Lahpet Thoke- A Tea Salad from Myanmar

At Obubu, we’re very fond of our tea experiments. Therefore, at every tea tour we all enjoy a beautiful Kabuse Sencha salad. Basically, after brewing Kabuse Sencha three times to extract all the bitterness- Kabuse is a perfect choice for a tea salad, since it is a shaded tea, resulting in softer, sweeter leaves- we add some soy sauce, some genmai (roasted rice) and boom! Deliciousness.

After one of the tours, one of our guests of Burmese origin told us „You know, I used to eat a sort of tea salad as a child. We put in fish sauce, some lime, some peanuts…”

Yumyumyum what is this because I want it now!  So after many google searches, there it was: Lahpet Thoke. We tested around with different intensities (freshly plucked tea leaves, sencha brewed once and sencha brewed twice), but we’ll just give you our best version.

Serves 6

Ingrédients :

1/3 cup loose leaf green tea (we suggest a softer leaf, like a variety of shaded sencha)

6 tablespoons of peanut/sesame oil

7 garlic gloves

1 fresh chilli, seeded and finely diced

1 lime

2 tablespoons (but more can be better) roasted salted peanuts, coarsley chopped

1 tablespoon (or just add to taste) fish sauce/oyster sauce (if vegan, soy sauce will do)

matcha salt (revolutionarily enough, we made it by adding salt and cooking matcha together)

(optional: dried shrimp, thinly sliced cabbage, seeded and diced tomato, toasted sesame)

Méthode :

Brew the tea leaves two times (drink the tea) and remove all excess water. Warm up the peanut or sesame oil in a skillet, and pour over the tea leaves. Knead the oil in to the leaves and let it sit at room temperature for minimum 1 hour, but for best results, overnight. When the leaves are soft enough, remove the excess oil, add 3 cloves of garlic  and the diced chilli. Then add matcha salt, the fish sauce and the juice of half a lime. Stir well and set aside, as the salad will aquire a paste-like texture. You can then fry the peanuts and the rest of the garlic and add them in.

We served ours in a simple, more Japanese manner. But if you want to follow the Burmese tradition, feel free to add all sorts of stuff and make an arrangement like this:

(source: riceandcurry.wordpress.com)

Play around with it, and whatever it is you choose to do, you have just discovered a new, healthy snack for those leftover tea leaves.