Latest news with #tea
South China Morning Post
17 hours ago
- Health
- South China Morning Post
A soothing cup of rice? Chinese scientists create grain with health benefits of tea
Chinese scientists have engineered the first 'tea rice' enriched with the antioxidant compounds that make green tea a health-boosting drink. Advertisement The rice has been fortified with the micronutrient catechin, and the researchers behind it say it can provide the health benefits of tea without any side effects from caffeine. 'Catechins, as key antioxidant components in tea plants with high content, offer certain benefits to human health,' the team said in a paper published in the peer-reviewed Plant Biotechnology Journal in March. 01:33 2-metre 'giant rice' twice as tall as other varieties nearly ready for first harvest in China 2-metre 'giant rice' twice as tall as other varieties nearly ready for first harvest in China Catechin flavonoids are a type of polyphenol – micronutrients that occur naturally in plants – shown to have antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, anticancer and cardioprotective properties. Catechins are thought to play a role in regulating blood pressure, aiding in weight loss, and lowering the risk of cardiovascular disease. 'These essential flavonoid phytonutrients are renowned for their pivotal role in bestowing the unique health benefits associated with tea plant consumption,' the team said. Advertisement Catechins make up around 15 to 30 per cent of the dry weight of tea, with particularly high levels found in green tea as it does not undergo the same oxidation process that black tea does during processing. While green tea contains these beneficial compounds, it also contains caffeine, which can cause people to experience symptoms like insomnia and heart palpitations, particularly when consumed in large amounts.
News.com.au
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- News.com.au
Common tea mistake Aussies are making
As winter approaches, few pleasures rival the comfort of dipping a biscuit into a steaming cup of tea. For tea enthusiasts, this simple ritual is the ultimate afternoon pick-me-up. However, according to the experts, many of us might not be doing it correctly. Suzy Garraghan, Senior Tea Buyer and Leading Tea Expert at Yorkshire Tea, has shared her insider tips for the perfect tea dunk – from the ideal angle and temperature to the best biscuit textures for the job. Yes, there is an art to it! As Judi Dench's character memorably explains in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: 'It means lowering the biscuit into the tea, letting it soak in there, and trying to calculate the exact moment before the biscuit dissolves, when you whip it up into your mouth and enjoy the blissful union of biscuits and tea combined'. So, let's get into it. 1. It's all about the angle According to Ms Garraghan, the trick to the perfect dunk starts even before the tea is poured. 'Whether you opt for a teacup or a mug, make sure it's wide-brimmed,' she advises. 'This will allow you to dunk your biscuit at the right angle.' If you're a 'down-dunker', you might be surprised to hear you've been dunking your biscuit wrong all this time. Apparently, you want to dunk at an almost horizontal angle, so only one side of the biscuit gets soaked. This way, the biscuit will remain stronger, allowing for repetitive dunks without any soggy disasters. 2. Choose your tea wisely Understandably, when you dunk a biscuit, it absorbs the quality and strength of the tea's flavour, so it's crucial to choose wisely! 'It ultimately comes down to personal preference, but for me, proper dunking teas are top class, peak season Assam teas like Yorkshire Gold, which are full-bodied and rich in 'gutty' strength and malty notes,' Ms Garraghan says. 3. Check the temperature Monitoring the temperature of your tea is a game-changer for perfecting your dunking technique. 'The warmth of the tea dissolves the biscuit's sugar, fat and starch, so the biscuit will eventually collapse under its own weight,' she explains. 'Temperature, therefore, is often responsible for our drowned dunking pursuits.' The hotter the tea, the quicker the biscuit will dissolve, so Ms Garraghan suggests 85 degrees as the optimum temperature for your brew, but the perfect temperature will depend on your biscuit of choice (more on that soon). 4. Watch the clock The optimum dunking time shares a similar predicament to the ideal dunking temperature – it depends heavily on the biscuit variety. 'No matter which partners you choose, never dunk for less than two seconds or more than five seconds – and don't forget to monitor for signs of biscuit collapse!' Ms Garraghan urges. 'For a Gingernut, I recommend around three to five seconds. For a Tim Tam or a Digestive, no more than two to three seconds as these varieties are less solid and will dissolve and make a mess faster.' 5. Pick your biscuit Now the question you've all been waiting for … which biscuits are the best for dunking? While it ultimately comes down to personal preference, the tea expert does have some favourites. 'Gingernuts are dry and hard on their own, but with tea, they become beautifully chewy,' Ms Garraghan explains. 'The flavour means they're not universally liked, but they are excellent value for the keen dunker due to being solid enough to be dipped, bitten and dipped again'. Her runners-up include Digestives, for their semi-sweet flavour and crumbly texture, and Tim Tams, which create the delicious mix of tea, chocolate and biscuit all at once.
