We hope that you already know how to make sandwiches and brew tea - you’ve arguably lost any right to making excuses not to the day you became a teen...possibly even earlier than that🤨! For the purposes of helping you construct a coherent high tea set, though, we thought it’s imperative that we offer some recommendations. More importantly, we’ll include important pointers for tea-brewing, which may benefit you greatly even out of the context of preparing high tea (personal assistant to a tea snob, anyone😖???).
Diving right in, here are some sandwiches which would be appropriate for high tea (some more traditional than others):
If you’d like to make your sandwiches more pleasing to the eye, you could use 2 types of sandwich bread - white and brown (or purple...if you are into purple wheat) on either side.
And there are no hard and fast rules as to how you should slice up your sandwiches: triangular, rectangular, square, circular...you do you!
Also, if you don’t mind packing on the calories, you could swap out the sandwich bread for toasted focaccia (sliced horizontally down the centre and served like a slider)!
Moving on to the tea, the types best suited to high tea are earl grey, assam, darjeeling, chamomile and mint. If none of these appeals to you, just be sure to choose either a black or an infusion as these varietals will be best able to hold up against the bold flavours of the other high tea components. But, of course, if you have a serious bias for a different varietal, no one can really stop you from going for it - even the legendary French patissier Pierre Herme argues that sencha is the best tea to pair with sweet treats.
When it comes to brewing, your best bet, of course, is to follow the instructions stipulated on the packaging😅.
If, for whatever reason, the packaging does not have any instructions or you just do not trust the instructions given (in which case, what a cynical grinch you are😂), do follow these guidelines:
While looking through the guidelines above, you may have noticed something: that is, when in doubt, you should just steep your tea for 3min.
Regardless of whether you are following packaging instructions or our recommendations, be sure not to use water that’s any hotter than what we’ve stipulated when brewing Green, White or Oolong. These varietals will be ruined by higher temperatures (using slightly cooler water is fine, though). There is no ‘you do you’ in this case...unless you have a thing for regrets🤭!
Crucially, you should not be boiling your water and letting it cool to the temperature that you are looking for (i.e. boil the water if and only if you are steeping your tea at 100°C). The higher the temperature that your water reaches the more oxygen it loses, which leads to less flavourful tea. Simply heat your water to whatever temperature you’re aiming for with the help of a kitchen thermometer or click here (skip to 0:19) for instructions on determining water temperature by eye.
We aren’t going to make any tea brand recommendations since this is extremely preference-based (and we wouldn’t want to offend anyone who swears by certain brands, should we not include them on our list😬). If you’re not much of a tea drinker, you should have a tea snob in your family or friendship circle (we’d be surprised if you don’t) who can help you pick a brand to try out!
On a final note, if you are a tea hater (and feeling a little naughty)...you could simply swap out the tea for champagne🥂😏!
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