Gifts for the Food Lover 10: Teavana Chai and German Rock Sugar

I’ve been seeing a lot of gift lists on my favorite food blogs lately and I love reading through them. There are so many things I’ve never come across before and I end up with all kinds of new ideas.

Since I’ve come across lots of great things this year myself, I thought I’d put together my own list. So from now through Christmas I’ll be interspersing a few posts to highlight some of my favorite food-related items including books.

The first is something my husband and I found during a recent trip to Florida for a family wedding. We were killing time in the Florida Mall in Orlando while waiting to pick up family from the airport. As we walked by Teavana the white tea they were sampling caught our eye.

We tried it and were intrigued by the flavor. It was mildly fruity, slightly sweet with the warm spices of chai. We found out later that it was a mix of the Samurai Chai Mate and the White Ayurvedic Chai.

We rarely try something like this and simply have to buy some, but this was an exception. I think we surprised ourselves that we liked it since we are usually fans of Chinese green and black teas with no additional flavors or spices. This tea was just too unique to pass up. Not only in flavor, but also in the look. It was full of pieces of coconut and whole spices.

After settling on the tea, I started talking with the sales clerk about the sugar they used to sweeten the tea. She said that they used a very small amount of German Rock Sugar to release some of the aromatic flavors in the tea.

Of course with my interest in different types of sugars, I had to ask more about German Rock Sugar. This was the first I had ever heard of it. The sales clerk said that it was an unrefined sugar that just barely sweetened the tea. She was right about its sweetness. It has a wonderful flavor, which is why we bought some to compliment our newly purchased tea.

Since then I’ve been trying to seek out an exact definition and source of German Rock Sugar. A simple Google search repeatedly leads you back to the Teavana site. After digging a little deeper I did find a bit about its origin – East Frisia in the far Northwest Corner of Germany.

germanFoods.org states:

The traditional preparation of East Frisian tea is a well-defined ritual: First a piece of rock candy sugar called Kluntjes is placed in…cups… The freshly brewed hot tea is then poured on top of the sugar… The rock sugar will melt slowly which allows multiple cups to be sweetened with the same piece.

Learning the term Kluntjes led me to search for that specifically, which taught me that Kluntje – Kandis translates to rock candy (or something similar) in English. Another site I found did say that it was unprocessed and unrefined and I haven’t found any information on the actual process. A look at the Kölner website tells me that the type we bought from Teavana most closely resembles Kölner Krusten Kandis.

So I may not have learned all I wanted to about German Rock Sugar, but I definitely know a bit more than I did. And, of course, I’ve discovered a new type of sugar to experiment with!

If you have some tea lovers on your list, this blend would make a great gift. You can throw in some of the sugar with a history lesson to make the gift even more interesting and sweet.