Ingredients
Instructions
- Measure the beet powder with a light hand the first time you make this. It brings the color and most of the sweetness, and a heaped spoonful takes the cup from earthy to something closer to soup.
- Put the raspberry leaves in underneath the powders. Leaf needs room to swell, and it does that better sitting on the bottom than floating on a bed of beet.
- Add the crushed chili in the quantity listed and resist rounding it up. Dried chili keeps releasing heat for as long as it sits in hot water, so a cup that is right at five minutes is fierce at twenty.
- Pour the boiling water over and let it stand twenty minutes. Raspberry leaf is mild and slow and needs all of that; the color arrives inside the first minute.
- Serve it properly hot, and expect it to look far stronger than it tastes. Beet dyes water long before it flavors it, which is why this drinks like a fruit tea rather than a vegetable one.
- Keep the three dry ingredients in separate jars and combine them by the cup, in the dark, for six months. Beet powder pulls moisture out of the air and sets into a solid plug when stored mixed, and the chili bleeds heat into whatever it sits against.
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