I love to combine ingredients which are not conventionally used together, and yet make an excellent combination. We’re entering the winter season in Seattle, and it feels comforting to make hot drinks. Squeezing fresh grapefruit is easy to do, and what if we made this a hot drink? And if we do this, why not add a bag of green tea for added energy and antioxidants? This is the inspiration for this quick recipe.
As I mentioned in the sister posts where I cooked a meal to goes with the drink, I thought about grapefruit when watching a NHK television documentary on medical research. The host went to the Oita prefecture, in the southern part of Japan, near Okinawa, where the climate is generally warm year round and where citrus fruits like kabosu grow in abundance. In the region of Oita, like the Okinawa island, researchers noted that populations grow old with few diseases usually associated with aging. They believe the good overall health of the population has to go with the fact that people are active, have gardens, ride bikes instead of taking cars, walk in the sun, and eat unprocessed natural foods, like kabosu citrus, onions, and shiitake mushrooms, among others.
Since we can’t find kabosu in Seattle grocery stores, I noticed the researchers emphasized naringin as one of the active ingredients contributing to metabolic stability, and they also added that you can find naringin in grapefruits, especially the pulp and the skin. They went on to showing that locals are creating jellies using kabuso skin, for this reason.
Prior to this, I already experimented by combining tea in a hot orange juice, so it felt like a natural extension of this drink to mix green tea and its mild caffeine contents and antioxidants, with the naringin and vitamin C present in the grapefruit. You can optimize your pulp content by doing two things during the preparation stage. The first is to run the hot water through the citrus squeezer, over the pulp, then pour the juice back in the glass or cup. The second is adding more pulp into the cup by using a spoon.
I like to drink this hot grapefruit green tea as an alternative to coffee, to gain energy and mental focus. Sometimes I will have coffee first in the morning, then mid morning or early afternoon, make this drink. It does very well also for lunch, as shown in some of the photos for the baked onion dish. Enjoy. Kanpai!
Hot grapefruit green tea
Instructions
- Cut the grapefruit, then squeeze it in a large citrus squeezer. Remove seeds from the pulp with a spoon.
- Estimate the juice volume, then fill a large cup or glass with water with a volume equal to the difference.
- Heat the water in microwave or in a pan, then pour it over the squeezer and the pulp, into the squeezer’s container where the juice is. This will add more pulp and naringin to the juice.
- Pour hot water and grapefruit mix back into the cup. Use a spoon to place the remaining pulp into the cup should you wish to consume it all.
- Add a green tea bag to the hot juice and let it rest for 2 minutes. Mix in the tea, juice and pulp with a long spoon or a chopstick, and consume immediately.
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