This recipe from the Lab Farewell Cookbook is actually two gifts. I'll tell you about the second gift first: the recipe is for a salad with an ingredient I've never encountered before, fermented tea leaves. There's a not-so-authentic-but-it'll-do recipe for making them at home, and I took it on with a 'lil help from my friends.
My mate Toby is an expert in all things tea, and he recommended Assembly in Carlton for green tea leaves that are good enough to eat. The leaf prep is simple: rehydrate, drain and lightly ferment in salt, flavour with garlic, lemon juice and olive oil. The result is, to me, a distant cousin of pesto - it's got that concentrated green flavour, but the tea is lightly bitter instead of summery and sweet like basil. Following the recipe's general guide, I teamed it will a little pickled ginger, then generous shakes of salted roasted peanuts and fried shallots.
The first gift is the written recipe itself. It's a rollicking read that runs to two-and-a-half pages, and instead of paraphrasing it I'm submitting it whole, with permission.
Wow!!!
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