Food

Grapefruit Green Tea

Posted on April 3, 2020

This is a TBD-part guest blog series from Katie.

Who am I, you may ask? Mary and I were roommates back in 2018, not to mention climbing partners, tiny home festival buddies, and overall kindred spirits in finding good deals and coming up with hacks (I am part Asian after all). You may recall we once made apricot jam together with a friend’s fresh apricots. While I slaved away over the stove and tried to prevent burning myself from the canning bath, Mary made those cute labels.

So, despite being generally less artsy/crafty/creative than Mary, she is graciously allowing me to share some of my own experiences on her blog. So alas, we present:

Day in the Life: Katie Shelters at Home

Week 1: Grapefruit Green Tea

I’m pretty obsessed with boba. With boba places only being open for takeout because of the shelter-in-place order (boba for me is a catchup-with-a-friend activity to avoid excessive consumption, plus I am trying to avoid going out as much as possible), I decided to make my own grapefruit green tea. This fresh fruit tea is a signature drink of Taiwan. 85C and Yifang do a good one.

Ingredients: sugar, zester, green tea bags, grapefruit

I modified this recipe I found. First, you have to make the grapefruit simple syrup. I zested one whole grapefruit and let it sit in a cup of sugar for an hour. Then I mixed the sugar with equal parts water and brought to a boil on the stove. After realizing that simple syrup is basically a lot of sugar in not a lot of liquid, I’d recommend ALWAYS asking for less sweet when ordering boba (between 20%-50% full sweetness).

It helps to not think about how much sugar this is.

A friend just moved to Hawaii and left behind a bunch of green tea bags. Score. I steeped those in a pot on the stove for probably 5 minutes too long. It left the tea pretty bitter, but luckily I had just made a lot of the grapefruit simple syrup. I dumped that in and let it cool before placing the container in the fridge.

You can also use other types of tea, like jasmine or mint.

To prepare the drink, I cut off the peel of half a grapefruit, put it in a glass, and filled it up with the grapefruit green tea. I had some extra boba straws, which worked great to suck up the grapefruit chunks. The grapefruit flesh can be eaten when you’re done!

Who needs to go out when you have fresh fruit tea at home?

The tea provided about 5 days worth of drinks and was a great afternoon refresher. Plus, instead of paying about 5 bucks for a drink like normal, I only had to pay $1 for the grapefruit (are these California prices?).