Bluffton Tea’s Savannah Blend’s key ingredients are green tea, quince & mallow flowers.
It’s a clean refreshing incredibly flavorful tea with a hint of sweetness and full of green tea antioxidants. We’ve discovered when doing taste testings, a recurring question is What exactly is a Quince?
A Quince is a autumn fruit of the pomme family. It is a hard, yellow, fragrant fruit that looks like a cross between an apple and a pear. In full disclosure, it is definitely not a beauty queen in its appearance and tastes terrible raw, while confusingly emitting a unique fragrance with hints of pineapple, guava and Bartlett pear. It is irregularly shaped, knobbly and kind of ugly. However, quince’s taste attributes change once cooked or steeped in tea. When cooked, the fruit transforms into a soft, sweet, pink, incredibly flavorful food packed with vitamins and nutrients. Quince are an excellent source of vitamins A and C, as well as iron and potassium.
The quince is native to southwestern Asia, the Caucasus and northern Persia and its cultivation spread to the eastern Mediterranean basin. It is now grown throughout the world, including Europe and North America, though in the United States, it grows primarily in New England and the Mid-Atlantic region and pockets in California and in some areas of Latin America.
How used in cooking: The persistent tart flavor of quinces counteracts the greasiness in heavy rich meat and fowl dishes found in Germany, Latin America and the Middle East cuisines. In traditional Persian cooking meats and sour fruits are cooked together. In Britain a traditional accompaniment to partridge is a quince sauce and the French will add slices of the fruit to roast quail. In the US quince have been popular since Colonial times for making jams and jelly or wines, since they're very high in pectin. The word “marmalade” comes from the Portuguese word for quince.
Medieval cooks regarded the quince as the most useful of fruits and spiced it with pepper, ginger, cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg. In French, Italian and Spanish medieval courts and banquets, nobles enjoyed quince jelly for dessert which remain popular today. In British Tudor and Stuart periods, quince marmalade was regarded as an aphrodisiac.
And the legends of quince? Did it really help start the Trojan War? In Greek legend Helen of Troy bribed Paris to award a quince to Aphrodite as the prize in a beauty contest, starting the Trojan War. Quince have been around a long time and are from the same geographic region - so who knows?
After tasting Bluffton Tea’s Savannah Blend of Green Tea and Quince, you decide if the legends have any merit?