Confiture au thé madame gris (lady grey tea jam)
Tea
This is a take on the French Milk Jam, Confiture au Lait, a specialty of Normandy. Think of it as the Dulce de Leche of France. <br /> <br />Milk Jam is made by cooking down whole milk, sugar and split vanilla pods for an hour or two. In the end, you have a 'caramel' sauce that's as delicious as can be. <br /> <br />I love, love, love Lady Grey. I reverse engineer my tea, by warming up milk and adding the teabag to it. This way, the bitter tanins in the tea are smoothed out and mellowed and the essence of the tea is distilled, into a cup, ready to be drunk. <br /> <br />We discovered this quite by accident a few years ago - my husband and I. The taste is very different from brewing the tea in hot water and adding milk later. An extra special part of our tea ritual was spooning a touch of sugar into the mug and stirring, to sweeten the tea....but then we would also add more sugar, and this time wouldn't stir, so as you drink the mug down, the tea progressively gets sweeter! Heavenly!! <br /> <br />I decided to make a 'tea-milk' jam, hoping the slight bitterness from the tea would balance the sweetness from the sugar and milk. And it works well - the orange, and bergamot flavours of Lady Grey really carry through and end up creating a wonderfully fragrant, sweet 'jam' that would be at home on a slice of buttered crusty french bread as well as lining the base of a tart, topped with bananas and whipped cream, swirls some through vanilla ice cream, sandwich it between two cookies - the choice is yours. I know where I'm going.....
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