Peach flavored white tea

For the past few years I’ve been trying out a lot of different types of premium tea. They often have interesting names like ‘Honey Orchid Black’ and ‘Monkey-Picked Teeguanyin’. They are certainly different in taste and often uniquely exquisite.

But after trying all these different ones I ended up liking a basic, flavored white tea as my favorite. This kind of reminds me of a novel episode of a Japanese drama I watched several years ago. In it there was an old Yakuza boss who is very aged and close to death. He was highly respected almost as a god by his underlings. The boss had one last request to have this one dish from the past with a certain flavor that he was really nostalgic for.

His underling is in a frenzy to fulfill his bosses last request. He goes through this epic effort to find the dish with the flavor from various high-end restaurants, hire the best chefs in the business, trying different ingredients, but none of the dishes contain the flavor the boss had loved.

Finally, with the help of a detective he manages to track down the owner of diner long out of business. He pays the man to serve the boss the dish and in delight the boss eats the dish which has the mysterious, nostalgic flavor from the old days that he had loved so much.

After going through all of this to finally find the dish and fulfill the bosses final request it turns out the ingredient he was nostalgic for, that he remembered from the old days was MSG.

I just love this story ❤️

UPDATE: I found the drama in my files. It is episode 1 of “River’s Edge Okawabata Tanteisha”. Am watching a scene near the end now where the detective’s boss is explaining to him that, before the current time of organic food with natural ingredients, in the old days cooks used to throw in liberal amounts of “umami” – flavor enhancers – a.k.a MSG – into their dishes. The video shows the cook putting an enormous, heaping tablespoon of white powder into a bowl. 🙂

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The non-premium-grade tea that is now my favorite has peach flavoring. The other day I shared the tea with someone and they expressed skepticism about the peach flavoring, as they rightly should given the horrific stuff that is put into food and the frequent mislabeling that occurs. (On this note I just read that an almond milk company is being sued because their almond milk contains so few actual almonds – it consists mostly of other, filler ingredients.)

I decided to look into the tea. The ingredients for the tea on the company’s website list ‘natural peach flavor’. Researching this further I found this really fascinating article by a flavor scientist on the complexity of peach flavor. It turns out that peach is one of the most complex flavors to create.

This article is a fascinating read if you’re at all curious about the history of and science behind peach flavor:
flavorscientist.com: Peach Flavor

There is one thing she says at the end of the article:

our sense of smell and taste is more astute than any analytical instrument

That is a piece of wisdom. We have an amazingly sensitive, high-precision instrument built into our bodies which often goes unrecognized.