| Steeped with great Canadian tea
There's no real mystery as to why the Mysterious Rose wows at first sip. Leon Li of Ten Ren Tea skilfully slips a multitude of harmonious flavours into his iced tea creation – soaking, straining and blending blueberries, plums, simple syrup, brown sugar syrup and Taiwanese oolong tea with ice. He deftly shapes a thin slice of red apple into a flower and sets it afloat on the thick, dusty rose elixir, alongside a plump bubble tea straw. "This is the drink of all drinks," Brendan Waye of the Great Canadian Tea Steep-off tells a small but rapt audience Monday at the Canadian Coffee & Tea Show at the Toronto Congress Centre. "This should be framed, not drunk." But drink it we must (we being the steep-off judges), and the sensory memory of this vibrant and complex creation lingers.
Leslie Harlib's Cuisine Scene: It's really become time for tea
UNTIL A YEAR ago, Jennifer Leigh Sauer, a Mill Valley-based photographer, wasn't much of a tea drinker and hadn't thought much about tea. While on a shoot in San Francisco for one of her clients, she went into a Chinatown tea-tasting shop and it changed her life. "Before that, I thought tea was like Earl Grey or English Breakfast, basically Twinings or Liptons," she says. "The shop was so amazing; it was colorful, textural, beautiful. I was wound up visually by what I was seeing. And I couldn't believe the impact tea had on the people drinking it. It was magical." Being around tea culture was so inspiring, Sauer says, she decided to photograph tea salons around the Bay Area, thinking she'd write an article about the phenomenon. The photos and accompanying essays wound up as her first book - a beautiful full-color hardcover released this week by Earth Aware, a division of Palace Press in Terra Linda.
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