extracting the roasting smell of tea leaves

On a traditional shopping street in Japan, you often smell the roasting smell of tea leaves. It comes from a tea shop. They use a special machine for roasting and diffusing the smell. Why? To make fresh Hoji-cha (roasted tea) and also to attract the customers off course.

My experiment of today is, how to extract this smell!



The tea leaves in the beginning of roasting diffuse sour-sweet smell like the leaves of cherry blossoms.



Controlling the temperature was not easy.



After 30 minutes roasting.



The natural smell of roasting tea leaves was absorbed in the transparent fat.

This is a classical form of perfume called "pomade".

Neri-ko, the Japanese traditional incense

Neri-ko is a primitive form of incense made from diverse fragrant resin or wood powder that dates back to more than 1000 years ago.

Based on the try-out set released by Kogado, I made Neri-ko for the first time.



Mix the powder well,



then pour plum syrop.



Then make small balls.





Then burn the incense!

'Takimono-awase' is a form of game competing each other's recipe. In the "The Tales of Genji", the oldest romance novel written by Murasaki-shikibu more than 1000 years ago, Genji's wives and lovers competed with their own family recipes. How elegant!

I'm thinking about looking into the traditional recipes that are in "The Tales of Genji".

Kodo

Kodo is a Japanese traditional smell ceremony, like tea ceremony. I've participated in the introductory class at Kogado in Tokyo.

Kodo solely focuses on art of diffusing fragrant wooden piece. They also make guessing game out of it. The art of simplicity.