Hibiscus Tea

I have been watching a series on cooking in orthodox monasteries, some with monks and others only nuns.

Most eat no meat and they fast for over 200 days a year, eating  pulses, grains and vegetables.

  The monastics eat mainly whatever they grow in their gardens.  They preserve, pickle and sell a lot of their produce be it vegetables, wine, cheese or oil.

It is really interesting seeing life inside these monastic orders, especially the female monasteries/nunneries.  Many are rich with  acres of olive trees, herds of goats and cows, huge gardens.  However it is hard work and very 'hands-on' .  The nuns and monks don't just sit in church all day reciting their prayers. 

 In a nunnery it is the nuns themselves who do most of the work, driving tractors, and other farm machinery, milking, herding, tending the animals, making cheese, tilling the fields.  All these things are done by women all over Greece, it just seems strange to me to see the nuns in long, black, all-covering habits toiling this way. 

A female monastery near us which we visit now and again over easter. 

 Like many of the monasteries it is a collection  of stone buildings high up in the mountains, surrounded by immaculate gardens and hidden behind high walls

The monastery in Crete

Most monastics enjoy some sort of herbal tea, drinking it for their health and offering refreshment to visitors.  The flavour  of the tea depends on what is growing around them .  Mountain tea (tsai tou vounou) is a huge favourite all over greece. Ironwort seems to be the English translation.



Today the programme visited a monastery in Crete, much smaller than most of them with only an Abbot and 3 monks. The monk in charge of the kitchen looked well fed, enthusing over the snails he was stewing.  A larger type of snail called kohlous are a specialty in Crete.  I saw them described somewhere as the 'lobster of Crete'.

Cretan snails

The monk was not at all concerned about frying live snails, giving them a  lingering death.  Bad karma

 He introduced me to cold hibiscus tea. This tea is made with cold water, and is not the usual brew steeped in boiling water.

He collected a handful of those gorgeous red  hibiscus flowers and set them out in the sun to dry.  The tea was made by adding a few dried hibiscus leaves to a jar of cold water and leaving  it for a few hours.  He strained out the flowers and poured the brew into glasses.

You can make it with fresh flowers as well and it can also be enjoyed hot if you prefer.

Hibiscus tea is rich in Vitamin C and helps with stress and anxiety.  It also helps reduce high blood pressure, protects the liver, helps in weight loss and benefits the body in a number of other ways .


We have loads of hibiscus here so I'll be collecting a few flowers and trying out the cold tea, just to see how it tastes.   The resulting tea is a bright pink. Looks exotic.

 I've never heard of anyone around here drinking hibiscus so it will be a novelty.