World Culture Tour: Burma part 1 - Tea Leaf Salad

For our Burma, also known as Myanmar, stop of the World Culture Tour, we decided to make one of the national dishes, Tea Leaf Salad.

The salad is kind of beautiful when put together. It's very colorful and has such a wide variety flavors. So, on to the recipe:

Ingredients

First, you have to make the salad dressing -

• 2 Tbsp loose green tea leaves. (Our local grocery store didn't carry this, but they did carry green tea in tea bags. So, we got that and opened enough tea bags to get 2 tablespoons!)

• 1 clove garlic, minced

• ½ tspn salt

• 3 Tbsp vegetable oil

• 1 tspn white vinegar

• 2 cups hot water

Salad -

• 1 Tbsp vegetable oil

• 4 cups shredded green cabbage

• ¼ cup fried garlic

• 1 ½ cups roughly chopped cherry tomatoes

• ½ jalapeño or serrano chile, seeded and minced

• 1 Tbsp lime juice

• ¼ cup chopped toasted peanuts

• ¼ cup fried yellow split peas (or field peas)

• 2 tspn fish sauce (We opted to skip this ingredient, we're not big on fish taste).

• ¼ tspn crushed red pepper

• ½ cup chopped fresh cilantro

Directions

1. First, make the dressing: Put the tea leaves in the water for 3 minutes, let boil. Drain and press excess water out of the tea leaves. Let cool.

2. Combine the tea leaves, fresh garlic and salt. We put ours in a blender, but you could also use a food processor. Add in the oil and vinegar and continue to blend.

3. With the dressing ready, prepare your ingredients for the salad. First, fry your garlic cloves.

4. While frying the garlic, chop the pepper, the cilantro, the tomatoes, and shred the cabbage.

5. Now, it's time to assemble the salad: Make a bed of cabbage on a serving plate using the cabbage you shredded. Spoon the dressing into the center of your plate and arrange piles of your ingredients around the dressing in a circle. Make piles of tomatoes, chopped pepper, fried garlic, peanuts and split peas (or field peas). Drizzle oil, lime juice and fish sauce over the top of your ingredients and sprinkle with cilantro and crushed red pepper.

6. Serve as is so everyone can see how great it looks. Everyone can grab the ingredients they want and mix it in their own bowls.

For the rest of our Burma/Myanmar stop:

• Movies Rambo 4

• To End All Wars

• Golden Kingdom

• Burma History - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBcGLK34L4w
  

Food: Tea Leaf Salad

Music:

Traditional Myanmar Music - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6BLppBxoUk

Stories

Magic Powder - https://storyweaver.org.in/stories/705-the-magic-powder-a-folktale-from-myanmar

Click to see more of the World Culture Tour!