Stuff You Should Know - Matcha: That Ain't Just Tea

Episode Date: June 25, 2020

Matcha is something else, healthy and delicious and all the rage. Learn all about this trendy beverage today. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, it's Josh and Chuck, your friends, and we are here to tell you about our upcoming book that's coming out this fall, the first ever Stuff You Should Know book, Chuck. That's right, what's the cool, super cool title

we came up with? It's Stuff You Should Know, colon, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. That's right, and it's coming along so great. We're super excited, you guys. The illustrations are amazing, and there's the look of the book.

It's all just, it's exactly what we hoped it would be, and we cannot wait for you to get your hands on it. Yes, we can't, and you don't have to wait, actually. Well, you do have to wait, but you don't have to wait to order. You can go pre-order the book right now, everywhere you get books, and you will eventually get a special gift for pre-ordering,

which we're working on right now. And that's right, so check it out soon, coming this fall. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. ["I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works"] Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and we are macha macha men.

We are some macha men. And Jerry's out there, too. This is Stuff You Should Know. That's very cute. Yumi's iTunes, I guess, on her phone, is stuck on macho man. Like, anytime she plugs it in in the car, that's what comes up. What is the deal with that?

What, like, that the same first song starts off? Yeah, and it varies. It's annoying. I don't know what it is, but that's the way it is, because Tim Cook said so. By the way, if I may, here at the beginning, I joined Instagram, finally. Because of that Gwyneth Paltrow thing? What?

Or is this totally unrelated to macha? No, it's totally unrelated to macha. Okay, well, welcome. Do you thought I joined Instagram because of Gwyneth Paltrow? I thought that this was a segue into the macha episode. No, I just finally got on Instagram, because I loathe Facebook,

and the only thing I will do on Facebook now is I do not pass a go. I go straight to Movie Crush and Movie Crushers, which is a great community of really awesome people. It's a little wonderful corner of Facebook that's not snarky and fun and supportive and movie talk, mostly. But I finally got on Instagram,

because everyone was like, dude, just get on Instagram, because it's not like that, even though Facebook owns Instagram. And so I did. So if you wanna follow me, you can find me at ChuckThePodcaster. That's it, full stop.

Okay, that's it, I thought there was, that was a pregnant pause. Well, heck, I'm gonna say mine too. I'm at Josh Clark. Yeah, it's, you know, I'm posting a few personal pictures. I'm posting some Movie Crush stuff. Any shirtless ones?

Not yet. That's good. I'm posting some, you know, I've always kind of considered myself an amateur photographer, so it's just things I find beautiful or funny or fun or interesting, not a ton of stuff, but you know, I'm there now.

Sounds like you've got it all figured out, Chuck. How many followers do you have? How many do I need to beat? I think I'm at about, I think 20,000. Ah, geez. You'll make it to that. I'll never make it there. You will too.

I think I'm at about that. And the screen. Got a good little crew going. What kind of stuff do you post? I need to follow you. Definitely way better. Post some Momo pictures. Okay.

What else do I post? Just Momo pictures. Momo pictures. Pictures of me with food. Oh, food pictures. Me and you pictures, that kind of stuff, you know. The usual Instagram stuff. I don't know how personal to get.

As much as you want to be. I guess it's all. I mean, if you do like a confessional videos where you're crying, it might freak people out a little bit. Oh, can you do video? Oh yeah. Oh, okay.

Well, you are new, aren't you? I think I might just keep it very basic and just do the old, here's a picture. Okay. Okay. I predict that that will change eventually. You think? Sure.

Cut to me crying. I'm going to go follow you right now. I'm at 27.9 by the way. Oh, wow. Chuck the podcaster. Go ahead. I haven't announced it yet, so don't make fun of my numbers.

I'm following you. Probably got no more than a couple hundred. You got 945. All right. That's pretty good. Not bad pre-announcement. Well, yes, that is not bad at all. Wow.

So the reason I thought, let me do this, okay? Because I have some explaining to do. The reason I thought you were talking about Gwyneth Paltrow is because Gwyneth Paltrow is the person that the current deep and abiding love for all things matcha that America has. Gwyneth Paltrow is the person that is chalked up as kicking that off back in 2015.

