With every passing day, many people are becoming more and more health-conscious. They make vital changes in their diet plans, meals, and food recipes to ensure some points. These points include taking all the required nutrients in a sufficient amount, staying hydrated, reducing the calorie intake, staying energized, and more. They also do physical activities to maintain healthy body weight.
When it comes to food recipes, people are becoming innovative. They are using unique ingredients that are not commonly used in households or outside food joints. But if you look at it deeply, you will understand that these ingredients might be unusual but not new.
Until a few decades ago, people used to put these ingredients in various recipes for both taste and medicinal purposes. Some examples of such ingredients are sunflower seeds, oatmeal, and hibiscus. Yes, you read that right! ‘Hibiscus’ – a flower – is used to prepare different recipes. Hibiscus occupies a place of importance in traditional cooking and vintage recipes.
The fact that we are writing this blog post on ‘How to Make Hibiscus Tea’ is enough to prove that people of the modern age show interest in learning about hibiscus and its uses. Well, we will be covering the recipe for tea made from hibiscus in this blog post.
What is Hibiscus Tea, Flower, and Plant? How is Hibiscus Tea Served?
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As you already know by now, hibiscus tea is a tea made from the flowers grown from the flowering plant ‘Hibiscus’. In fact, the hibiscus is a genus of flowering plants in the mallow family, Malvaceae. The genus is so large that it consists of numerous species of flowering plants that are native to tropical and subtropical regions throughout the world. Hibiscus plants are grown in places that have warm temperatures because they grow well in full sun.
Countries in which hibiscus is grown include but are not limited to India, China, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Sudan, Egypt, and Nigeria. China and Thailand are the largest producers of hibiscus. Various parts of the hibiscus flowering plant, viz., flower petals, leaves, stems, and seeds, are used for medicinal, culinary, and cosmetic purposes.
As you are here to learn how to make hibiscus tea, you must know that the tea is made from the hibiscus flower petals. You can use both fresh and dried hibiscus flowers to make tea. Alternatively, you can also use ready-made hibiscus tea bags to prepare hibiscus tea. If you are using fresh flowers, you should take only the petals. Remove the calyx, pistil, and pollen from the flowers. It’s also worth mentioning here that you can make both hot hibiscus tea and cold hibiscus tea.
How to Make Hibiscus Tea: Ingredients and Method
Let’s put your question, ‘how to make hibiscus tea’ to rest by sharing an easy recipe for making this delicious beverage. With the quantity of the ingredients mentioned here, you will be able to make five servings of hibiscus tea.
Ingredients
- 2 cups fresh hibiscus flowers or ½ cup dried hibiscus flowers
- 8 cups water
- ½ cup honey
- 3 tablespoons fresh lime juice
Method
- Take the fresh or dried hibiscus flowers as per your convenience. But you need to remember that if you are using fresh flowers, you have to remove the calyx, pistil, and pollen. The calyx is the green part at the base of the flower. It is attached to the stem. The pistil is the tube in the middle of the flower. It looks like a thin thread. Pollen is attached to the pistil.
- Now, put the hibiscus flowers and water in a large pot. Turn on the flame. Once the water starts boiling, turn off the flame. Cover the pot. Let the tea steep in the pot for 15-20 minutes.
- Then, add the honey and fresh lime juice in the pot until they mix well. In the end, strain the tea into another pot or a jug.
- If you want to drink hot hibiscus tea, pour the tea into a cup. If you want to drink cold or iced hibiscus tea, keep the tea in the refrigerator for a few hours before serving it in a glass. You need to put ice cubes in a glass in order to drink iced hibiscus tea.
Now that you have learnt how to make hibiscus tea, let’s take a look at the time required to prepare this tea. It takes around 20-25 minutes to make tea from the fresh or dried hibiscus flowers. You must have guessed by now that this recipe includes making hibiscus tea from the flowers. If you are using tea bags, you need to follow the instructions mentioned on them.
Benefits of Hibiscus Tea that You Should Know About
Learning how to make hibiscus tea becomes even more important when you find the amazing health benefits it provides to your body. Hibiscus is a storehouse of several nutrients, and so, it’s considered to be a superfood. Hibiscus contains iron, calcium, phosphorus, vitamin C, niacin, riboflavin and other nutrients.
Therefore, when you drink a hot cup of hibiscus tea or a cold glass of hibiscus tea, you get various health benefits. These benefits include but are not limited to lowering cholesterol, lowering blood pressure, preventing hypertension, boosting immunity, reducing blood sugar levels, and removing toxins.
The flavonoids present in the hibiscus can protect the cells in your body from oxidative damage and thereby help you prevent several diseases. Hibiscus tea is also helpful for the digestive system as it works like a laxative. The vitamin C and antioxidants present in the hibiscus are necessary for the formation of collagen, and so, you can get glowing skin. Another wonderful benefit of hibiscus tea is that it alleviates menstrual pain in women. Hibiscus tea can also help you deal with serious mental issues like depression.
In order to ensure that you get the desired health benefits from hibiscus tea, gaining knowledge about how to make hibiscus tea is not enough. You need to select the right species of hibiscus flowers to prepare tea. Not all the species of the hibiscus plant are edible. So, you need to choose the one whose flowers are edible and do not cause any side effects. The species which is commonly used to make hibiscus tea is ‘Hibiscus Sabdariffa’. The flowers of these species are pink or red in color.
Conclusion
It’s not an unknown fact that the trend of drinking herbal teas is increasing these days. Hibiscus tea is a herbal tea as it does not contain caffeine. If you want to take sips from a cup of hot tea or feel refreshed by drinking iced tea without consuming caffeine, you should go for hibiscus tea. The calorie content of hibiscus tea is quite low. Hibiscus tea has a sour or tart taste. If you don’t like its sour or strong taste, you can add honey just like mentioned in the recipe to make the tea a bit sweeter.
