Gentle persistent focus 

Matcha was one of those foods that when it arrived, you heard its name about a bit and then one hot afternoon at a picnic someone surreptitiously slips you a frozen matcha mochi while the kids aren’t looking and your eyes widen and you think, oh my, what is this amazing sweet grassy, savoury green, cold chewy substance?

Then a week passes and you’re around at a friend’s place for breakfast and there’s a plate of green matcha pancakes causing a stir and later that week lining up for a coffee someone orders a matcha latte and everybody goes momentarily quiet and glances up at the latte orderer before quickly regaining their composure.

Then after the novelty passes people get on with their lives and no one thinks twice about a strange green powder that’s somehow become an ingredient on our tea shelves.

Well I certainly didn’t until Isabelle Fouard, Fair Food’s marketing manager brought some matcha into the Fair Food warehouse the other day.

She got talking about matcha whisks and how you whip it up it into a drink and it suddenly occurred to me that, apart from it being a healthy green powder that makes mochi amazing, I didn’t really know what matcha actually was.

When I discovered it was ground up green tea I was a little “is that it?” – nothing against green tea but I thought there’d be a bit more to the matcha story.

But of course there was – heaps.

Matcha was discovered in the sixth century by Chinese and then later Japanese Zen Monks who, in the best spiritual traditions, were into plant alchemy and how it might get the human body closer to nirvana.

The monks found that if you steamed then finely ground green tea leaves and then whipped them up into a drink, the result was an alert yet gently focussed state that lasted hours and hours – the perfect beverage for those extra long meditations.

Word of the calming yet energising drink spread and matcha became foundational in setting the sensibility and vibe of a newly evolving culture based around tea ceremony. 

A thousand or so years later Western science would explain the matcha effect as a balance between two very different substances; caffeine, a stimulant and L-theanine, a nootropic found almost uniquely in green tea leaves.

Studies in the 90’s and early 2000’s showed that L-theanine promoted dopamine and serotonin release and increased calming alpha brain waves while it also slowed the absorption of caffeine in drinkers’ bloodstreams, providing a gentle, long lasting energy release.

Matcha, as it turns out has twice the caffeine and two to four times the amount of L-theanine as green tea. Black tea due to the oxidisation process used has matcha-like caffeine levels but almost none of the L-theanine – which begs the question of how Britain and its empire would have turned out if it took to matcha instead of black tea.

The shade-grown part is also fascinating – early matcha growers discovered tea plants grown partially in shade made stronger matcha than tea grown in full sun leading farmers to build wooden frames over the tea bushes layered with straw mats. 

In the three weeks before harvest the aim is to gradually reduce light from about 70% down to 90% shade which pushes the plants to increase photosynthesis resulting in softer, greener, sweeter tea leaves and higher quality matcha.

Today, most matcha farms use black shade cloths (similar to greenhouse netting).

Matcha Maiden, the matcha Isabelle brought into Fair Food this week was founded in Melbourne in 2014 as a side project in former lawyer Sarah Davidson and her partner Nic Davidson’s kitchen.  

Packing organic matcha into zip-lock bags the pair were among the first to bring Japanese organic matcha to Australia.

As matcha awareness blew up Sarah and Nic’s side hustle grew quickly, pushing Sarah’s law career to one side as they found themselves frantically working out how to build a brand, a cafe (for a while) and discover as many delicious ways to share this gently amazing ingredient as they possibly could.

You can try out Sarah and Nic’s matcha on yourself and your friends – it’s here in the webshop

Have a great week

Chris