While drinking teas from all of the great tea-growing regions of the world is a journey in a cup, exploring tea’s culinary potential, unfurling the myriad flavors inherent in the leaf, is oftentimes an even richer pleasure that can spirit you away to other dimensions.

Going beyond the more familiar renditions of tea-flavored foods, such as the Chinese tea-smoked duck, marbled hard-cooked, tea-steeped eggs, or the tea-flavored noodles and green tea ice cream of Japan, tea lovers and inventive cooks can incorporate their favorite teas in dishes both savory and sweet. Professional chefs and home cooks alike are discovering how tea imparts complexity, subtlety, and sometimes a bold edge in everything from braised pot roast to rich chocolate truffles.

For my earliest tentative forays into cooking, I was attracted to the shelves of ethnic grocers, ferreting out some new-to-me ingredient and creating an unorthodox use for it. Tea was one of those exotic items on the shelf that always beckoned, packaged in beautiful tins or boxes decorated with images of high mountains shrouded in fog with ideographs whose calligraphic grace I was learning to decode as a student of Oriental languages. Japanese green tea became my drink du jour those many years ago, yet I now drink and cook with all kinds of teas as a versatile flavoring for meat, poultry, fish, seafood, noodles, and vegetables.

To me, drinking tea is a bridge to cooking with it; the reverse also seems true.  Analogous to cooking with wine, where the rule is “if you won’t drink it, don’t cook with it,” cooking with tea calls for the use of tea that has a clean, forward flavor, clearly characteristic of its type. I believe unflavored greens, oolongs, and black teas tend to be the best to cook with, standing up to, but not overwhelming or muddying, the other flavors and ingredients in a dish.

One can add the dry leaves to a broth as a final seasoning fillip (sieved out before serving) or finely pulverize them for a spice blend rubbed on a filet of fish or chicken breast. Consider infusing leaves not in water but in juice or syrup to poach seasonal fruits such as mellow Asian pears, perfumed lychees, fragrant summer peaches, and other stone fruits. Tea leaves can perfectly flavor melted butter for a tea-inflected torte or infuse cream with their savor for a chocolate sauce, truffle confection, or glaze. The canvas is endless, only limited by your own imagination.

To learn more, and see demonstrations of some of my favorite recipes, stop by the PeLi Teas booth number 434 at the World Tea Expo on May 2 and 3. I look forward to meeting all of you and sharing some delights of cooking with tea.

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