Tea and food pairings and tea-infused dishes from a fine dining chef's perspective

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All photos are kindly provided by Christian Nicita and are used with permission.

When I think of tea and food pairings or using tea as an ingredient in a dish, Italian food does not come to mind as the first, most obvious choice. And I was born and raised in Italy. That’s the reason why, when I came across chef and tea lover Christian Nicita and his tea room/restaurant Acquamadre on Instagram, I was immediately captivated. Imagine my reaction when I found out that he was serving gongfu-cha-steeped tea alongside fine-dining dishes in Sicily! Mind-blowing! And tea found its way into the dishes as well, together with local seasonal produce. Unfortunately, Acquamadre has shut down permanently due to the pandemic but Christian is already working on more tea-infused projects.

Here is my conversation with him.

Acquamadre, tea room and restaurant in Catania, Italy. Photo provided by Christian Nicita

Anna: Introduce yourself to the readers of The Tea Squirrel. What’s your background and how did you get into tea?

Christian: I’m a real tea addict, I’ve been drinking tea since I was 16 and when I was 20 I switched from tea bags to flavored loose leaf tea. When I was 22, I discovered oolong tea and gong fu cha (Chinese-style brewing) and my way of drinking tea has changed completely. Tea has been by my side during work breaks, while studying through the night, while meeting friends and sharing joyful moments with them and in moments of solitude.

When I was 20, I started working as a cybersecurity expert and at the same time I enrolled in a philosophy degree course at university (I am very interested in medieval and renaissance philosophy). My girlfriend at the time loved wine and even though I was a teetotaler and didn’t really like wine, I decided to pursue the wine sommelier certification course by AIS (Associazione Italiana Sommelier, the Italian Wine Sommelier Association) because I thought it would help me understand tea better, given the lack of high quality tea education courses. I became a certified wine sommelier and on top of that I pursued further wine education including the sensory analysis masterclass by AIS.

I come from a family of restaurant owners, my mom was a high school teacher and at the same time she managed the kitchen at our family’s restaurant. I had never cooked before moving to Rome, but I discovered I was good at it even though I lacked knowledge in cooking techniques. Therefore, when I was 28, I decided to take a break from my day job to attend culinary school in Rome and later on, I had a few experiences working alongside Michelin-starred chefs.

Anna: Acquamadre, your business, is a tea room and restaurant. Tell us more about it and why it is so unique and special.

Christian: Acquamadre is the place I had always been looking for as a tea lover and had never found. When we tea lovers travel, the first thing we are looking for are tea places. Usually, when we do find a tea house or tea room, tea is an afterthought. It’s very hard to find a tea place with high quality teas that can be traced back to the tea farm and tea master. At least, that was true in Italy before 2018 and from what I gathered from my trips to the Middle East and northern Europe.

Acquamadre is the kind of tea place I wanted to find, where tea is front and center, any time of day because it’s always tea time. In the morning you can pair tea with your breakfast, in the afternoon you can have a snack and pair it with tea and you can serve tea with lunch or dinner too (which is extremely unusual for Italians), alongside Sicilian dishes based on seasonal, local produce.

Acquamadre is unique because we are serving tea “the Italian way” by bringing it onto the dinner table at meal times and by using gongfu cha to brew the tea and then we serve it in wine glasses. It becomes a multi sensory experience. Having a pasta dish and washing it down with a drink that comes in a teacup or mug is unthinkable for Italians. The wine glass bridges that mental gap because Italians have that negative association of tourists vacationing in Italy, eating a pasta dish while enjoying a cappuccino (a big no-no in Italy).

A mackerel dish at Acquamadre paired with a 2016 Bai Ni Shui Sheng Puerh from Yunnan Sourcing. Photo provided by Christian Nicita.

Anna: How did you come up with the idea of using tea as a culinary ingredient?

Christian: When you love tea as much as I do, tea becomes your lifestyle. And therefore we tea lovers gladly put tea (or try to put tea) into anything that we like. At first, I tried using tea as a culinary ingredient by following recipes I found in cookbooks, most of which were disappointing.

The very first tea recipe I’ve ever tried was an Earl Grey tea risotto (and I should mention that I don’t like Earl Grey tea) but at least you could taste some Earl Grey in the dish. When I swapped out Earl Grey for another type of tea, the result was an absolute disappointment. Later on, though, when I went to culinary school and mastered different techniques, I started figuring out how to use pure teas (not flavored) in recipes and let their flavor shine in many dishes.

Anna: What are the challenges of using tea as a culinary ingredient?

Christian: Tea has a well-defined flavor on its own. If you use it within a tea and food pairing combination, it can improve your tasting experience without overpowering the food and without being overpowered by the food, even with complex dishes. When you use it as an ingredient, though, its flavor has the tendency to disappear.

One of my first experiments after culinary school was to use Keemun tea to replace stock in a dish with slightly spicy garbanzo beans and a tomato kanten jelly. In theory, the flavors should go very well together, because if you had a tomato-based garbanzo bean dish and paired it with Keemun tea, that’s a winning combination! But using tea in place of stock in that particular dish was very underwhelming and the resulting flavors were sadly flat. Whenever I put a tea-infused dish on the menu, I want you to taste tea in that dish. The problem with tea is making sure that tea flavor is prominent in the final dish and well balanced with all the other ingredients.

