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Author:
Franco Salzillo
Tea alone is a wonderful, revitalizing drink. Pleasantly bitter and aromatic, there’s pleasure in both a warm cup of tea and in a glass of iced tea.
Tea is also super versatile, especially when you combine it with fruit. Sweet, fruity concoctions that just taste like summer. These are Southern specialties that are much more than tea or fruit juice; they’re the best of both worlds.
When it comes to sweet fruit tea, the sky’s the limit. From citrus fruits to peaches, there’s just no way of getting it wrong. Now, some fruits are more decadently pleasing than others, and the sexiest are berries, of course.
Today we’re making raspberry tea, but feel free to use any other berry; they all work with this recipe. For me, raspberries and blackberries are the best, but that’s just me.
The thing with berries is that, more often than not, they’re tarter than we would like, so you have to cook them with sugar as if you were making a jam. The difference is that we’re keeping the juice and discarding the pulp and seeds. Only then are berries ready to add fruitiness and sweetness to the excitingly bitter, caffeinated tea.
A good black tea will work fine, but experiment with green tea or floral tisanes. I won’t lie, fruit tends to overwhelm tea’s properties, so don’t worry too much about it. I like to brew my tea extra strong to give it a fighting chance, though. I will use two tea bags for every cup of water, but again, find what works best for you!
Fruit and tea, sugar and water, that’s all you need. And a saucepan, too. In half an hour, you’ll have an ice cold raspberry tea pitcher, a drink as nice looking as it is tasty!
In a saucepan, add the raspberries and cover them with water, around four cups. Bring to a boil while stirring. Remove from heat and mash the raspberries with a mashing utensil. With a fine-meshed strainer, remove the solids and reserve the raspberry juice in a separate bowl.
Rinse the saucepan, boil four cups of water, remove from heat and steep the tea bags while stirring for five minutes. Remove the tea bags and dissolve the sugar. Let the sweetened black tea cool down to room temperature.
Once the raspberry juice and the tea are cooled down, combine them and pour them into a pitcher. Store the pitcher without ice in the fridge.
Serve your raspberry tea in glasses filled with ice and garnish them with fresh raspberries.