Did you know that? Yeah, they laid at her feet. Is that fair? Because I feel like- No, it's not at all fair. Yeah, I feel like the matcha, sort of hipster matcha boom happened before that. But I think what they're saying is like she popularized it

and it was no longer just relegated to hipsters because you know, hipsters are so rare. They're rare creatures and they don't have much reach in the popular culture. It takes a Gwyneth Paltrow to really spread an idea these days. Thank God for her. But there was a post that she made back in 2015

that says that Chalotte, Chalate, C-H-A-L-A-I-T, yeah, Chalate. Matcha latte was a dreamy new discovery on Instagram and that apparently made people go start drinking matcha. Because she discovered an 11th century tea powder. That's right. Good for her. It's dreamy.

I'm glad we're doing this because first of all, I love matcha. Yeah, I do too. And I think I got into it. I've fallen out of it, but this made me buy some more that I bought online as being shipped now as we speak. Oh yeah? So I got out of it for a little while.

I guess maybe because I can't go to my little Japanese store and get it in person. But what kicked off my love of matcha was my friend PJ in Los Angeles, so it was a while ago. And then I was reminded from the, watching Top Chef the other night they did, they had a, you know how much I love that show. They had a challenge where it was,

they had to prepare a traditional Japanese kaiseki, which is a progressive taste, not quite a tasting menu, but a progressive dinner, formal dinner, which is very much reminded me of the matcha formal tea ceremony. Right, which we'll talk about, but I just want to say that I think it would be deliciously ironic if you learned about matcha from PJ and PJ learned about it from Gwyneth Paltrow's Instagram post.

Now this is way pre-2015. So what about matcha everything, Chuck? What about matcha KitKats? Are they your favorite KitKat flavor? Didn't not care for those. I had them, yeah, did not like them at all. Do you have, have you had like a good matcha latte from Starbucks?

Have not had a matcha latte. It's pretty good. I think it is like matcha tea, to be honest. So you like the traditional matcha powder in hot water, stirred together, there's your tea. Yeah. Oh, great. I mean, that's the purest approach there is.

And that's like what you said, people have been drinking that since like the 11th century. Yeah, or add it to like just a regular steeped green tea, might add a little dash of matcha or to a smoothie, which I have a smoothie almost every morning. Yes, okay. So there's a lot of different ways that you can enjoy matcha. Have you even said what it is yet?

No, we're about to. I think we should also say that we're not invested in any kind of matcha outfit or anything like that, because we're talking it up a bit like we are, like we're in the midst of a pump and up scheme or something like that. We're just fans, right? Matcha is just great.

So we should say, like you were saying, matcha is tea, but it's tea-empowered form. And it's specifically a very distinct type of tea grown in a very distinct way and processed in a distinct way. And that it's really unlike any other kind of tea, so much so that it's a really weird thing if you think about it,

but then it's also a very delightful and calming soothing thing to learn about too, I found. Yeah, and big thanks to howstuffworks.com, Maria C. Hunt, the American Specialty Tea Alliance, and then this great article on Good and Proper from Emily Holmes helped me out for this one. But yeah, so the matcha is these tea leaves that have been steamed, then dried,

and then you get those stems out. And the seeds. Yeah, the seeds, no stems and seeds, that's the rule. You don't want any swag tea. Right. So you get that stuff out of there, and then you grind that stuff into a fine powder, and we'll talk about the different places where it's grown,

and then about the history, but what you end up with is this, ideally very bright, bright chlorophyll green powder. Almost neon green. Yeah, if it's the good stuff. You're right. Yeah, the greener, the brighter, the almost dayglowy it is, usually the better the actual matcha is,

and we'll see exactly why. But somewhere along the way, about the 11th century, or the 12th century, I guess it would be, I think back in 1191, the Japanese imported this idea from the Chinese, and it's weird to think like there was a point in time where they're like, okay,

we're gonna start powdering tea from this process, and then this will go on to become matcha. We're up to that. Nobody made tea like that. They made tea like you would think. They grew tea, they kind of packed it into cakes or bricks, and they sold it like that, and you would steep it, and you would drink the liquor is what they call it.