Anna: How did you design the tea and food pairings on the menu at Acquamadre?

Christian: Creating a tea and food pairing can follow two patterns, namely intuition and testing. Intuition comes from previous positive experiences that two flavors can pair well, and subsequently testing out that idea following the parameters of a pairing theory, which, in my case, is an adaptation of the wine pairing techniques developed by AIS (the Italian Wine Sommelier Association). Clearly, there are differences between tea and wine. Temperature, for example. Throughout the years, I’ve been practicing the wine and food pairing principles, adapting them to tea and food pairings.

Another dish from the Acquamadre menu, spaghetti with Hokkaido pumpkin, 99% dark chocolate and cilantro, paired with Bai Ye Dan Cong from Ling Tuo village. Photo provided by Christian Nicita.

Anna: What are the easiest teas to use as culinary ingredients and why?

Christian: The easiest teas to use as culinary ingredients are flavored tea blends because even though you might not detect tea itself in the final dish, you will almost certainly recognize some flavors from the blend. Nevertheless, flavored tea blends are my least favorite because it’s hard to taste the tea itself, which is almost always overpowered by the flavorings. I’d rather taste pure tea.

Matcha is usually one of the easier teas to use because it has a bold flavor, it’s easy to spot in a dish. Lapsang Souchong is also easier to use because of its smoky notes, even though lower quality Lapsang Souchong might work better to cook with because it’s much smokier than its high quality counterpart.

Personally, I’m focusing on working with those teas that you wouldn’t typically use as culinary ingredients because their flavor tends to disappear in the final dish.

Anna: What are your favorite cooking methods and techniques to use tea in a recipe?

Christian: When it comes to using tea as a culinary ingredient, my techniques, style and preferences have changed over the years. There is always a trial-and-error phase and evolution before a successful dish. Today my favorite techniques are:

Cold brewing tea on top of a stock or flavored water.
Grinding tea leaves and sieving the tea powder to enhance texture because tea leaves are tough and you don’t want to chew on them in a dish.
Using tea in place of stock by over brewing the tea and then balancing the flavor out by adding salt or sugar and/or other elements and by thickening it slightly.

Anna: Tell us more about some of your most successful tea-infused dishes.

Christian:

Pasta with matcha and fish. I use grouper but you could use any other white-fleshed fish and you add matcha green tea to the sauce because its slightly bitter and umami notes work really well with the natural sweetness of hand-made pasta and the fish. There’s no tomato in this dish (adding it makes the resulting color unappealing) and the challenge is to find a source of acidity and freshness. I came up with the idea of adding some onion which has been braised separately with lemon and it does the trick.
Risotto with oysters and Tie Guan Yin oolong. I strongly believe that Tie Guan Yin, in particular what is known as Jade Tie Guan Yin, works really well with fish, seafood and savory dishes. This risotto is prepared using small-batch, handmade butter and a little bit of goat cheese from a breed of goats from Sicily. At the end the risotto is generously dusted with finely ground Tie Guan Yin, it almost looks like a meadow, and in the middle you’ll find a raw oyster that becomes lukewarm thanks to the heat of the dish.
Fish with shou puerh. I use Mahi-Mahi for this dish, which is not very prized in Sicily because of its intense wild flavor. I serve it on top of a pumpkin puree with roasted porcini mushrooms, coriander sprouts and accompanied by a young shou puerh stock, a tea aged between 2 and 5 years. I over brew puerh tea for the stock and then I balance it out with salt and thicken it slightly with xanthan gum.

Anna: What are your favorite tea and food pairings?

Christian: It's hard to say, I don’t have a favorite pairing and I also don’t have a favorite tea. But I really like well-balanced pairings. Some of the pairings that you would have found on the menu at Acquamadre:

Mussels paired with Tie Guan Yin oolong.
Pasta with garbanzo beans paired with Assam black tea.
Pasta with tomato water, eggplant and ricotta salata paired with black tea from Georgia.
Roasted mackerel paired with sheng puerh (aged between 5 and 12 years).
Pollo alla cacciatora (a traditional Italian dish, braised chicken with vegetables) paired with First Flush Darjeeling.
Pulled lamb paired with shou puerh (aged between 5 and 20 years).
Babà (a traditional Italian dessert, sponge cake bites soaked in rum) paired with Bai Ye Dan Cong oolong.
Sacher Torte (chocolate cake with apricot jam filling) paired with Rou Gui oolong.

Anna: What tea-related projects are you working on right now?

Christian: Sadly, Acquamadre had to shut down permanently because of the pandemic. To quote Aristotle, ‘life is movement’, there are ideas, there are opportunities and I hope they will become a reality this fall and winter but it’s still too early for me to talk about them. In the meantime, I’m working with restaurants as a consultant to help them develop a tea program, develop recipes with tea and train their staff to serve tea. At the same time, I keep drinking tea and learning about tea, which is a lifelong endeavor.

My approach to cooking is not an easy one to work with because ingredients and their quality come before everything else. Time will tell what the upcoming projects will lead to. As far as I’m concerned, whatever the future holds, it’s definitely tea-related.

Thank you, Christian, for sharing your perspective on and experience with tea and food pairings and using tea as a culinary ingredient. We wish you all the best for your upcoming projects!

You can follow Christian Nicita on Instagram here and check out more photos from Acquamadre here.