- Hi, I'm Parris, and on this week's
health and nutrition video,
I'm leaving behind broccoli and cauliflower,
going for something a little more exotic.
You may have seen this in your supermarket
in the coffee and tea aisle.
It's commonly pronounced yerba mate here in the US
and it's a healthful drink that's somewhere between
coffee and tea, but not exactly either.
And you drink it with a gourd and a bombilla.
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Yerba mate is a popular drink in some places in the world.
This package is a loose leaf container of it
and this is what you use to drink it with.
Mate actually means gourd.
Now, this is a modern silicone version of a gourd.
And one of the more interesting things to me,
because it's not in a teabag
and you don't use a regular tea strainer,
is you drink it with this special straw that has holes in it
so you're straining it as you drink.
I picked up this eight-ounce pack of loose leaf yerba mate
for about $10 over at our local supermarket.
And they did not have this at our local supermarket,
the gourd and the straw; I had to buy this online.
This is a set and it came very highly recommended.
I didn't know exactly what I was buying,
so I went by the Amazon reviews.
This is easy to clean and works very well
and you can hold onto it even while it has hot drink in it.
This is just over $20.
I'll link to both this and this down below the video.
So, first, a little background.
Mate, as people in the know call it,
was actually being consumed long ago
by native peoples in South America.
It's not from the tea plant,
it's actually from a holly bush tree plant,
but it's similar in that the leaves
and, in this case with mate, the twigs are actually selected
and dried and gone through the process similar to tea
to give you this kind of loose leaf powder.
This is what mate looks like.
And all of this, a great deal of it, actually,
goes into the gourd and has hot but not boiling water
added to it in certain measured doses
to bring out all of the flavor
and the vitamins, minerals, and the caffeine.
The production process leaves this
with a kind of powdery residue in it.
When you pour it into the gourd,
you'll see sort of a little cloud come up.
And you wanna remove that before drinking it
because it adds to the bitterness.
And they have a special technique for doing that,
I'll show you in just a minute.
Traditional gourds were made from actual gourds.
They were hollowed out and cured in a way
that you could then put the mate in it
and over and over use the same one
for putting the hot water in to make the drink.
This is silicone, this is the latest high-tech gourd.
It's able to reverse inside-out for cleaning
and it does a pretty good job
of keeping the heat on the inside.
So, even though you add hot,
again, not boiling, water to this,
you can still hold it to drink it.
And this is a bombilla,
in case you were wondering how to spell it.
This is a straw with a strainer built into the end.
There are all kinds of straws used to drink the mate.
This one is made out of stainless steel.
They're generally made out of metal
and they all have some sort of strainer at the bottom.
You should be able to see the holes in the bottom there
and also in this portion of it, and this is all metal.
Did seem strange to me at first
to think of drinking a hot tea with a metal straw.
In this particular gourd,
there's a built-in rest for the bombilla.
And if you follow the instructions for brewing it correctly,
you won't have the issue of pulling in
a mouthful of burning hot tea.
Mate is supposed to have some of the best qualities
of both coffee and tea without having the negative aspect
of having caffeine that leaves you feeling really jittery.
The form of caffeine in this,
as best as I could find investigating, is called mateine
and it does give you some energy,
but it doesn't give you the jittery feeling.
In the process of learning how to do this,
I have already had a cup of this.
And normally, if I have a high-caffeine drink,
my heart doesn't appreciate it and will complain loudly,
and I haven't had that affect.
So, we're going to add some tea.
And you would think,
"Oh, gee, a bag like that's gonna last you all year."
Well, you're going to fill the gourd
up to this line with tea.
Additionally, while you're pouring it in,
you want to put it in at an incline,
rather than flat across at the level of the line.
There's a reason for that I'll explain in a bit.
Let me pour some in and I'll show you.
There's that cloud of the bitter dust.
So, you fill it about to the line.
And then, if this were standard tea,
that would be a crazy amount of tea or coffee
to have in there, but this is going to work, trust me.
Now, before putting it at the incline,
we're going to wanna do a special technique
to remove that bitter powder.
The special technique is you cover the gourd with your hand
and you do this a few times.
And if things go correctly, when you pull your hand off,
you have that green material.
That's some of that bitter powder
that you're gonna pull off and wash your hands
or do this under the table, (laughing)
and you're ready to put this
at the incline you need to get started.
So, I'm simply going to shake it like this
until I have an incline like that
so that the end where the straw is going to go in
will be much lower than the other side.
Keep it like that.