And you would remove the tea leaves. That's not at all what matcha is. Matcha is straight up ground powdered tea leaves, and you're drinking the tea itself, not like steep tea that's come out of the tea, and then you're throwing the tea leaves away. You're drinking the whole kit and kaboodle as they say to Japan.

Yeah, which is why there are so many great health benefits, which we'll get to. Yeah. Yeah, there was a, well, first of all, it's in Japanese, mat means powdered and cha means tea. So, badabing, badaboom, matcha, powdered tea. But there was a Zen monk named Isai. I believe so.

Okay. Who brought these tea seeds after going on a trip to China. And I think this is the person who in 1891 started cultivating this stuff. What'd I say? 1891. Sorry, I was off by 700 years. Started cultivating this stuff and then had a pupil,

and this stuff was very popular with the monks because they could get caffeine loaded and stay up all night and pray. Right. But I had a pupil named Mioi, who was a Buddhist monk. They're in the mountains northwest of Kyoto. And I think this is the person that really took this cultivation seriously

and started to sort of make it a larger scale operation. Yeah, the Buddhist temple that Mioi lived at, I think was in charge of, it's called Kozanji on the Tanganou mountain. I checked with Yumi. I was like, do you say both those? And she said, yeah, and I practiced and it's not coming out right.

But Tanganou mountain outside of Kyoto. And Mioi just so happened where he lived, where he started planting this tea had these incredible natural conditions that just so happened to come together that produced exactly the kind of tea leaf that you would want for matcha. But it was just basically a freak of nature

that it happened that way. Yeah, we got this great soil, super fertile. We have this morning dew that comes in because of the river nearby. And that really rests on those tea leaves and just makes it all pop with chlorophyll. And it became more popular. And as it became more popular,

it was the third shogun of the Ashikaga shogunate. And his name was Ashikaga Yoshimitsu. Beautiful. I love Japanese words. I know, it's wonderful, isn't it? Yeah, there's something about it. It just appeals to my eyeballs and it appeals to my tongue

when I can manage to get it out of my mouth correctly. There's just something about it. I really like it, but. I know. He's the one that said, all right, we got to get more of this stuff and fast because people love this matcha. So let's get it going here in the Uji era area.

Right, outside of Kyoto. So it was originally just on Togano mountain. And then it was expanded to a wider area. And it was there when they expanded to Uji. And Uji is now like the place where you get the world's greatest matcha they've decided. But at first the tea that they were starting to produce in Uji when they first expanded it,

but they were like, this is not nearly as good as the stuff that they're making over there on Togano mountain, right? And they could not figure out why. And then they went back and they looked and they realized that on the mountain, there was a lot of forest that was naturally shading these tea bushes

and that that was the big difference. Then they started to study it more and more and more and they realized that they could kind of mimic this forest shading it and that if they did this at certain amounts or certain times during the growing season, they could actually force the tea to produce exactly the kind of leaves that they would want to turn into matcha

because it takes a very specific kind of growth pattern. And it's just so beautiful in Zen, especially because these were Zen monks who were figuring this out, but it's just like this delicately manipulating the plant to get it to do what you want so you can get the most remarkable leaves to use for matcha. I just find it, seriously,

like when I was researching this and studying this, I was just so much, it was just calm and like really soothing, you know? Yeah, I don't think we said the name of it, but it's called tinsha before it becomes matcha. Matcha is that final ground-up powder. Yeah, everything leading up to that is like you said, tinsha. So technically you don't grow matcha.

So we'll talk about exactly how it's cultivated later, but the upshot of it is that by noticing that the forest around these plants shaded them, they figured out how to simulate it by building structures around them and what they've come up with finally in Uji is what you would call ceremonial grade matcha. Yeah, and you know what?

I looked that up and saw a couple of things. I saw that ceremonial grade used to be reserved for royalty and that it's kind of the best stuff out there as opposed to culinary grade, which you cook with, but then I also saw other places that said that's sort of a tag you can't even trust anymore that sort of thrown on there for Americans. Right.