Business Recorder
3 days ago
- Business
- Business Recorder
Weekly SPI down 0.81pc
ISLAMABAD: The SPI for the current week ended on May 29, 2025 decreased by 0.81 percent. Decrease is observed in the prices of electricity charges for Q1 (10.10 percent), chicken (8.51 percent), LPG (2.67 percent), sugar (0.25 percent), powdered milk (0.20 percent), vegetable ghee 2.5kg (0.17 percent), wheat flour (0.09 percent), rice-IRRI-6/9 (0.07 percent), garlic (0.05 percent) and moong (0.01 percent), says Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS). The year-on-year trend depicts an increase of 0.41 percent, ladies sandal (55.62 percent), chicken (32.92 percent), eggs (32.30 percent), moong (31.45 percent), powdered milk (23.75 percent), sugar (21.96 percent), bananas (21.17 percent), pulse gram (19.66 percent), beef (17.51 percent), LPG (16.30 percent), vegetable ghee 2.5kg (13.67 percent), and vegetable ghee 1kg (12.76 percent), while major decrease is observed in the prices of onions (55.56 percent), electricity charges for Q1 (36.54 percent), potatoes (29.28 percent), garlic (26.51 percent), tomatoes (19.22 percent), tea Lipton (17.93 percent), maash (17.50 percent), wheat flour (15.11 percent), petrol (7.43 percent),masoor (7.42 percent), diesel (7.02 percent) and chilies powder (6.97 percent). During the week, out of 51 items, prices of 14 (27.45 percent) items increased, 10 (19.61 percent) items decreased, 27 (52.94 percent) items remained stable. Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
Sky News
4 days ago
- Business
- Sky News
Fraudster conned luxury hotels and retailers out of £580k by selling fake Scottish tea
A man has been found guilty of fraud totalling almost £600,000 after he passed off ordinary tea as a premium product grown in Scotland. Thomas Robinson, 52, claimed the tea was a unique variety he had grown at his Perthshire estate using innovative techniques. Operating as The Wee Tea Plantation, he then fraudulently sold it to high-profile clients in the hospitality sector, including luxury hotels and retailers, between January 2014 and February 2019. Varieties listed on the website - which touted partnerships with train operator Caledonian Sleeper and the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh - include Dalreoch White, Silver Needles, Scottish Antlers Tea, and Highland Green. Also known as Tam O'Braan and Thomas O'Brien, Robinson was found to have misled genuine Scottish tea growers by selling them plants he falsely claimed were a unique, locally-grown variety. He also bolstered his credibility by fabricating academic qualifications and industry awards. An investigation by Food Standards Scotland (FSS) found Robinson's misrepresentations led to his clients losing a total of £584,783. He was found guilty of two counts of fraud by a jury at Falkirk Sheriff Court on Thursday, and is due to be sentenced at Stirling Sheriff Court on 25 June. In a statement, Ron McNaughton, head of Scottish food crime and incidents unit at FSS, said: "This was not a victimless crime - individuals, businesses, and an emerging sector of genuine Scottish tea growers suffered real financial and reputational harm as a result of deliberate deception." He then thanked a witness who came forward and added: "Fraud of this nature is often difficult to detect and even harder to prove, but we were determined to pursue every line of inquiry to build the strongest possible case."
