Summertime, Mint's A-growing....

[dcseain]

and melted_snowball can't find loose tea at his local Safeway. I just had to share my mother's iced tea recipe as a result of that post. So here it is:

To 10 gallons/40L of water in a pot with a lid, add ~18, give or take, tea bags or about 1 1/8 C or 0.27L of loose tea in cheescloth, and swirl them around a few times to thoroughly saturate them, then secure them to the pot handle with string once saturated, place the lid on the pot. Go to bed.

Now that you've had a good night's sleep, has the tea been steeping for at least 12 hours? If not, let it sit until it's been at least 12 hours, then bring it to a low simmer. Once at a low simmer, remove the tebags/cheesecloath and stir in 0.75 lb/0.3kg sugar. Turn off the heat and allow the tea to cool to tepid or so.

Once tepid, add 1L lemon juice, fresh or bottled, 25cL lime juice, fresh or bottled, and 8oz/237mL all-natural vanilla extract, stirring to combine. Pour into pitchers and chill. Serve over ice, ideally outdoors on a day that's at least 85 degrees fahrenheit with humidity at at least 85, ganished with fresh mint from the garden or mint patch. We always grew peppermint, but spearmint can be nice too.

Comments

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Holy tamole, that makes a LOT of tea. I'm imagining a refridgerator with the equivalent of 20 2L bottles in it, and my mind is boggling a bit.

I've got to assume she threw some big parties.

Anyway I might try that recipe, divided by 20. ;) ...Perhaps even from the "once tepid" stage, after making the tea the usual way and adding it to a pitcher of ice. The vanilla addition sounds tasty.

We don't have peppermint in our yard, only spearmint. Peppermint would be nice too.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

Our house was the neighbourhood nexus for the children oun our age group, and iced tea and water were the only 2 drinks we were allowed between meals, at which we had to drink milk.

Some portion of the tea got made into freezer pops, and a batch that size was a weekly ritual. A batch half that size got made weekly without sweetener for those who preferred non-sweet tea. Combined, the tea generally filled several large Rubbermaid pitchers, and occupied one half of one shelf in the fridge, plus the whole door of the freezer.

[ftemery.livejournal.com]

I wonder how that compared with the amount of sugar in Kool Aid?

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

Dunno; iced tea is supposed to be sweet. I hated Kool Aid as a child, it was much to sweet for me, and tasted yucky. I chose water over it. I still don't like the taste of artificial colours and flavours. I won't even eat mint ice cream if it's green. Blech.

iced tea

[selki.livejournal.com]

When I had it growing up, it was unsweetened.

We'd sometimes make sun tea in a big glass jar we'd stick outside for a few hours. But mostly I had it at occasional church events.