So I don't really know what to believe. I do know that like a high quality Japanese matcha is not cheap. Right. So that can always be a decent guide if you're online trying to buy some. If you see something super cheap, it's probably not great, but there are four regions in Japan where it's produced.

Uji, Fukuoka, Nishio, and Shizuoka. And Uji is the most renowned obviously, the article from Eater that I saw said is sort of like seeing Bordeaux on a wine label. I see. The next to best would be Fukuoka, which is on the island of Kyushu. And they're sort of newer in the last like 10 to 20 years,

but apparently are putting out some really, really good stuff. Nishio is the largest by volume of matcha. Right. And they're sort of the more mass market style. And if you get that in the US, it's not going to be very good apparently. And then the last one is the Shizuoka.

And they're the largest producer of all green tea by volume. And it's not very well regarded as like really good matcha. I gotcha. So go for that Uji or go for the Fukuoka if you want the good stuff. So I say we take a break and then we'll come back and talk about maybe the tea ceremony. How about that?

Yes, let's take a break. Okay. Thank you. Stuff is should grow. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude. Bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and nonstop references

to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called

on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know. Okay, Chuck. So apparently ceremonial grade is totally made up. But if you were going to go- I don't think that's necessarily true, but.

I could, okay. I could see people abusing that. How about that? Okay, I could probably do that. I could see non-Japanese retailers abusing that. How about that? Yeah. So, but if you went to a tea ceremony,

that would, if there is such a thing as ceremonial grade, that probably would be the kind of tea that they would serve you. And ceremonial grade tea, or I should say the tea ceremony is called the chado, which means the way of tea. Because again, cha means tea and dough means way. So this is like the way of tea.

And just the name of it, of the tea ceremony being called that kind of gives you this idea that there's like a zen vibe to it. And there most decidedly is. Oh yeah. Like if you just watch one of these, it's just super calming, everything. It's sort of like that formal meal I was talking about.

Everything is just very exact and purposeful. Yeah, those are the two words. Exact and purposeful is what it's all about. You're not just throwing tea around. I mean, everything from the folding of the napkin to how you sit, it's all just very much planned out. And it's just super relaxing to be a part of, I think. It really is.

I was talking to Yumi about it, cause she was trained in it. She said it's super stressful while you're learning, because every single step and every single hand movement, every sound that you make, like the whisk clinking up against the bowl, all of those things are meant to be a certain way. And so much of that there's like different schools

that do the ceremony slightly differently. But the ultimate point of the whole thing is that it's meant to draw you into the moment. It's meant to be a really meditative experience, not just for you, the person making tea, but the person who's being served tea. And it is, like you were saying, when you watch one of these things,

there's plenty of them on YouTube. It's real quiet, really silent. And it's really meditative, even just to watch a video of, but it's cool, the idea that there's, this whole process planned out, and that it's meant to make you observe the moment. It also really shows you how this whole thing

has its roots in Zen Buddhism, green tea does or matcha. Yeah, even the white lady in San Francisco in that video you sent me was relaxing. It was, but then did you see the French one too? Yeah. And that was just like, I was like in my chair drooling while that one was going on, because it was just totally quiet.

But when you watch a tea ceremony, you see that there's a specific way that you're supposed to produce, to make green tea, like the way that you drink it, matcha, where it's just powder and hot water mixed together, and then there's your tea. But then, so you're supposed to use two scoops, if you've ever seen like one of those little

bamboo hook skewer kind of things. It's called a cha shuka, yeah, cha shuku, okay? Those are equal to about a third of a teaspoon, and you want two of those. So roughly a half a teaspoon, if you don't have one of the bamboo scoops for green tea. And then you put in a little bit of water, and you stir it together with the bamboo whisk

until a froth forms, and then there you go. You've got your matcha prepared the traditional way, and you're supposed to drink it in about three sips from what I understand. Yeah, and it's, you know, you can get more detail than that if you want to, if you wanna get out a strainer to keep it from lumping up, you can do that. The water should be warm.

