Affogato is a dessert that usually involves drowning vanilla ice cream in espresso. Today, we tried to create an affogato using gyokuro mecha from Nakamura-en.
Method
3 teaspoons of gyokuro mecha in about 70 ml of 90˚C water. 4 1/2 minute steep time.
Our first mistake was not pouring out the steeped tea into a separate pot first. Instead we poured it directly onto the ice cream melting it even as we continued to squeeze out ever more concentrated (and deeper green) drops of tea.
We’ll have to try this again later fixing the above mistake, because the soup of melted gyokuro-vanilla that resulted wasn’t half bad.
Sprinkles
As an afterthought, we sprinkled a bit of the gyokuro mecha onto the remainder of the ice cream. It gave the ice cream a bit of texture but did very little to add to the taste…I guess matcha or sencha powder is really best for sprinkling.
And because there was so much leaf used, we continued to steep it, once, twice, thrice…the combination of umami and shibumi flavors just keeps coming out, and in darker green color (partly due to all the powder that is finally coming out).
Lessons learned
Notes for the second attempt: 1) pour into pot first. 2) test it with the second and third steeps for darker color. 3) cooling the tea a bit before pouring onto the ice cream might be helpful as well.
The post An attempt at creating gyokuro affogato appeared first on YUNOMI.
