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I purchased genmaicha as a huge gamble due to my dodgy past with Japanese green teas, which I’ve come to see as the rough neighborhood I’m frequently chased out of by prowling vegetable notes and buttery flavors – a statement of preference rather than quality. That said, though my relationship with drinking veggies is unstable, my standing when it comes to rice is certain, and if there’s one thing I like more than rice, it would have to be the premium, charred rice crust I get to chip out of the bottom of the saucepan after I make rice for the simple reason that I do not know how to make rice but insist upon doing so. For this reason, genmaicha stood out as a dubious beacon of hope, but a beacon of hope nonetheless.

A whiff of the leaves did nothing to quell my reservations, evoking a somewhat grassy profile that was faintly dry and saline but unmistakably vegetal. Still, the splintery green leaves were richly interspersed with promising, amber nuggets of puffed rice and even some small, white popcorn-looking morsels that renewed my interest. The dusty breath exuding from the tin conjured a colorful suggestion that the best may be yet to come, specifically because the best is possibly locked in this bancha’s stuffy basement begging to be let out. So we return to the sketchy kitchen scale for a rough estimate of 6 grams of leaf (4 tsp volumetrically) dosed in 12 oz of 175F water for 3 minutes. The smell of the tea as it steeped is where everything changed – this was the puffed rice tea of my dreams.

Finally let out of its cage, the delectable, toasted scent of the rice has the ball! It’s mowing down any other flavors in its path! It tramples green tea underfoot! It’s broken into the end zone! Or something like that, I don’t know sports. The savory touchdown is nothing short of Orville Redenbacherian and it’s everything I could have hoped for. Though this tea rapidly grows bitter after its allotted three minute soak, as one might expect, the steeped kernels of brown rice are soft and too pleasant to waste and I must restrain myself from eating them all before the resteep.

Are there limits to this ambitious blend? Is there a law restricting me from adding more rice? How much rice can I add before surpassing the threshold of genmaicha and encroaching into congee territory? Tune in next week for answers to all these and more. As always, this has been Monday, and I am your host.