Papaya leaf tisane / herb tea

[john.b]

I've seen posts claiming health benefits for papaya leaf tisane before, and since there have been several papaya trees in our yard for years I finally got around to making it. It wasn't so much to acquire health benefits, more about seeing what it tastes like, and experimenting with processing. I wrote a blog post about that I'll link to here, along with cross-references about health benefits (alleged, at least), but I'll add enough detail here this post will also stand alone.

I used relatively basic processing, just chopping and oven-drying a medium size leaf using low heat. Low heat could mean different things; I think that was around 100 C, and it took something like 40 minutes to dry, so it would be possible to dry it much slower. The "tea" was pretty good; it tasted like pumpkin mixed with toasted pumpkin seeds, not really very bitter at all, which I'd sort of expected. I tried the second half of it after a quick roasting step, pan heating the leaves for a few minutes until there was a slight color change, but not enough to brown it. Oddly that shifted the flavor to taste a lot like roasted tomato.

I plan to try it again and mess around with oxidizing the tea, or changing roasting steps. There is a lot more range of potential processing approach, of course. One reference said to just hang the tea in a dark place to dry over a long time. Another thread on here talked about oxidizing herbs and the original reference link raised the issue of rolling / bruising the leaves to enable oxidation. Someone could even go a bit crazy and try some sort of wet piling step, borrowing from processing for both yellow teas and shou pu'er, but that might be a bit much.

That blog post write-up, covering the same content scope as this post in slightly more detail: http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.co ... f-and.html

[Whalebreath]

Thanks for this-had some positive experience with Papaya leaf tisanes back in another century-this brings back memories.

[john.b]

Cool! Anything to pass on about that? I guess health claims have evolved in the last 20 years but cutting up papaya tree leaves and drying them and making tea should have been the same.

It's not much of an update yet but even since that post I've been experimenting with trying to oxidize the leaves. The first attempt didn't really work but I'll keep with it, and mess around with roasting.