Daily Mail
4 days ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
Guilty, conman who duped top hotels by selling fake Scots tea in £550,000 scam
A conman who bought tea from round the world and sold on it as Scottish is behind bars after being found guilty of a fraud totaling more than half a million pounds. Thomas Robinson, 55, also known as Thomas O'Brien or 'Tam O'Braan', rented land on a former sheep farm near Loch Tay and began supplying Edinburgh 's top Balmoral Hotel with what he described as authentically Scottish single-estate tea. He claimed he'd been told that tea he had supplied to London 's five-star Dorchester Hotel was 'the Queen's favourite'. A court heard he bought tea plants from a nursery in Sussex and installed them for show in a former kitchen garden at Dalreoch Farm, Amulree, Perthshire, shortly before an expected visit from buyer acting for foodstore Fortnum and Mason's. He said he had found a way to make his tea grow in half the usual time - using a 'special biodegradable polymer' which the prosecution said looked like black bin liner - and claimed to have given a presentation on his methods to the Royal Horticultural Society. The tea menu at the Balmoral's Palm Court, based on descriptions Robinson gave them, boasted 'Our Scottish grown teas come from gardens in our farming heartlands in Perthshire and Dumfries and Galloway'. They had names like 'Dalreoch White', 'Silver Needles', 'Scottish Antlers Tea', and 'Highland Green'. Falkirk Sheriff Court heard he spun elaborate tales to customers while trading as 'The Wee Tea Plantation' in what the prosecution described as the 'CV of a fantasist'. He secured deals to supply his tea products from his own plants and other tea gardens in Scotland to France's oldest tea house Mariage Frères, as well as the Balmoral, The Dorchester, Fortnum and Mason and a Dunfermline-based firm called The Wee Tea Company. But the court heard Robinson bought over a tonne of tea grown abroad, repacked it, and sold it on. He had the foreign leaf delivered to a mailbox address in Glasgow and paid for it from a joint personal bank account, not his business account. One expert said a kilo of top tea from Africa could be sold for 100 times its cost if passed as grown in Scotland. Robinson also claimed to have produced tea plants at Amulree from cuttings and seed. Between 2015 and 2018 he supplied 22,000 plants to a dozen other growers in Scotland and one in Jersey at £12.50 each. The jury heard that over the same period he was actually importing tea plants at three Euros each from Italy. He either passed them off as Scottish-grown or allowed his customers to assume they were. Many died or did not thrive, and yields were a fraction of what Robinson had led his customers to expect. One grower bought thousands of plants to plant near Castle Douglas but gave up seven years later after a meagre harvest of just 100g of finished tea. Robinson claimed that with the exception of 15,000 plants sold to a grower in Jersey, all the Italian plants had been in Scottish ground for a period and that made them Scottish. The scam began to unravel early in 2017 after Perth and Kinross Council started to check up on whether Robinson had a food processing licence; then he received a visit from a Scottish Government advisor about plant passports. As the authorities started to close-in, he spun a story claiming thousands of his plants had been stolen. The Food Crime and Incidents Unit of Food Standards Scotland was called in, and an investigation was launched, headed by a retired police inspector. Prosecutor Joanne Ritchie said Robinson had formed 'a scheme to deceive and make money on the basis of lies'. She said: 'When you look at what he was actually doing, the suggestion that this was genuine Scottish tea or these were Scottish-grown plants is almost laughable. 'He lied to every single witness who encountered him, but more than that he lied to the population at large, to the people who had been buying this tea on the understanding it was Scottish.' After a three and a half week trial, involving thousands of pages of documentation, jurors took six hours to find Robinson guilty of defrauding the tea growers of £274,354 and the hotels and tea companies of £278,634 - a total of nearly £553,000 - between January 1, 2014 and end of February 2019. The verdict was unanimous, and with no deletions to any of the charges. Robinson denied the crimes, claiming that paperwork he could have used in his defence had been destroyed in a flood and his electronic records had been lost because his storage had been turned off. He insisted he had done no wrong and was 'proud' of his work telling the jury: 'I wanted to leave something that would stand in the history of tea.' He shook his head when the verdicts were announced. Sheriff Keith O'Mahony deferred sentence for reports until June 25th and remanded Robinson in custody. He warned him: 'There will be significant sentencing consequences for you.' Advocate Colin Neilson, defending, reserved mitigation. Robinson will also face proceedings under the Proceeds of Crime Act.
