Japanese tea hojicha hits the sweet spot among the cafe set
"Hojicha is a roasted green tea," says Kosei Kamatani, who started the Japanese-inspired dessert cafe Via Tokyo with his brother and mother in 2013.
"Hojicha is a roastedgreen tea," says Kosei Kamatani, who started the Japanese-inspired dessert cafe Via Tokyo with his brother and mother in 2013. "For the most part a simpler grade green tea is used as the base, but hojicha based on roasted sencha [a more premium green tea]is also common."
Tea lovers and those with a sweet tooth have been flocking to Via Tokyo recently for their roll cake (like a Swiss roll), cheesecake and lattes made with hojicha. Via Tokyo's first hojicha product was a soft-serve ice cream. It was so popular that Kamatani says he will consider putting it back on the menu.
He introduced hojicha products to his menu because he loves hojicha desserts: "In trips to Japan I encountered sweets such as hojicha chocolates, ice cream and biscuits, which I found scrumptious. The taste of hojicha is like no other: a deep, malty and almost caramel-like flavour without any unpleasant bitterness you can sometimes get with matcha [green tea]."
Another early adopter of hojicha is Teakha. Nana Chan, Teakha's founder, says: "Hojicha au lait and a plain hojicha is always on the menu. We've also served hojicha panna cotta, and we're constantly researching recipes using hojicha, the next one of which may be a hojicha chiffon cake."
When using hojicha to flavour food, Kamatani says: "Using tea leaves to infuse the flavour of tea into a mixture of some sort to be used in cooking is common, but ground tea leaves [a finely powdered form] are also quite often used in things such as baking to produce pastries."
Chan says that using hojicha is all about balance. "Since hojicha is quite a light tea, it is hard to extract the flavour unlike, for example, Ceylon or matcha.
"This means a hard balance to strike between soaking it for long hours to extract the flavour and trying to prevent the bitterness from coming out from the long steep."
