This Hōjicha powder made by tea producer Yukio Kobayashi, is made from the ‘demono‘ of ichibancha tamaryokucha.
What is ‘demono’? Demono (出物) are the tea leaf portions separated during the finishing of tamaryokucha, so it can be considered a by-product of premium tamaryokucha production.
In Japanese tea, there are many teas that are by-products of green tea processing: for instance Shiraore (or kukicha) is mainly stems, konacha is the very fine particles that we often see being ground into powder (funmatsucha) and drunk in sushi restaurants, or yanagi bancha (the broader leaf pieces that are sorted out during the refining process).
During the production of ichibancha (spring harvest) tamaryokucha, Kobayashi collects the demono, or by-products, during the refining process, roasts them and grinds it to powder.
Hōjicha teas can have a wide range in taste due to different base tea being used, and also due to very different roasting recipes.
This particular hōjicha is made from leaves that have been shaded (10-14 days), deep-steamed and processed into tamaryokucha aracha (unrefined tea). Kobayashi then refines the tea, collects the demono and grinds it into powder.
We really love this hōjicha powder, and team member Marjolein has been buying it for personal use for a couple of years (as both drinks or for baking) – not being certain if there was enough interest in hōjicha powder to actually keep stock and put it online.
The taste very nutty with a roasted hazelnut-like character to it, and touch of bitter pure chocolate.
Drinking it pure, whisked like matcha, we personally feel it still has a little too much bitterness to it, although we feel it’s less bitter than many other hōjicha powders we’ve tried. We recommend to drink it as a latte, either with sugar or only milk (or oat or nut milks work well to enhance the nuttiness of the flavour!).
Marjolein’s hōjicha latte recipe:
- 4 grams of hōjicha powder
- 4-6 grams of sugar
- 25 ml hot water
- 100-130 ml milk (cold or warm)
Weigh out the hōjicha powder and sugar together, add a little bit of the hot water and mix together into a paste. Add the rest of the water, and then slowly add in the milk.
There may be still a little bitterness, but with different milks we feel some mask the bitterness more than others, and you can also play around with different sugars. A muscavado brown sugar for instance deepens the flavour and gives a richer taste, but masked the bitterness less than a normal white cane sugar did.
Brewing this hōjicha at different events across Europe, we also find there’s very different preferences for level of sweetness across different countries. Please use the recipe just as a starting point and adapt to your taste!
About Ocha no Kobayashi
Ocha no Kobayashi is run by Yukio Kobayashi and his wife Akiko.
Yukio Kobayashi is a second generation family tea merchant, although his grandfather was an instructor at the Nagasaki Tea Experiment Station, helping to share tea cultivation knowledge in the prefecture, the tea roots in the family grow to three generations.
The company was founded in 1966, by Kobayashi’s father Hamao Kobayashi. The business has focused on tea selection and blending, or the ‘refinement’ (shiage) of aracha (unrefined tea, usually bought at auction or directly from farmers).
Yukio Kobayashi took over the company management in June 2016, and decided to change the structure of the business to focus mainly on consumer-facing business, rather than wholesale. Kobayashi gained a lot of confidence and fulfilment through direct interactions with customers and decided that’s where he wanted to focus his attention.
The Ikedoki Team is grateful that he still allows us to source this wonderful hōjicha powder from him!
The Ocha no Kobayashi store is one of the most charming shops in Higashisonogi, not just selling the tea they produce and some teaware, but also selling fresh manju (a traditional Japanese sweet: a small, dense bun with sweet filling).
