Every few days, some friends will ask me to suggest some tea powder, hoping to make some "strong tea flavor" food. Literal interpretation: If you want "strong tea flavor", you actually want to deepen a taste. For example, if the milk tea needs to be thicker, it means that the milk tea has more milk, that is, the proportion of milk should be higher. The question is, can tea powder be added endlessly? The situation is a bit like chocolate. Generally, milk chocolate contains 25-60% cocoa, while dark chocolate contains more than 70%. The caffeine increases, the sweetness decreases, and the texture is harder. It is not easy to pair with other ingredients.
Another problem is flavor. I remember eating Lindt's 99% dark chocolate and I was not very impressed. I guess the cocoa they used was of poor quality. In the same situation, in the world of matcha, the consequence of adding more tea powder is that the taste of all teas will double, but it will not change it. the taste of. What does that mean? If 3 times of gentian tea powder is added, its bitterness will be magnified by 3 times, but you will not feel the sweetness/umami taste provided by high-quality tea powder such as Youxuanli, which is 3 times more expensive than gentian. That’s the reason why many baking friends buy a variety of tea powders to pair themselves.
To sum up, adding more tea powder is ok if you want a strong matcha flavor. The question is whether the added tea powder is the taste you want, or you need to switch to another tea powder or mix and match to meet your requirements. If you want to know more about the difference between tea flavors, please follow our previous post: Know the taste of matcha .
Every couple days, a matcha fan will ask me to recommend a matcha choice. One request I often get is "how can I get a very strong matcha flavour in my matcha food / dessert?" Say you want to have a strong cafe latte, you can get a double espresso shoot with same amount of milk to increase the coffee ratio against milk. But is it that easy for matcha?
It's a yes and no. Yes one can just add more powder to a food to increase the density, but the consequence is that it might lose the balance - say a cookie might become drier because matcha powder will absorb more liquid from the dough.
Another issue is the character. I remembered trying a pack of Lindt 99% dark chocolate thinking it'll be a great bar for chocolate lover (I was), but it wasn't. The chocolate bar became rough, bitter, undesirable. Same goes to matcha that when its intensity rises, it may not be too pleasant. Instead, I would suggest to replace / mix & match with other higher-grade to yield a more complex tea flavour, because matcha is supposed to carry multiple flavours.
In summary, to create a stronger tea flavour, one can simply add more powder / quantity to reach the result. If one wants to have a richer matcha flavour (i.e. better quality), changing / mixing with other matcha may be a better solution. Know more about matcha flavours from my previous post: Various flavours of matcha.