It's nettle season and we are busy picking and making nettle infusion for our Yum Cha Iced teas, as well as for other customers use our infusion to flavour their own products. Selling weeds is a farmer's dream, but the nettle is no ordinary weed. For a start, it seems impossible to cultivate. Two years ago I scattered 100,000 seeds on a third of an acre of nicely prepared ground, but not one germinated. Another farmer in Northumbria, a wild flower specialist who knows his trade better than anyone, failed three years in a row to grow nettles for me before finally giving up. They seem to have very particular requirements and of course where these are met they grow rampantly and are mostly unwelcome. Fortunately we have Mare Mead, an ancient meadow by the river Mole that floods every year bringing nutrients the nettles approve of and which they have all but taken over so we have a regular supply.
In Italy you are considered fortunate if you have a patch of nettles. They are much less common there and highly appreciated mostly as a green vegetable, spinach style and welcome especially for being available early in the year when there is little else around, before even the first asparagus comes up to herald the arrival of spring. Nettle risotto is delicious, and there are nettle frittatas, nettle gnocchi, and even, for the bold, nettle salads.
Nettles are also one of the most important medicinal herbs. Most medicinal herbs in fact are common weedy plants, not exotic rarities, and elder and nettle together are by some way the most important plants used in western herbalism. You can find out more in Mrs Grieves excellent and encyclopaedic "A Modern Herbal" here:
http://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/n/nettle03.html . Nettles are thought to be particularly good for autoimmune complaints such as hay fever and arthritis.
For me though the great thing about nettles is their lovely fresh aroma, which to me even surpasses that of elderflower. It is strong and distinctive, but also delicate and does not survive cooking. If you want to preserve it you have to treat your nettles with great care. On the other hand, you do need to at least warm them up to about 80 degrees C at some point to neutralise the sting which otherwise you will notice even in a tea.
Yum Cha nettle iced tea is my favourite out of the twelve teas and infusions in the Instant Iced Tea range so far by some way. Nettle tea itself is nothing new, but it is always made from dried nettles and the lovely fresh aroma is completely lost. By infusing fresh nettles and then preserving the extract in a syrup we get a concentrate that can be added to iced water at about 1 part to 20 to make iced tea in an instant that has all the flavour and aroma of fresh nettles. It's easily recognisable as nettle if you know what it is, but if you don't you would probably take it to be a fruit, so sweetly aromatic it is.
Nettle sorbet is equally stunning and if you want to wow your guests at a dinner, serve just a scoop between courses as a palate cleanser. It will be the talk of the evening. To make it you just need some lemons, water, sugar and nettles. Pick say 100g of nettles. Take about 80g lemon juice and add 120g water then the nettles. Press them down from time to time, and they will soon settle into the liquid and start to infuse. If you are in a hurry, heat them up for a moment, which will wilt the nettles and extract the flavour in a few minutes, but for best results infuse cold overnight. Strain off the liquor which should be an attractive light red colour (I know, you thought it would be green, but look carefully at nettles and you will find most of them have a lot of red in the stems and this colour infuses out, while the green doesn't) and measure or weigh it. Whatever the weight add about 2/5 of the amount of sugar, i.e. if it is 100g add 40g sugar (or for a better texture slightly less sweet taste, 20g sugar and 20g glucose). Now heat to 80 degrees (if you don't have a thermometer, 80 degrees is when a coating of fine bubbles starts to line the pan) and set aside to cool. To make the sorbet use an ice cream maker if you have one, but if you don't it doesn't matter, it works just as well if you just put it in its container in the freezer. If you do the latter, take it out once frozen, break it up a bit and pound it with a pestle to improve the texture and break down any large ice crystals, then return it to the freezer to set again before serving.
If that all sounds a bit daunting you can try this alternative recipe. Get hold of a bottle of Yum Cha Nettle Instant Iced Tea (ask me how), and dilute the syrup about 3:1 with water. Freeze it. That's it! It will be just as good as the above because that's just how Yum Cha is made.
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