Shou pu-erh

Pu-erh cuit (shou)

What it is

Wet-piling, wo dui, was worked out in 1973 at the Kunming and Menghai factories to get in weeks the taste of a raw cake aged for decades: damp leaf is heaped a metre high under cloth and turned while the microbes hold the core near 50-60 °C. It is not an older tea than sheng but a different manufacture, and the result — beetroot, damp wood, forest floor — is closer to a savoury ingredient than a drink.

In the kitchen

Rinse twice: the first two pours of any ripe cake carry the smell of the pile and are thrown out. Then use it hot and strong, 10 g per litre, as half the braising liquid for pork belly or duck legs with star anise — it deepens colour as much as flavour.

Goes with

Pork belly Duck Star anise Jujube Beetroot Dark chocolate

Same species

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

Also used with

Chenpi Dried chrysanthemum flower

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