You don't wanna just throw boiling water in there. Apparently anything over 80 degrees will scorch it, and that will increase the bitterness. Unless, I don't know, you really like a bitter matcha. I guess that could be a call you could make, but there's a fine line. I think bitterness is a part of matcha to a certain degree, but it shouldn't be the overriding characteristic.

No, no, it's meant to be balanced out by a sweetness. Like, because I mean, matcha, it's like, if you've had tea, but you've never had matcha, you can't guess what matcha tastes like just by having had any other kind of tea before. It's got its own flavor for sure. Yeah, I mean, green tea will give you a hint. Like, if you really like green tea,

you'll probably like matcha, but it's still not quite the same thing. No, because the other thing about matcha, too, is it foams when you whisk it, which indicates that it's got a mouth feel to it that tea doesn't have. Like, green tea is like tea, the consistency of tea. Matcha is almost like-

Creamy. Yeah, it has a creaminess to it, even though it's just powdered tea. There's no cream in it, but it has a creamy consistency to it, too. It's basically magic green potion from Japan land. Yeah, and it differentiates. There's another type of tea called hojicha,

which is reddish brown, and they get that from smoking it. Oh, yeah? Yeah, it has sort of a earthy smoky aroma. They both have that umami, those umami undertones, but the hojicha is not gonna be bitter because that roasting process, I think I said smoking, they actually roast it.

Right, okay. Makes it a little different, and I think hojicha doesn't have nearly as much caffeine as matcha. Matcha is about 3.2 grams per 100 grams of caffeine. It's a lot of caffeine. And hojicha is 0.13, if that tells you anything. Holy cow, and it's 3.2?

Yeah. Wow, and again, that's because you're drinking the tea leaf itself, not just the liquor of the tea. Yeah, but, and I found this to be true, it's not a super jittery caffeine. No, and we'll talk about exactly why, but no, it's world-renowned because it's not a jittery caffeine feeling,

even though there's so much caffeine, it has what's called like an alert calmness, or a calm wakefulness, something like that, where it's like you're not jittery, but you're kind of in the zone is how a lot of Westerners describe it. Yeah, like the same or I drank it for a reason, because they could meditate,

but also know when someone was 50 feet behind him with a sword. Right. You know? Right, yeah, exactly, because they would sprout eyes in the back of their heads. That's right.

The other thing too is I don't want us to make this sound exotic or unattainable. Like people have been drinking matcha for a thousand years, more than a thousand years now, or about a thousand years. And it's powdered tea mixed with hot water, and then you drink it, and it's wonderful. That's it, like you don't have to have... The ceremony.

No, you don't have to. There's a purpose to the ceremony, it's to take time out from your busy life, but if you just want some good matcha, buy some good matcha, get a half of a table, or a half of a teaspoon, some warm water, stir it together, and enjoy your matcha. It doesn't have to be some,

you don't have to be pretentious about it. No one does, and it's not to say the Japanese are pretentious about it, but just talking about it like this can come off as pretentious, even though it's not meant to be that way at all. And I don't want to like scare anybody off or make it sound like it's unattainable.

It's super attainable, and it's really beneficial too, which is why I'm saying, go try it if you haven't. Sure, I think it's the same sort of inaccessibility that some people might feel about wine, and a wine tasting can be intimidating for people, or if you go to a place that has the pour over coffee, and there are lots of different ways to skin the cat, and you can certainly, I mean,

I think Gwyneth Paltrow showed us that it was accessible. Right. A dreamy new discovery. She gooped it up for everyone. Yeah. And by the way, you said that to drink it in the three slurps, apparently that last one is when you turn that bowl fully up,

and sort of the point of that is you're sort of in that bowl with the tea. Everything else is blocked out around you, because it's completely held up to your face. Just savor that last, that gulp and that last bit of sereneness before you get on Facebook, and talk about it. Yeah, we didn't say you're supposed to traditionally

drink it out of a tea bowl called a chawan, and that's another thing too, like it's nothing to go to your local Japanese store and say, do you have stuff I need for matcha? And they'll say, here's the bamboo whisk. They'd love it. Here's the bamboo scoop, here's your tea bowl, give us $12, please.

