Matcha green tea tasting 抹茶の飲み比べ

Two years ago I made green tea and black bean cake  using the left-over "kuromame" 黒豆 black beans in syrup that came in the Sushi Taro osechi box. The recipe I used is in English in our blog. This year I commissioned my wife to take over making the green tea cake. Then, she pointed out that we were out of "matcha" 抹茶 green tea powder. I kept it in the freezer and mostly used it for cooking such as making "green tea salt" for tempura and apparently didn’t replace it after using it up. Since we are not physically going to our Japanese grocery store because of covid, I decided to get the green tea on line. Hibiki-an 響庵 is a company we have used in the past to get green tea and we could have gotten matcha from them but it is shipped directly from Japan and would have taken too long to get here. I then found "Matcha Kari" which imports its matcha stock from Japan but is located here so delivery time was much shorter.  I bought a mid-priced tea from them called "First harvest sipping matcha". (According to Mach-kari’s, Hibiki-an’s, and other websites which sell matcha, they offer several grades of matcha which appear to range from lowest quality/lowest price to highest quality/highest price, identified as “culinary”, “sipping”, “ceremonial” and “competition”.) (Disclaimer: I am not sure if there is official grading of matcha and if so what the grades would be). While we were waiting for this to arrive, I happened to see, while picking up a take-out at Tako Grill, that they had the matcha tea brand we used to get from our Japanese grocery store. This was very reasonably priced ($0.28 per gram, while the one from Matcha Kari was ＄1.17 per gram or over 4 times more expensive). I assume that the one from Tako Grill  was not as low-grade as “culinary” matcha  according to the lexicon I outlined but would be at the lower end of  “sipping“ grade. It also came from “Uji” 宇治 near Kyoto 京都. We have gotten regular Uji green tea (sencha 煎茶) from Hibiki-an in the past and it was pretty good. So as far as I was concerned this matcha (left in the picture below) was certainly good enough to make green tea cake. Then, a few days later we received the matcha from "matcha kari".

I have not made or tasted matcha for a long time but since we had two different kinds, we decided to have a tea tasting to see if we could taste a difference. I knew I had matcha bowls and a "chasen" 茶筅 (matcha frothing bamboo whisk) and a bamboo scoop or "chashaku" 茶杓.  The chasen and chashaku were easy to find but it took some search to find the matcha bowls. We have two; one that I brought with me for some reason when I first came to the U.S., and one that was given to us as a gift. Both are rather utilitarian  bowls but will do the job.

I made the two kinds of matcha, (the one from Tako Grill shown on the left and the one from Macha kari shown on the right) and taste tested.

For the sweet “chagashi” 茶菓子 accompanying the matcha I served the last of  the “kurt-kenton” 栗きんとん the mashed sweet potato with chestnuts from the Sushitaro osechi box and green plum I made simmered in syrup 小梅の甘露煮. It is customary to serve such a sweet with matcha to enhance the flavor of the tea. 

First of all, as a disclaimer, we have to acknowledge that we are not connoisseurs of matcha. Nonetheless after carefully sniffing and tasting both matcha we could state, with confidence, that despite quite a difference in price, we could not identify any difference in taste; none. The first thing that came to mind was the Japanese expression “Giving gold coins to a cat” or “neko ni koban 猫に小判” i.e. giving something of value where it can’t be appreciated. Well we did say we weren’t connoisseurs and this may just prove it. In the future, however, we will stick to the more reasonably priced macha.