Ingredients
- 1 tablespoon dehydrated lemon balm leaves
- 1 tablespoon dehydrated marigold flowers
- 1/2 teaspoon powdered dehydrated orange zest
- 1/2 teaspoon dehydrated stevia leaves
- 4 to 5 cups boiling water
Instructions
- Strip the petals off any green base still attached. The base is where the bitterness concentrates, and a whole dried head brews noticeably sharper than loose petals do.
- Add the orange zest powder last and let it sit on the surface a moment. Its oil floats, and stirring it under simply carries it to the bottom of the pot.
- Pour the water in gently down the side rather than straight into the middle. Petals this light are driven to the base by a hard pour and sit there in a mat.
- Cover it and steep twenty minutes. The color arrives inside five, so the remaining fifteen belong to the lemon balm, which is slower than it looks.
- Judge it on taste rather than on how gold it has gone. Marigold will have the cup looking finished long before the blend actually is.
- Strain it thoroughly. Petal fragments slip through a coarse basket, and they are unpleasant on the tongue in a way they never are in the pot.
- Keep the dry blend in an opaque tin, not a glass jar. Marigold bleaches faster than anything else here — a jar on a windowsill is pale within a fortnight, and that color is most of why it is in the blend.
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