Cooking with green tea

I’ve been reading about the health benefits of green tea and I would love to introduce it into my cooking. I’ve seen many rice recipes using green tea, but can you recommend any other interesting ways to incorporate it?

unnily enough I’ve been thinking a lot about green tea of late, because a shipment of three delicious Zealong teas grown near Hamilton — green, oolong and black — has arrived in London and we’ll soon be putting it on our menu at The Providores. It’s a product New Zealand should be proud of, seeing as it’s the only commercially grown tea from New Zealand, and it picked up a coveted Great Taste Award in the UK recently. Also, we are selling a very popular matcha doughnut at Crosstown — a business I co-founded in London that is redefining what doughnuts should be. Our doughnut even managed to get a full page spread in magazine in the UK due to the fact that matcha (green tea powder) has many health benefits — which clearly must outweigh the deep-fried dough and icing sugar! Anyway, I’m a sucker for green tea and the more we include it in our diets the better I say. I never pour boiling water on to my green tea, I always turn the kettle off just before it comes to the boil, and I add a tablespoon of cold tap water to the cup first — I find boiling water makes the tea become a little too bitter for my liking.

As for uses other than just drinking it, it is a fairly versatile flavour. Green tea can come in both leaf form (such as Zealong) or as a powder. In Japan I’ve had the most delicious matchacino made from fresh slightly sweetened soy milk frothed up under a steamer with