My husband and I started incorporating matcha into our green smoothies, nut milks, and other recipes. We studied everything we could find on the subject of matcha, including how to prepare the tea and incorporate it in many different recipes from sweet to savory.
Drinking matcha green tea has been a time-honored tradition in Japan for more than 900 years. Buddhist monks valued matcha as a health elixir and consumed it prior to meditation. Matcha is cultivated from a high-quality leaf known as tencha. The tencha leaves are sheltered from the sun to produce a vibrant shade of green due to the increased amount of chlorophyll. Matcha leaves are carefully harvested by hand and briefly steamed to protect the leaves from oxidation.