Detox & Cleanse Teas

Burdock has two lives. In medieval Europe it was a vegetable, and it is still eaten in Italy and Portugal as bardana. In Japan it is gobo, and the standard dish is kinpira gobo: the root shredded with carrot and braised in soy, sugar, mirin and sesame oil. Kinpira was the son of the folk hero Kintaro, and the dish carries his name.

Milk thistle travels badly. It belongs around the Mediterranean and east through Europe to Central Asia and India, and wherever else it has been taken, North America, Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand and Colombia, it is counted an invasive weed. It is also a thistle you can eat, the flower head cooking much like a globe artichoke.

Dandelion has been in the Chinese pharmacopoeia a long time, under the name pu gong ying, by most accounts more than a thousand years. The root is slow to get ready: dug, sliced lengthways, dried a fortnight somewhere warm, and only then roasted. Hibiscus, which reddens half the blends here, has the opposite trouble, which is too many names. It is roselle here, rosella in Australia, Florida cranberry in the United States, and in Vietnam its leaves go into fish and eel soups rather than a cup.

Hibiscus, Organic is the tart ruby glass. Milk Thistle, and with it Milk Thistle Seed, Organic, is nutty enough to disappear into a blend. Dandelion Root, Organic goes coffee-dark in the roasting while Dandelion Leaf, Organic keeps the bitterness, and Burdock Root, Organic sits nearer a parsnip. Peppermint, Organic and Licorice Root, Organic are what the blends here lean on.