Sheng pu-erh

Pu-erh cru (sheng)

What it is

The leaf is fixed in a wok, dried in the sun rather than an oven, then steamed and pressed into cakes — sun-drying leaves enough live enzyme and microflora for the cake to keep changing for decades. Raw and ripe pu-erh share a name and little else: this one was never wet-piled, and a young cake is pale, bitter and camphorous, not dark.

In the kitchen

Rinse the broken cake once with boiling water and throw that first pour away, then infuse in short bursts of ten to twenty seconds. Its astringency is the reason to braise fatty pork in it — a litre of strong sheng replacing a third of the stock cuts the fat the way a dry wine would.

Goes with

Apricot Dried chrysanthemum flower Ginger Pork belly Jujube Dried fig

Same species

Assam tea Ceylon tea Da Hong Pao Darjeeling tea Earl Grey Genmaicha

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