Grown-in-the-shade green tea gets its time to shine.

As green tea and green tea sweets continue to grow in popularity around the world, so too do attempts to upsell it. Outside Japan, you may, for example, encounter cafes and confectioners billing their premium products as using “ceremonial matcha,” which isn’t an actual classification in Japanese tea culture, and is merely a marketing term meant to imply higher quality to go along with the higher price being charged.

That’s not to say that there aren’t sweets in Japan that employ types of green tea that sit above matcha in the country’s tea hierarchy, though, which brings us to cream puff chain Beard Papa. Spring is the harvest time for green tea, when its flavors are said to be their most robust, and so Beard Papa has brought out a new limited-time green tea flavor that uses gyokuro.

Gyokuro is a type of green tea in which the leaves are shaded from the sun for at least 20 days during the growing process. This helps smooth out any rough astringent elements and enhances the sweetness/umami of the tea, making gyokuro at once mellower and more flavorful than other types of green tea. The timing of when the leaves are shaded is important (do it too soon and the leaves won’t have enough sunlight to properly mature, but do it too late and you’ll just end up with regular old green tea), and this extra required care means that gyokuro is one of the most expensive types of green tea, but well worth the price for fans.

▼ Gyokuro plants with their sun-shading nets not yet unfurled

With this year’s crop of gyokuro now coming in, as of May 1 Beard Papa is offering Gyokuro Matcha Cream Puffs, with a cream filling flavored with a mixture of matcha and gyokuro that promises to be a delicious mix of sweet and bitter elements. The treats are finished off with a dusting of green tea powder, and they’re cooked after ordering for the optimal amount of crunch to the dough for you bite through on your way to the warm, melty filling.

As you might guess from the high-class marque ingredient, the Gyokuro Matcha Cream Puff is a little more expensive than Beard Papa’s standard 250-yen (US$1.60) cream puffs, and will instead set you back 320 yen. That still makes it a pretty affordable luxury, though, and something we’re sure we’ll be able to find room in our budget for between now and June 30, when they’ll be leaving the menu.

Source: Beard Papa, PR Times via Japaaan
Top image: PR Times
Insert images: Wikipedia/Westermeierw, PR Times
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