Smoked Tea Rub

Combining the dense sweetness of molasses with the smoky depth of lapsang souchong tea, our Smoked Tea Rub is not for the faint of heart. Mediterranean herbs like fennel and rosemary lighten the burden of this rub, but the deeply flavorful ground tea leaves, combined with molasses and black pepper, give this rub a formidable presence that lingers, mingling with the salt and flirting with the slight crunch of sesame seeds. Our Smoked Tea Rub is blended in our facility in small batches, which helps guarantee that our products taste great as we ship them out our doors.

The tea we use for this rub is Lapsang Souchong. This brash, aromatic, strongly-flavored black tea gets its character from being smoked over a wood fire. While most teas go through a more gentle drying process and are laid out over mesh or gauze to air-dry, Lapsang Souchong is aggressively dried over a wood fire. During this complex drying process its the leaves are placed in a bamboo basket and allowed to partially wither, before rolling, which allows the tea to open and absorb more flavors, and fired over wood. The tea leaves are then expertly stored to allow them to ferment. After fermentation they are rolled and roasted again over a wood fire, which then stops their internal processing.

Tips From Our Kitchen

This rub is great for hearty meats; use on a roasted pork loin or on oven-baked ribs. Toss with sirloin and sear for a beef-and-broccoli stir fry. Rub on duck or dark-meat game birds, like quail or pheasant. Chop that duck and stuff some enchiladas; for pure fusion top them with hoisin-inspired enchilada sauce. Add it to the seasoning base for mushroom risotto. Mix into lamb burgers. Use to flavor udon noodle soup.

Use 2 teaspoons of Smoked Tea Rub per pound of meat, until you can judge the strength of this seasoning blend.

Blended from granulated molasses, sea salt, Lapsong Souchong tea, demerara sugar, sesame seeds, paprika, garlic, black pepper, fennel, rosemary and marjoram.

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