea in the South is that relatively few people drink it, and so it tends to sit in the machine longer. If the machine’s urn hasn’t been meticulously cleaned, which often seems to be the case at fast food places, the tea can pick up kind of a funky algae flavor. Whenever I go somewhere and they have good unsweet tea, I know that they keep their tea urns clean. And since cleaning the urns is an easy step to skimp on, I consider this is an indicator of good management and attention to detail. If the unsweet tea tastes good, I’m inclined to think the the kitchen is more likely to be clean and sanitary.
1 cup cornmeal
1 cup self-rising flour
2 teaspoons salt
2 1/2 cups water
1 (16-ounce) bag whole okra, sliced into 1/2-inch rounds
1/2 cup chopped Vidalia onions
1 tablespoon clarified butter, plus more as needed
In a large bowl, whisk together cornmeal, flour and salt. Whisk in water to make a thin batter. Stir in okra and onions. Over medium heat, add clarified butter to a cast iron skillet. Use a small ladle to pour batter onto skillet. Pan should be hot enough to make batter sizzle. Cook until underside is browned, about 3 to 4 minutes, then flip and brown on the other side. Repeat with additional batter, adding more butter as necessary.
Okay, you can strike the bottle of ice water from your list, just like tennis with spouse is off mine. Not so much over the toe thingie, but got tired of him jamming aces down my throat and having him make fun of me for whining.
You should try some green tea ice cream.
bttt
I’ll be paying more attention to the tea urns in the future..I have seen the large teabags...my local Chik-Fil-A seems to have very high quality control on its unsweetened tea.
You don’t like okra and tomatoes stewed with plenty of onions? Yum! That’s different than just plain boiled okra.
Oh, yummmmm! Are they little 4-5” rounds instead of one whole skillet of bread? Bet that is crispier. Thanks!
I’ve been meaning to, but my choices are limited as to shopping these days. I’ve seen it, but can’t remember where. Who-all makes it, do you know?
Nopey nope. Still too slimy for me. Not a huge tomato fan, either. I know the dish *looks* good and even smells good, but I can never get the first bite down.
Fried or pickled is about my limit, I’m afraid. Crispy.
Little rounds. or oblongs. We always do fried cornbread as rounds like thick hamburger patties.
I have no idea. I’ve only had it at a sushi bar.
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