Last week, I tried making a raw tea out of amaranth snips from my garden. This week, the experimentation has continued: I have made green-tea processed amaranth and “regular” sun-dried amaranth, just to see how tea processing impacts taste.

 

To make sure I was comparing apples to apples, I started with the same amount of amaranth by weight for both comparisons and used the same amount of water.

 

Both teas rocked, but they were definitely different.

On the left (I think it’s the left), is the sun-dried tea. As you can see, it’s much paler than the picture on the right: green-tea processed amaranth, which is so shockingly fuchsia that it belongs in a museum. 

 

What do I mean by green-tea processed? Well, most of the herbal teas we use are just dehydrated in some fashion. 

 

Green-tea processing utilizes what’s called a “kill-green” step: heating the leaf enough to denature the enzymes in the plant that cause it to oxidize. This is why green tea has more antioxidants: because the process literally stops the oxidation. Depending on the process, if you’re pan-firing the tea at the kill-green stage, you also add a hint of caramelization to the tea from the Maillard reaction.

 

This the green-tea process that I use, step by step: 

The taste of the teas changed, too: the sun-dried tea is more vegetal, and the green-tea processed tea is nuttier. They’re both a little more subdued than the raw tea, which I guess is to be expected. I would love to see a chemical analysis of what is happening here.

 

Please note: there are two possible confounding factors here. First, I made the sun-dried tea about a week after I made the green-tea processed tea, and that meant that I was dealing with slightly older amaranth from my garden.

 

From visual observation, older amaranth is perhaps slightly duller in color, and so this may be a function of the age of the underlying leaves. You can kind of see this in the cover photo at the top: the leaves are getting redder.

 

I also let the sun-dried tea sit longer after preparation, so that might also have something to do with the color drop off. By contrast, I dropped the amaranth pearls in water the moment I finished drying them off.

 

So there are still unanswered questions. Clearly, I need to grow trays of red amaranth microgreens so I can make shockingly pink tea.

 

I am also going to have to spend the summer grabbing things out of my garden to see how well it teas. And luckily for me, I know my next experiment.

Origin name: this tea was yanked from my garden and prepared by me.

One of the things that is not fun about being a person who gets immersed in history a lot is that you see a lot of parallels between right now and prior times.

 

I’ve seen a lot of people talk about 1930s Germany, and I think we should keep those comparisons in mind and be wary of where we are, but I think that the US is not like 1930s Germany for multiple reasons. 

 

I’m saying this not to imply that people can breathe a sigh of relief and not worry. It’s because I’ve seen too many people say things that sound like they’re giving up. They think that Trump is the Fourth Reich, and that he’s won, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

 

But no, I don’t think we should assume that this country will continue the way Germany did. That doesn’t mean it will be good; there are a lot of truly awful things that I think can happen. But what happened in Germany will not work in the US, for two simple reasons. First, this country is a lot more diverse than Germany in the 1930s, and that poses a serious difficulty. 

 

Second… well, how do I say this? This is not a history book, and my summary will leave out a lot of nuance.

 

Even back when this country was a collection of English colonies, before they’d swept the country from east to west with a wave of migration, we were a bunch of angry weirdos. This is because one of the ways that England dealt with the huge number of religious dissidents generated by Henry VIII creating the Church of England (and related Protestant/Catholic arguments) was to ship almost everyone ornery off to the American colonies.

 

We got the Pilgrims. We got the Quakers. We got the Puritans. We got the angry rabble rousers who were making life a little too difficult, sometimes for each other, and they all landed slopped together on the Eastern seaboard of what is now the United States of America where the only things they could see eye to eye on were “fuck the King” and “let’s try and take more land.” 

 

When we first became a country—before we even had a constitution—the motto of the United States was e pluribus unum: out of many, one. This has proved to be more of a guideline than an actual accomplishment.

 

Much of US history is about the fight between how very many we are, and how very hard—maybe even impossible—it is to herd us into being one.

 

It is, at times, a despair. How hard is it to treat people with dignity? To believe in racial equality? To allow people to live their lives, to love who they love, without having state interference? Why is it that Texas or Alabama or Florida(the governments, not necessarily the people—lots of good people live in those states) can’t just get with the program and believe in human rights? Will you please stop engaging in voter suppression?

 

But it is also, in times like this, a light. We have states that were once part of Mexico and states that were once Puritan, states that once enslaved people, and states that once demanded that every human being stand equal. 

 

That’s my second reason why I think that the US won’t go the way of Germany. We are a country of cats. We were specifically sent to this land because of our inability to herd.

 

This country has always been engaged in a civil war over which direction we’re headed. Sometimes that war is quiet and subterranean. Sometimes, it’s loud and vociferous. Many of the pivotal points in US history break upon this: that every once in a while, we are more many than we are one.

 

I’ve heard a lot of slogans recently. “Our diversity is our strength” is one I mostly agree with, but I think it’s rather beside the point. Our diversity is an inevitability. 

 

Do you know how hard that side has tried to make this country not diverse? They tried in the Know Nothing era. They tried, horrifically, to destroy Native populations, and what they did was heartbreaking and awful but their descendants are still here. They tried when they expelled most of the Chinese from the country. They tried during Operation Wetback. They are trying now. 

 

They’ve done heartbreaking, awful damage—I don’t want to downplay that—but they’ve never once succeeded, because we will always be many, and we will never be one.

 

What is happening now is horrific and heartbreaking, and people are being harmed. There will be scars that these events leave that will eventually stop bleeding but never go away. I strongly suspect that things are going to get more awful and more heartbreaking before they start getting better.

 

But they will not win, because the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of our country is the same: that when you try to make every one of the many places in this country be the same, it splinters, and out of many, we have more.

The reason I started green-tea processing various teas was book research. In The Earl who Isn’t, Lily makes green-tea processed stinging nettle for her grandfather, a thing that I did just to see what happened, with delightful results.

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