It is not real tea from a tea plant, but your taste buds will fall in love with it. Whether in summer with ice or in winter after a long walk in the cold with a drop of cherry brandy or tuzemák rum. Make some home-baked tea yourself!

Baked tea got its name from the method of preparation. The resulting blend of fruit, sugar and other ingredients is really made by baking. And in glasses it lasts all year – provided you don’t drink it all in a month (and that would be no surprise – it’s excellent). It is a fantastic fruit tea.

What will we need to make baked tea?

Baked tea is made using fruit.  In order to give it a better and more marked taste at least half should be sour fruit – blackcurrants, oranges, gooseberries, blackberries. In general, however, we can use any favourite fruit to make this unique drink – from ordinary apples and pears to forest raspberries and blueberries.

 In addition to spices and a drop of alcohol, which evaporates during baking, sugar is an integral part of baked tea. It is healthier to use grape sugar, but using honey makes it taste great.

Ingredients:

·         2kg of fruit – apples, mandarin oranges, pineapples, apricots, peaches, strawberries, cherries, cranberries... depending on the season and what you like best

·         1kg of sugar (best of all grape sugar, or honey)

·         2–3 teaspoons of a spice blend – aniseed, whole clove, cinnamon, star anise

·         1dl of rum or cherry brandy for a stronger taste

·         1–2 lemons

Preparation:

First clean and peel all the fruit (but leave the skin on apples and pears) and remove stones and pips. We subsequently slice the individual pieces into small cubes and put them in a deep roasting pan. We mix the fruit, cherry brandy or tuzemák rum and spices in it, and squeeze the lemons onto it. We bake the mixture at 170°C for approximately 30 to 45 minutes. During this time the fruit must release its juices. After removing it from the oven we immediately pour the baked tea into jars and let it stand for several hours bottom up.

And making the tea is now easy – we put three to four teaspoons of baked tea in a cup and pour on boiling water. In the summer we can swap the boiling water for sparkling mineral water and thereby obtain a refreshing summer drink.

Other Fruit Teas

If you are not in the mood to make baked tea at home, you can try the excellent fruit teas from the Oxalis.cz range. They contain whole chunks of fruit and have an irresistable taste.