Tea-licious! 17 superior tactics to make use of earl gray, from ice-cream and cocktails to strudel and salad

As you might already know, the identify of Britain’s Best Loaf 2025 was once awarded to a brioche that was once flavoured with lemon curd and earl gray tea. The inventor – Miyo Aoetsu, who runs a baking trade from her house in Derbyshire – says the loaf was once impressed via a up to date Japanese pattern for meals that mix the flavours of lemon and earl gray. But outdoor Japan, what number of recipes can there be that use earl gray as an element? Here are 17, only for starters.

The first, and most elementary, is for earl gray itself. The connection between the tea and the second Earl Grey, in whose honour it’s from time to time mentioned to had been concocted, is sketchy and in all probability nonexistent. There is not any reliable method or authoritative model; it’s only a identify given to black tea flavoured with bergamot, one of those sour orange grown broadly in Calabria. Making your personal is so simple as leaving some dried bergamot peel in a jar of black tea for a little bit. The outcome it is going to be a little bit extra refined than store-bought – which normally comprises oil of bergamot – however you might even like it.

The affiliation between earl gray and afternoon tea is powerful, and a lot of recipes function it in teatime treats. If the theory of a tea loaf flavoured with precise tea doesn’t sound like overkill to you, right here’s a delectable model from Ruby Tandoh wherein the dried fruit is soaked in earl gray for an extra intensity of flavour.

Traditional Welsh bara brith additionally usually comprises a robust cup of tea. Anna Jones’s private desire is for earl gray; she recommends two teabags and a protracted steep. Benjamina Ebuehi’s earl gray cardamom buns get started with 4 teabags steeped in milk. They additionally use a yeast dough, so the buns want time to upward push. The syrup to comb the tops of the buns calls for every other teabag.

Also for teatime, right here’s a easy fig and earl gray jam from Lillie O’Brien. It required simplest tea leaves, ripe figs, sugar and lemon, heated to atmosphere level, on this case 105C.

Earl gray’s singular bergamot odor – at the start deployed, satirically, to masks inferior teas – can right away flip an differently overseas pudding into one thing recognisably British. In this spirit, Ebuehi provides an earl gray and lemon panna cotta, whilst Earl gray “tea-ramisu” is a model of the vintage wasteland for individuals who don’t like espresso. And Mike Robinson’s earl gray burnt cream is an English translation of creme brulee, infusing the milk and cream with unfastened leaf tea tied up in muslin.

A toast, tea and marmalade bread and butter pudding feels like one of these dessert it’s good to devour for breakfast, and using two earl gray teabags simplest underscores its associations with a very powerful meal of the day. As a compromise, it’s good to serve it at brunch.

Nikki Duffy pairs earl gray with apricots and mascarpone, for a pudding that most commonly makes itself to your refrigerator, even though it’s good to have a protracted wait: dried apricots are soaked within the tea for anything else from six hours to in a single day, prior to the liquid is tired off and decreased at the hob. The result’s poured again over the apricots, which then return within the refrigerator for as much as two days prior to serving.

For a dessert requiring quite much less understand, Felicity Cloake poaches pears in earl gray tea (about 750ml) spiked with sugar and lemon zest. If you favor the mix, it’s good to additionally take a look at pear and earl gray strudel with earl gray sorbet.

But whilst Earl gray would possibly paintings as a sorbet, are you able to put it in ice-cream? Of path you’ll be able to! Proving there’s a recipe in the market for each idle hankering, right here’s one for earl gray ice-cream from Cornwall restaurateur Nathan Outlaw.

Perhaps as a result of the sour tannin distinction it supplies, earl gray normally reveals its approach into puddings and different candy dishes. But no longer solely. Here, as an example, is a pear and walnut salad with earl gray dressing. If you’re the experimental kind, it’s good to try a tea-brined turkey with tea-and-lemon gravy which calls for no fewer than 18 earl gray teabags. The recipe requires the turkey to be roasted on a closed barbeque grill, even though while you’ve brined it it’s good to cook dinner it any approach you fancy.

To end, a couple of earl gray cocktails. The primary factor with placing tea in a cocktail is that it’ll merely water down the drink. Here are two other answers to that downside: Andy Milz’s Mar-tea-ni makes use of an earl gray syrup constructed from tea leaves, blackcurrant jam, vanilla sugar and apple juice, whilst the Come as You Are cocktail begins with earl gray gin – a bottle of gin that’s had a teabag in it for 6 hours. Worth the wait, surely.