Des Grands Thés bio et éthiques, des voyages et des rencontres…

Arlette Rohmer, fondatrice des Jardins de Gaïa

Creating recipes: the philosophy behind the flavours


The Déjan’thés range is expanding with the release of Come on Baby and Light my Fire, two festive, rock-inspired recipes with a 70s feel that are pushing back the boundaries in flavoured teas. After a period of intense creativity, we are delighted to share the final result of our various experiments with you. How do we create the emotion you feel when you try one of our recipes for the first time? Why should you use whole flowers and spices wherever possible and what effect does that have? Read all about it here. Welcome to a behind the scenes look at our creations!

Two new recipes where poetry meets rock ’n’ roll

Come on Baby and Light My Fire, two recipes with the energy of rock ’n’ roll and the sweetness of flower power.

We were particularly inspired when we came up with Come on Baby and Light My Fire – the spirit of The Doors was never far away and we took our inspiration from Jim Morrison’s lyrics with their blend of poetry and energy. This was an exercise in style and taste, which gave us the opportunity to let our imaginations run wild by harmonising the ingredients and looking for links of resonance, contrast and complementarity.

The idea came from Arlette Rohmer, who is a huge fan of The Doors and wanted to give a little nod to this period that she experienced as an explosion of energy, colour, creativity and freedom. It was all about using flavours to revisit the spirit of an iconic song and a legendary era for music and festival lovers where powerful lyrics rubbed shoulders with the femininity of « flower power”!

Between Yin and Yang…

Blending aromatic plants, spices and flowers, the simplest and most direct way to flavour a tea …

With this in mind, Come on Baby, with its base of white tea and sensual notes of jasmine, orange blossoms, vanilla and rose petals, is a recipe that appeals to all our emotional senses and evokes the female side (Yin) of the song. It’s a haunting recipe that is poetic, sweet and sensual …

Light My Fire, with its deliciously spicy black tea base and lemon and honey notes, sparkles with masculinity (Yang). A torrid, explosive rock star of a recipe …

These two new glamorous, expressive and incandescent compositions also give us an opportunity to talk to you about the way we go about creating a new recipe and the essential principles that guide our approach.

Taste and taste again … until the right balance is found between the flavours and the desired emotion.

The philosophy of true flavours

Over time, our approach creating recipes has been refined, but the basic principles remain the same, the most important of which can be summed up as this: without authentic flavour, there’s no emotion…

Among our five senses, smell is in fact the only one directly linked to our brain where it stimulates the limbic system linked to emotions and memory. Although our senses can be fooled, to a certain extent we believe that smelling a rose essential oil will never provide the same emotional intensity as breathing in the scent of a rose in a garden.

To create our Dhyāna meditation range of teas and herbal teas, we favoured recipes combining only teas, plants, spices and flowers.

This is why we always seek authentic flavours for our in-house recipes: we favour organic and fairtrade flowers, herbs or spices over essential oils, extracts or flavourings. As an example, for 27 years our mint teas have been composed entirely of tea and mint leaves and the Dhyāna range (meditation teas and herbal teas) is made up of blends of plants and spices which in turn evoke the four elements: earth, air, water and fire. And if the results seem more subtle when compared to a tea to which a lot of flavourings have been added, their taste will be all the more natural and more likely to stir emotions.

Flavouring yes, but there’s a way of doing it…

Playing with the flavours is also playing with colours …

While flowers, herbs and spices can be used to perfectly flavour a tea, pieces of fruit do not have the necessary aromatic strength. For some recipes, we use essential oils, extracts and flavourings that are entirely natural and certified organic, in order to get as close as possible to the original flavours.

When we create a recipe, we never try to mask the taste of the tea which must remain the central ingredient to let its flavour and quality shine through. It’s a decision we have always stood by, flavouring our teas with natural organic flavours even if there are fewer of them, they are more difficult to source and are sometimes less powerful than synthetic flavouring.

In 2022, you will rediscover some of our recipes, because new regulations relating to the production of organic products have upgraded the rules for flavouring organic products by only authorising the use of « natural flavourings », that is to say those derived directly from their main ingredient. This is a step towards even more responsible and ethical organics that we have always been in favour of.

At the same time, with the hype around plants and the increased consumption of natural products with more complex and more nuanced flavours, palates are becoming better and better educated. This trend fits perfectly with our philosophy and delights us with regard to what we do next!

Open to the world, inspired by our travels

The knowledge acquired during our travels and our close links with spice producers helps us to dream up countless different blends during the creation process.

Since 1994, our travels have enabled us to draw a veritable map of flavours and combinations that we continue to add to with each new creation. Developing recipes is a way of including a little bit of our personality and sharing our experience of the world through combinations of flavours from all over the place.

For example, when we created Bollywood Flush, a fragrant green tea that was both colourful and spicy, we were bringing to mind the traditional Indian festivals with the vibrant colours of saris, flowers and the flavour of cardamom

As “taste shapers” we are always looking for ways to inspire emotions in the simplest and most direct way possible. And here the choice of organic and natural is an obvious one.

Harmony, respect for the rhythm of life, biodiversity and unspoiled nature, mixed with a large helping of curiosity, conversation and creativity are the secret to coming up with tea and herbal tea recipes that are true to themselves and always have a unique and authentic signature.

Écrit par Les Jardins de Gaïa

Pionniers sur le marché des thés et tisanes bio et équitables, Les Jardins de Gaïa proposent, depuis 1994, des grands crus nature, des classiques et des créations maison originales. Privilégiant les petits producteurs et les récoltes manuelles, ils ont développé au fil des années une gamme généreuse et variée de thés, rooibos et tisanes aux qualités gustatives reconnues, ainsi qu’une gamme d’épices bio et prémiums proposée sous la marque Terra Madre. Tel un jardin épanoui, la force des Jardins de Gaïa tient dans la diversité des terroirs et l’engagement des hommes qui la travaillent…

Notre Maison de thé

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