TEA WITH chef natasha pickowicz + a pop-up together this saturday
Natasha Pickowicz is a pastry chef and the author of More Than Cake. We met and became friends over our love of Paige Lipari, owner of the bookshop/ cafe Archestratus.
Below is a conversation that we had just after we both returned from Italy this summer! This conversation sparked this coming Saturday’s Tè Time pop-up at Archestratus which will include a small batch of chamomile tea that was harvested for Masha Tea in Tuscany, tomato sandwiches on chamomile mayo, fish cured in our black and hojicha teas (all made by Natasha), Sicilian cookies by Paige, and a very cute Masha <> Archestratus mug featuring a 35mm film photo I took of the chamomile field at Maraviglia, home to the Masha Tea writing retreat + the chamomile for our harvest. We would love to see you at Archestratus at 5:30 9/7 at 164 Huron Street!!! Tickets and more info here :) But also feel free to swing by.
For “a taste” read TEA WITH Natasha Pickowicz below <3
Setting - Wednesday afternoon in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Natasha’s backyard. August.
Maria (M) Do you go to the [Union Square] market every Wednesday?
Natasha (N) I love Wednesdays there, I mean this time of year, yes, I do. Right now I’m just trying to stay on Italy time for as long as possible. I’m waking up early naturally.
M I feel like I was doing that too when I got back from Italy, but now I started watching Mad Men for the first time so I’m staying up super late.
N Oh my god, what! Prepare to have your heart broken.
M Don’t tell me anything. Although I’m kind of deep in. I just finished season 4. I’ve been watching it every single night so I’m off Italy time.
N The opposite direction.
N Everything kind of feels in flux [in the garden] and not really taken care of right now.
M I think it looks great!
N Haha it’s so crazy it’s so overgrown. This whole bush here is a bitter melon and it’s looking for a fence. I cut this back so much, I have so much more I need to do. It grew over tomatoes, salvia, cabbage. It’s crazy how fast it grew. I thought it was going to vine on the ground but it wanted to go up. You see my corn? It grew like 5 feet while I was gone. Corn doesn’t really need water, at least not here with the rain. But TEA. This is catnip. And I’ll pick this..
M Do you give it to the cat?
N She loves it, but it’s bolted and it’s gone to seed. It tastes like anise hyssop, it’s licorice-y. I have shiso too.
M I just made iced tea from shiso that I got at the market.
N To me, shisho is so good for dessert. With stone fruit, tomatoes, really juicy fruit. Less good with fall stuff like pears.
M It’s kind of sour.
N I think the purple variety has more of a sweetness. Every year I'll have friends over and have a taste test and see who can identify stuff and people are really good. I think it speaks to the clarity of what the plants are like. Like basil, people get it right away. Lemon verbena. Smell this one!
M That smells like ice cream. Like the lemon Italian ice that comes in the yellow packages.. Marino’s Italian Ice!
N I joke that it’s every pastry chef’s favorite herb. What else did we get? I have borage coming in but it hasn’t bloomed yet. Thats going to be really pretty. What else? I have all this fresh lemon grass. So this is like amazing. The fresh stuff in a tea, because it’s so oily when it’s fresh, it’s a different thing.
M It has an interesting texture.
N Yea it’s really grassy. I have some rue. I was just in the Dolomites and I tried a grappa that was infused with rue which I had never really seen before but it’s like in the Italian alps they infuse the grappa with all of these incredible herbs. Like gentian flowers, rue, alpine pine needles, it was so cool to have all those things expressed in grappa which is obviously so boozy and intense but can carry so many flavors.
[Natasha picks herbs as we talk]
M Did you grow up drinking a lot of tea?
N Yea! So my mom is Chinese and I grew up in a very Chinese tea drinking household. Her passion is Taiwanese teas. She was in Taipei last year and she brought me back these beautiful oolongs and jasmine teas and she’s always like This was really expensive because if you’re Chinese, tea is a status symbol and a luxury good. But my mom, growing up, drank everyday workhorse tea, it was the jasmine tea in the yellow tin with the brown pattern on the side.
The way my mom would drink tea is she would do three or four changes of water over the same tea leaves and she would let it sit on the counter. And I remember growing up thinking her tea was so tannic and so bitter. I didn’t grow up in a coffee household, for them [coffee] was a treat. My parents would get it like if they were out to brunch on the weekends. They never had it made at home, but tea is something they steadily drank throughout the day. And it was always the same kind of tea. So I think like it’s this unique idiosyncratic combination of not precious but there are also rules that are unspoken. You would never add anything sweet to a tea and you would never add dairy to a tea. Those are Western things that my mom thinks are like disgusting and I think I came into that palate, that sensibility, and I don’t take my tea with anything in it.. unless it’s chai. But almost exclusively, I’m not adding anything to my tea. I would watch friends add sugar or honey or add milk and think that’s not tea anymore.