Next up is the water.
Now, you can do this with a kettle,
but I found out this is the hard way to do it.
It's much better to have a thermos because you wanna keep
your 80-degree Celsius water at that temperature.
And you're going to be adding water over and over,
possibly over hours, to this drink.
Now, with a kettle,
I can get the water to 80 degrees Celsius,
which would be like 180 degrees Fahrenheit,
thanks to my infrared thermometer,
but it keeps cooling down, so I have to keep turning it on
and heating it up and then checking the temperature.
It's a lot easier just to have a thermos
of the proper temperature water
and use that to constantly refill your cup.
Just as it went past a slow boil, I pulled it off
and it's about the right temperature now.
I'm going to pour a very small amount of this
into the shallow side of the gourd
onto the mate and let it soak in.
By a small amount,
I'm talking about two or three tablespoons full.
Okay.
And it sits on top for a bit, and then slowly it soaks in.
I've poured the water on the very back portion there.
Now, the reason I'm going to do this
and the reason I'll continue to add water
just to that back portion
is because that's where the straw will go,
so I'll be able to drink it sooner.
But I'm saving the rest of this for later.
Once that's absorbed by the mate,
I'm going to pour some more water,
again, a few tablespoons worth.
Okay, one more time, third time.
At this point, this portion of the gourd
is getting pretty warm, sorta like holding your phone
when you're playing a game on it, but we're ready to drink.
So, you take your straw
and you cover the end of it with your thumb
and then push it down through the wet part,
the lower part of the mate.
So, you get down near the bottom there, okay.
And I should be ready for a drink.
Now, if you have used the right temperature water
and allowed it to absorb sufficiently
and drink it in the right fashion,
you won't get a mouthful of burning hot tea.
Let's see what I get.
Still pretty hot.
It's a very hearty drink.
It's sorta like the difference between a broth soup
and a stew that has vegetables and meat
and all kinds of things in it.
This feels like it's filling you up when you drink it.
Now, it does have a bitter taste,
my taking the powder out not withstanding,
sorta like beer, coffee, tea, there's a bitterness to it.
If you don't care for that, which I don't particularly,
you can grab some sweetener, though I understand
to some people who are purists about this
this is apostate to take this and put a sweetener on it.
But, hey, I'm using a silicone gourd,
so I figured I'm already on the outs
with those folks anyway.
Take whatever sweetener you use,
this is half raw cane sugar and half stevia blend,
and you pour it on the lower ends
where you're gonna be pouring the water in next.
Just pour it on top and then the next dose of water
will wash that down in.
Within a sip or two, you'll have that sweetness
in addition to the mate taste.
For me, much better with the sugar.
And you can adjust adding as much sugar,
as much water as you'd like.
Now, if you're thinking, "My gosh, that's a lotta tea to use
"for one cup, for one drink," this isn't one cup.
This is like the Big Gulp of South America.
You see people around here in the US with their Big Gulps,
they get the 64-ouncer to last them the day.
This is the equivalent version, but much healthier.
You put in all of that mate material.
And then, when the taste reduces
in the part that you've been adding water to,
you simply add the water into this section
and eventually water over here.
So, at that point, you've taken the mate-ness
from the material, washed it down into the bottom,
and had a chance to drink it all.
This will last you a long time,
so long as you keep adding proper temperature water.
Another interesting thing with this
is it's a very social drink.
In a group, somebody will fire up one of these
and drink the first bowl of it
and then add more water and pass it to somebody else.
And people pass it around and share it,
all using the same straw and the same gourd,
and eventually everyone will have some.
If you're ever with a group of people drinking this
and you're offered your turn with it,
that's actually a very nice thing
because they're not only willing
to share their germs with you,
they're willing to take a chance on your germs as well.
When I heard about mate and the gourd and the bombilla,
the straw with a strainer built into it,
I thought this is just so fascinating.
I never heard of drinking tea like this before,
so I just had to try it out.
Thanks so much to Celine in Argentina
for giving me instruction on how to do this properly.
I hope I did it justice.
And if you decide to try it out
but then you don't really care for the taste,
just think how often these days
can you walk around looking like Sherlock Holmes?
Yerba mate and the bombillas,
sounds like the name of a band that might be performing
on a cruise that would take you around South America.
You can find out more about this and this
at the links down below this video.
I'll be back soon with another review.
You can keep checking back for those
or you can click that subscribe button down below;
you'll get notified when our videos go up.
See you on the next review.
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♫ Wanna watch it all night long