Edible flowers have been in restaurant vogue for a while, along with adding microgreens to salads, and they certainly can bring lovely flavors and bold color accents to a plate. Another area worth exploring is edible flowers used as teas, and there are many delicious possibilities, whether you’re following a recipe or just doing some experimenting on your own. If you need a jumping off point to get started with edible flowers used as teas (or just in teas), we’ve got some ideas for you.
Be sure that whether you’ve ordered your flowers from an online natural food source or if you’re pulling them from your own garden, that they’re free of any chemicals or pesticides. Remove stems and leaves; rinse the blooms, and then us a paper towel (or something similar) to pat them down.
Use edible flowers — or slices of colorful fruit — on top of glasses filled with iced teas. Pansies do nicely with this treatment.
Use thinly sliced strips of orange or lemon peel, skewered around berries to add fruit flavor to tea.
Pull some fresh herbs from your garden – mint is always handy and blends well with other fruit flavors and/or fresh berries. Perhaps try garnishing with an aromatic herb like rosemary.
Use edible flowers with water in your ice trays, then add them to already chilled tea just before serving. For a punch bowl, try using a metal ring mold instead.
If you’re mixing a pitcher of iced tea, make some extra and then pour it into one or two ice trays for freezing. This is a particularly neat trick for hot weather fans of strong tea, since these cubes will definitely ice the tea without diluting it. For a lemon-flavored iced tea, a similar effect can be achieved by making ice cubes out of lemonade.