TIME FOR ROSE HIP TEA

I was recently introduced to rose hip tea by my studio pal Suzie, founder of Soothe-Me, a handcrafted skincare and wellbeing brand. I love sharing a studio with Suzie, she has great energy and I’m always learning from her, for example when we stopped for a cup of rose hip tea she told me about all the amazing vitamins and properties found in rose hips. I’m not usually into fruity tea but I’m pleased I gave it a try.

On my way home from the studio that day I noticed that neighbour’s Rose bush was over flowing with beautiful orangey red Rose hip buds. I gave them a knock and asked if I could pick them in return I would trim back some of the foliage. I’m not a natural gardener but I do enjoy spending time outside and pottering. After a couple of hours I had managed to trim back the thick rose bush and had a massive bowl of rose hips.

I’m a bit of scaredy cat when it comes to bugs and creepy crawlies so I before I started to prep the rose hips I filled the bowl that I had collected them in with water and left it outside in the garden for about 10-15 minutes. I then drained and washed them a few more times. The rose hips which develop after the rose has flowered have the remains of the anthers and filaments so there are lots of bits to trim off, to help get rid of them I kept the buds in water while I was trimming them. I think this backfired a bit the next day as some of the buds had softened overnight which made seed removal difficult. I picked out the soft rose hips and decided to make a syrup out of those so they didn’t go to waste. I found a recipe from River Cottage and adjusted to the measurements to the amount of rose hips I had. You can use the syrup on porridge, yoghurt, pancakes and desserts or to flavour cocktails and drinks.

Blitz the whole rose hips.

Add water to rose hip pulp.

Bring the mixture up to a boil.

Double strain through a muslin.

Return liquid to the pan and add sugar.

Pour into your warm sterilised bottles/jars.

Bring to the boil.

So back to prepping the rose hips for tea. After doing some research, rose hips were used to make itching powder! There are tiny hairs that surround the seeds inside the pods. When removing the seeds I tried to scoop them out with a teaspoon. I found using the point of my small pairing knife much better.

Removing the seeds is time consuming, especially when you have a 2 small children coming in and out of the kitchen begging for snacks. There were many moments I felt like putting whole lot into the garden waste sack. However I had put in quite a bit of effort and with my headphones on I carried on. Once I had some ready I put them in oven at 100ºC. Spread the halves out so they can properly dry out. I had 2 trays on the go, putting the drier ones together and adding a new tray of fresh ones underneath. Overall the oven was on for about 5 hours. I can put a timer on my oven to shut off at a set time so, once I was done with the de-seeding I left the oven to do it’s thing.

Once all the rose hips were dry I could see that some of the tiny hairs had come away from the rose hip halves. I put some in a container and gave them a hard shake. This helped separate more of the hairs away. I repeated this several times between picking out the rose hips, which look like dried chillies.

The next step is the blitz the dried rose hips into smaller pieces. I have a small basic food processor, I tried blitzing the rose hips in this but I didn’t get consistent pieces. I had large bits and quite a bit of powder. I don’t think the blade in my food processor was strong enough. I’ve left half of the rose hips whole, I might try using a pestle and mortar for them.

I had a go at brewing some of the rose hips using a fun floating tea infuser and I put in about 2 teaspoons, then added hot water and left for about 5 minutes to steep.

The tea has a lovely aroma. I think next time I would leave to steep for longer as the taste wasn’t as strong as I thought it would be. My homemade tea tastes quite different to the one I bought as that also has hibiscus in the tea which also gives a darker more purple coloured tea.

Now would I go through the effort of drying my own foraged rose hips again? Probably not, my 2 small children being a factor, they weren’t impressed with my efforts! However since my experiment I have noticed a glut of rose hips in my local area and I have also read another blog post about other ways to make rose hip tea, one being from fresh pulp so I might give that go soon.