So yea I definitely grew up in a tea house and drink a lot of tea because of that. Now I probably branch out a bit more. I love buckwheat teas and those earthy, nutty teas that are not fresh and herbal but are more nourishing and edifying. I love a smoky tea like a lapsang souchong. I used to live in Montreal and would go to Camillia Sinensis [Teahouse] and it felt like there was this nerdy foody moment with pu-erh’s and lapsang souchong with people who are really collectors and fastidious around sourcing and how to drink it and the timing and the temp of the water. I’m not that person at all, I’m not timing out how long it’s steeping or weighing out the tea for the ratio, I’m not that person at all but obviously it’s exciting to taste so many interesting unique terroirs and provenance of all these things. That was when, living in Montreal, opened me up to all of these interesting teas.
[Natasha pours the herbal infusion she brewed from her garden herbs while we were talking]
N I feel this this is really good iced, I wouldn’t normally drink something like this hot. It’s like hot minty water.
M I feel like a lot of this flavors might not come out in the iced tea though, because all of these herbs are so oily and don’t dissolve in water so the heat makes them activate.
N Anything that has citrus like lemon grass, lemon verbena, that’s the first thing I get out of this.
M Then you get this spiciness and mintiness.
N Maybe it’s the basil or the catnip!
M I feel like with this kind of thing it can get soupy, especially if there’s nettle in it?
N I LOVE nettle tea, that was really big in the Dolomites as well. They would have these Tyrolean alp blends and it would be like gentian flowers + nettles, like you go hiking and there are walls two stories high of nettle bushes and you have to walk around them to your legs don’t get fucked up. To your point about soup, I have a recipe in my [upcoming] book that I call tea bag soup and it’s green tea with savory and sweet things - you make a green tea scented savory broth that’s so good with hot pot.
M When you were promoting your last book [More Than Cake] did you do any events with tea?
N Not really, but teas express really well in baked goods. Like you were saying the way flavors and oils are activated in heat, that happens in baked goods too so [tea is] an amazing way to add nuance or depth to a baked food, like by rubbing it into a sugar, or infusing it into a custard, or whipping it into a butter cream. The way that I think about baked goods and pastry it’s all about building flavor and with baked goods there so many ways to do that. Soaking the cake with something flavorful after its baked. And what are you pairing the cake with…
I’m always looking for things that are super flavorful but don’t add sweetness or richness. Like I love baking with fruit and processing fruit into things so I think that something like tea is such a natural fit for what fruit can taste like because you’re pairing fruit with another plant. Whereas I’m not really a chocolate person so something like coffee doesn’t get included as much into my desserts.
N My obsession right now is this grass jelly tea. Traditionally in Taiwan you would brew this tea and then add a stabilizer and make it into a jelly and you might like..
M Wait remember that fashion event that you hosted that I went to - I feel like you made those there?
N Oh my god, yes! That was it!
M It was really good.
N I was going through a stash and could not get enough. Because you add barely any sugar, it sets, and in Taiwan you traditionally might cube it up and then put it over crushed ice and add condensed milk or just eat it as a jelly, but to me it has this warmth that is graham crackers, biscuity flavor that is vanilla but it also has this cookie flavor to it. With no sugar you get this incredible warmth.
So I just got that re-up. I also love making tea with roselle, which is like hibiscus. It’s something I love with pastry because it adds such beautiful color to everything. I have another drink in the book that’s a roselle salted lemonade so it tastes like Gatorade. And this is one of the oolongs my mom brought back from Taiwan.
M It’s really pretty. Are these the tea cups you usually drink out of? Or what cups do you like to use?
N My dad gave me these, they’re a set for tea. I do like a smaller cup that doesn’t have a handle to drink smaller quantities at a time. But there’s something about tea at night before bed that feels more like a mug moment. So I have a mug that Paige made that she sold for like a day. I’m not precious about what the tea is drunk out of at all. This pot came with a matching little mug with handle, but it’s pretty utilitarian. These cups feel more Chinese, small amounts of tea that you can finish before they cool down.
To keep talking about herbs, Italy, tea habits, and Mad Men (which I’ve now finished watching!) and to have TEA WITH Natasha, Paige, and myself, come to Archestratus this Saturday at 5:30pm :)
