We have been talking so much about this Hakka dish – Lui Cha that I decided to give it a try on Friday. Failing to get the recipe from my uncle, I did a fair bit of research in the internet in English and Chinese, and finally find one that resembles the taste that I could identify in my mind. There were too many versions since they are many sub-clan of Hakka improvised version.
The most difficult part is to prepare the grounded tea which consists of roasted peanut (a lot), pine nuts, sesames (a lot), mint leaves, Thai sweet basil leaves, green tea leaves and etc.
The rest of the vegetables ingredients were rather easy to prepare, but just a lot of cutting and slicing and then sauté each dish individually to taste, a rather time consuming task, but fit me perfectly who is a weekend chef desperately to do something different from my work to relax. With Johannes help we did this in 2 hours on Friday evening.
We ate the Lui Cha in 3 different ways:
(1) Friday night using the special prepared grounded tea
(2) Saturday brunch, Johannes wanted to do it Japanese way by substituting the home-made grounded tea with 2 packs of Matcha (Japanese powdered green tea) and it was really bitter.
(3)I decided to do it the way my mum used to do, i.e. pour oo-long tea over the rice and YES, the taste of childhood re-immersing
Although it is a vegetarian dish, but it was rather heavy as the grounded tea consists of a lot of nuts which is filling Overall, a pat on my shoulder, my first every attempt and it turned out to be a pleasing experience....
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