Ever made green tea before?
It's actually a very lengthy and arduous process, something that can take hours, if not days, even for the most skilled green tea producers. Not only that, but these producers risk extended exposure to the blistering Korean sun as well as repeated burns from dipping their hands in boiling cast-iron pans in order to put together this world-famous South Korean green tea!
Fortunately, on my most recent trip with Goh Travel Korea, I got to visit two stunning green tea fields and take part in the green tea-making process from start to (almost) finish!
Green tea plantations need to be strategically located in order to avoid being near any factories or power plants, thus avoiding pollution. The Korean southwest, where most Korean plantations are located, is fortunately an area without too many of these factories or power plants. In fact, the plantations I visited were over 100km away from the nearest pollution source, which was fantastic!
As you can imagine, the first step to making green tea is cultivating the tea leaves. This said, before you even start, you must take a moment to appreciate the stunning visual scenery that these green tea fields have to offer! It's an overload of green, but an impressive one at that!
In fact, you could even climb to the very top of the plantation for some stunning views:
The perfect green tea leaf should look something like this:
The ideal is to have a petal on each side and a stem sticking out in the middle. Once you've collected enough leaves, you're ready to head inside.
Once inside, dump the assortment of tea leaves on a table. It's important to sort through all of them and remove all the bad ones. The "bad leaves" are leaves that either don't meet the "two leaves, one stem" visual above, or if they're discoloured. This is very important because stale or bad leaves can leave an unfortunate taste in your mouth. We then had to press the leaves to the point of crushing them on the table. When the tea-master deemed that the leaves were sufficiently crushed, it's time to start cooking!
Before making our way to the cast-iron pans to start cooking the tea leaves, we were told that it was quite important to protect ourselves from burns, naturally. At this plantation, we were asked to put on two pairs of thick gloves as well as protective sleeves to protect our arms from any sparks, seeing as the pan is heated to over 400 degrees Celsius...
Once ready, dump the leaves into the pan and start cooking! There's a very particular three-step process for cooking tea leaves in the pan, and it's very important to never touch the metal with your glove-covered hands. First, press down on the leaves with the palm of your hands. Second, push the leaves to the right of the pan. Third, apply pressure and flip the leaves over by twisting your hands back toward the centre of the pan.
This process must be repeated until the leaves have shrunk a little and crisped up. This took us about 15-20 minutes, and we were a team of four, working in twos and tagging in every so often so that our teammates wouldn't get too burnt or suffer too much back pain (yes, you're bent over throughout the whole process so it can be straining on your back). I imagine that a team of skilled teamakers would be able to do this a lot quicker than us...
Once that's done, it's back to your tables! You then have to divide the cooked leaves into smaller piles and start rolling them. You roll the leaves into a ball, put pressure on the ball and roll this ball of leaves on the table. Keep this up for about 15-20 minutes, rotating the leaves, until they've all been rolled and more flavour has been extracted.
This process actually needs to be repeated a total of SIXTEEN times for the process to actually be complete, with the tea leaves actually shrinking each time. Once done, take the leaves and place them into your nice little bag, and enjoy some delicious green tea!
As you can imagine, we did not repeat the process sixteen times on our visit, we only did it once to learn what actually went into it, and we were gifted a nice little bag of green tea as a reward. We were actually even offered the opportunity to take part in a green tea tasting, to sample the fruit of our labour!
As if it wasn't a green tea overload already, we even got treated to some green tea cookies and crackers, some green tea jams (which were absolutely delicious!) and even green tea ice cream! Truly a special and authentic Korean experience!
