As you might already know, the title of Britain’s Best Loaf 2025 was awarded to a brioche that was flavoured with lemon curd and earl gray tea. The inventor – Miyo Aoetsu, who runs a baking enterprise from her house in Derbyshire – says the loaf was impressed by a current Japanese pattern for meals that mix the flavours of lemon and earl gray. However exterior Japan, what number of recipes can there be that use earl gray as an ingredient? Listed below are 17, only for starters.
The primary, and most elementary, is for earl grey itself. The connection between the tea and the 2nd Earl Gray, in whose honour it’s generally mentioned to have been concocted, is sketchy and probably nonexistent. There isn’t any official system or authoritative model; it’s only a title given to black tea flavoured with bergamot, a kind of bitter orange grown extensively in Calabria. Making your personal is so simple as leaving some dried bergamot peel in a jar of black tea for a bit. The consequence will most likely be a bit extra refined than store-bought – which often accommodates oil of bergamot – however you might even want it.
The affiliation between earl gray and afternoon tea is powerful, and various recipes function it in teatime treats. If the concept of a tea loaf flavoured with precise tea doesn’t sound like overkill to you, right here’s a tasty version from Ruby Tandoh by which the dried fruit is soaked in earl gray for an extra depth of flavour.
Conventional Welsh bara brith additionally usually accommodates a powerful cup of tea. Anna Jones’s private choice is for earl gray; she recommends two teabags and a long steep. Benjamina Ebuehi’s earl grey cardamom buns begin with 4 teabags steeped in milk. Additionally they use a yeast dough, so the buns want time to rise. The syrup to brush the tops of the buns requires one other teabag.
Additionally for teatime, right here’s a easy fig and earl grey jam from Lillie O’Brien. It required solely tea leaves, ripe figs, sugar and lemon, heated to setting level, on this case 105C.
Earl gray’s singular bergamot scent – initially deployed, mockingly, to masks inferior teas – can immediately flip an in any other case overseas pudding into one thing recognisably British. On this spirit, Ebuehi offers an earl grey and lemon panna cotta, whereas Earl grey “tea-ramisu” is a model of the basic desert for individuals who don’t like espresso. And Mike Robinson’s earl grey burnt cream is an English translation of creme brulee, infusing the milk and cream with free leaf tea tied up in muslin.
A toast, tea and marmalade bread and butter pudding sounds just like the form of dessert you may eat for breakfast, and the usage of two earl gray teabags solely underscores its associations with a very powerful meal of the day. As a compromise, you may serve it at brunch.
Nikki Duffy pairs earl grey with apricots and mascarpone, for a pudding that principally makes itself in your fridge, though you may have a protracted wait: dried apricots are soaked within the tea for something from six hours to in a single day, earlier than the liquid is drained off and decreased on the hob. The result’s poured again over the apricots, which then return within the fridge for as much as two days earlier than serving.
For a dessert requiring reasonably much less discover, Felicity Cloake poaches pears in earl grey tea (about 750ml) spiked with sugar and lemon zest. In the event you like the mix, you may additionally attempt pear and earl grey strudel with earl grey sorbet.
after publication promotion
However whereas Earl gray may match as a sorbet, can you set it in ice-cream? After all you may! Proving there’s a recipe on the market for each idle hankering, right here’s one for earl grey ice-cream from Cornwall restaurateur Nathan Outlaw.
Maybe due to the bitter tannin distinction it offers, earl gray usually finds its manner into puddings and different candy dishes. However not completely. Right here, for instance, is a pear and walnut salad with earl grey dressing. In the event you’re the experimental kind, you may try a tea-brined turkey with tea-and-lemon gravy which requires no fewer than 18 earl gray teabags. The recipe requires the turkey to be roasted on a closed barbecue grill, though when you’ve brined it you may prepare dinner it any manner you fancy.
To complete, a pair of earl gray cocktails. The primary difficulty with placing tea in a cocktail is that it’s going to merely water down the drink. Listed below are two completely different options to that downside: Andy Milz’s Mar-tea-ni makes use of an earl gray syrup comprised of tea leaves, blackcurrant jam, vanilla sugar and apple juice, whereas the Come as You Are cocktail begins with earl gray gin – a bottle of gin that’s had a teabag in it for six hours. Definitely worth the wait, undoubtedly.