Recently Serious Eats featured "pestle tea," a Hakka Chinese drink made from tea leaves pounded with nuts and seeds. Intrigued by the sound of this creamy, nourishing tea, we explored further and realized this is the lei cha that we've found in packets at Asian markets — but so much better when made from scratch.
Lei cha, also known as pounded, ground, or thunder tea, is a specialty of the Hakka people of southern China. (Large Hakka diaspora communities also exist in Taiwan and Southeast Asian countries like Malaysia and Indonesia.) The drink consists of green or oolong tea leaves pounded in a mortar and pestle with roasted nuts and seeds such as peanuts, sesame seeds, pine nuts, sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds. Herbs, beans, and roasted grains like puffed rice may also be added.
After grinding them to a paste, the ingredients are mixed with hot water or tea to form a thick, luscious drink. Often times it is served over rice, vegetables, and pickled radishes to make a nutritious soup.
Although it comes from centuries-old tradition, Hakka tea is not a specific recipe, and it's open to experimentation. For example, we loved reading how Hunger and Thirst adapted the method to her own, local ingredients and a molcajete. You can also use a food processor instead of a mortar and pestle, but we find that hand grinding can be very satisfying!
Have you ever tried pestle tea?
Learn more:
• Pestle Tea at Serious Eats
• Wild Pestle Tea at Hunger and Thirst
• Hakka Lei Cha at Arbor Teas
Related: Try This: Eight Treasure Tea
(Images: Heidi's WorK BooK, used with permission)
How To Cook Fluffy, Tasty Quinoa
How to Make Buckwheat Soba Noodles from Scratch
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Martha Concrete Lam...
Dirty Little Secrets of Tidy Families
Hillary & Michael's Refined Roost
TOTALLY trying this when I get home! This sounds awesome.
My first thought was of Sahlab, a middle eastern drink made from milk and cornstarch, with coconut and toasted peanuts sprinkled on top. Obviously, the two are quite different, but I'm envisioning some kind of delightfully spiced, creamy, herbal tea hybrid situation.
I went to the tea festival that Serious Eats article mentioned just yesterday, and it was fantastic. The ladies from Fang Gourmet Tea are so sweet and really explained how it evolved. We got a dish with peanuts, walnuts, cashews, sesame seeds, oolong tea, and pumpkin seeds (pepitas) and ground it with an agave stick (which is supposed to also impart some flavor) for at least 20 minutes, until it became very oily and pasty. A food processor definitely wouldn't do justice to the process. Then water was added and it was all stirred together and it was poured into cups to drink. Very earthy and creamy and delicious, especially since it was so cold in NYC yesterday!! If you're in the area at all, you should DEFINITELY try it, it's $10/person.
Hi Astrid-- Sounds delicious, what is the tea festival called? I'm in NYC and would love to go, but I can't find anything referencing one going on right now! Or are you referring to the Coffee and Tea festival coming up in March?
Thanks!
Salepi is supposed to be made with orchid roots, but most mixes just have artifical flavouring, since the orchids it's made from in Turkey are endangered and it's illegal to export it (supposedly, according to Wikipedia). I also find orange blossom water a common component - there certainly seems to be some in the Lebanese instant stuff I've got.