In college in 2010, I traveled to Hong Kong with my ex-girlfriend, and one of the Hong Kong food punch cards was the silk stocking milk tea in Lan Fang Garden.
At that time, I asked my ex-girlfriend, which is also this question, why is silk stocking milk tea called "silk stockings"?
But as a senior foodie, she didn't know, I had to be cheeky, ask the guys in LanFangyuan, fortunately, people are also enthusiastic, half Mandarin and half Cantonese, answered me.
In fact, stocking milk tea has nothing to do with stockings.
So why call it silk stocking milk tea?
Because the silk stocking milk tea is made of black tea, in the brewing process, it is necessary to pull the tea many times to hit the tea, using the impact force of the water to knock out the essence of black tea.
There is a jargon in the milk tea circle, "one punch, two bakes, three bumps, four warm".
The soul of Hong Kong-style milk tea (silk stocking milk tea) lies in "bumping tea".
It is this "bumping tea" that leads to the origin of the name of silk stocking milk tea.
In this back-and-forth tea collision, a cotton yarn tea bag is required to filter, as shown in the following figure.
The purpose of this is to make the tea taste smooth and even.
But the use of a long time, the original white cotton yarn tea bags, filter black tea a lot, from the shape, color, and look like flesh color stockings.
When customers come to buy milk tea, they see coffee-colored cotton yarn tea bags and joke that they buy a cup of "silk stockings" milk tea to drink.
Over time, the name "milk tea stockings" spread.
Inventing silk stocking milk tea was Lin Muhe, the owner of Hong Kong Lan Fang Garden, who came to Hong Kong to work as a teenager.
The earliest Orchid Garden was opened in Central, Hong Kong Island in 1952, and I drank it when I first went to Hong Kong in 2010.
I have drunk three shops in Hong Kong.
Originally, Lan Fang Yuan sold milk tea in the form of food stalls, and the target group was the local ordinary office workers, who were not used to drinking too light English milk tea.
Therefore, Boss Lin improved on the English milk tea to make the milk tea more fragrant and silky.
(The clever Boss Lin also pioneered the famous "Mandarin Duck Milk Tea.") ）
In 2014, Lan Fang Yuan's silk stocking milk tea (Hong Kong-style milk tea making process) was included in Hong Kong's intangible cultural heritage list.
After the sale of silk stocking milk tea in Lanfang Garden, a wave of imitation was set off in Hong Kong, and various tea restaurants have launched their own stocking milk tea.
But making silk stocking milk tea is not an easy job, it has relatively high requirements for raw materials.
The tea used, preferably Sri Lankan black tea, and, to be young tea, medium tea, coarse tea together brewed, coarse tea aroma is strong, there is sweet, young tea taste heavy, out of color, medium tea in the middle, used to balance the taste.
Milk is best to be Malaysian vegetable milk, or Dutch black and white evaporated milk, the classic ingredient of Hong Kong-style milk tea, and the most important thing to use is fresh milk.
You may ask, "Why not use fresh milk and use creamer like vegetable milk?" “
Those milk tea teachers in Hong Kong will tell you that because the price of vegetable milk is cheap, they used it as an ingredient for silk stocking milk tea.
Moreover, the milk tea made with vegetable milk is more mellow and fragrant, and the taste is smoother, which is an effect that milk cannot achieve.
The golden ratio of tea soup and evaporated milk is preferably 7:3, so as to have the best taste.