Totally. It's not hard to get into it all. It's even in the traditional ceremonial way, but it's like you said, drinking it out of that tea bowl is a different experience than just drinking it out of a mug, and it's meant to be that way. Yeah, and you don't have to be pretentious about it, but there's also something we said for honoring

their tradition in whatever way you feel comfortable doing. Yeah, because I mean, I was reading about this morning, drinking coffee, and I'm like, matcha and experience of matcha is basically the opposite of coffee. It's not meant to be like, go, go, go, let's go, let's get the day started. It's like drip, drip, brew, brew, brew, brew. Right, exactly.

It's meant to be like, let's take some time out of that day and just reflect and chill out for a minute, but get a little buzz going. Yeah, exactly, you can have it all. So we kind of just glanced over the fact that matcha is grown in a really unusual way. I feel like we should talk about that a little bit. You want to?

Yes. Okay, so when they figured out that there was a, that the forest shading the tea bushes were doing something special to it. When they started growing it in Uji in the matcha they produced, or the tencha I should say, wasn't nearly as good. They started really studying what was going on,

and they figured out that if you deprive the tea bush of light at certain times and in certain amounts, the tea bush will respond by producing exactly the kind of leaves that you want to turn into matcha eventually. That's right, you're affecting the light cycle, and you start this in about mid-April, then they figured out what you do is you just build

a little covering, a little hut over these bushes, and you can apply straw, more or less straw, to allow more or less light in to the bushes, and around mid-April you cut that light down by about 60 to 70%, and then I think 10 or 12 days after that, you cut it down almost to darkness to 90%, and that's sort of where you get your good money,

chlorophyll and matcha going on. Right, and so what's neat though is we can explain this now, but these guys figured this out centuries, almost a thousand years ago, how to do this, but now we understand that two things that give matcha, it's sweet taste and it's bitter taste, are theanine and catechins. They're two different compounds that are found

in green tea and matcha, and theanine gives it its sweet flavor, catechins give it its bitter flavor, and that through photosynthesis, theanines become catechins. So if you can keep the plant from photosynthesizing as much, there's fewer theanines that are gonna be turned into the bitter catechins, so that's one reason you're depriving it of light.

That's a pretty big step. The other step, Chuck, is that they figured out that chlorophyll is related to the amount of theanines. I don't know if one produces the other or what, but they're related to one another, so the more chlorophyll there is, the more theanines are gonna be, hence the sweeter the matcha's gonna be,

and that if you deprive the tea bush of light, it's going to produce more chlorophyll to try to carry out photosynthesis, so not only does its color get greener, it produces more theanines as a result. So by depriving it of light at certain times, and then using the tea bush that comes out of winter and has a bunch of nutrients packed down in its roots,

and it's now sharing them with the young buds, and that's what you harvest is the first leaves of spring, that's how you get the tensha that will turn into the best kind of matcha. Yeah, and you also get those good, the leaves get wider, you get those broad leaves because they're seeking out the light that they're not getting.

It's actually very cruel. I thought about that too. I was like, the Japanese know how to torture some plants between this and bonsai, you know? Yeah, it reminded me of the marijuana podcast too, the cultivation one, because it's another plant that, you know, you can just throw a seed in the ground and grow tea or grow marijuana and not worry about it

because it's just a plant. But if you alter the light cycles, they both do something extraordinary. In the case of marijuana, I believe altering the light cycles is what causes it to bud at specific times, and it's kind of really similar with the matcha. It's kind of the same process.

So with marijuana, is it kind of like you're making it, think like the days are getting shorter and so it needs to start budding or the days are getting longer? Okay, I got you. Yeah, you're artificially manipulating what would naturally play out over probably a longer period of time is my guess.

I've never grown marijuana, but I'm just guessing. Right. You're like, there was a high times at my dentist, so that's one. That's probably about right. So yeah, so they figured all this out, like to do this with tea, and they started out by adding like little bamboo

or reed covers to deprive sunlight, and then they would put straw mats over that. Now they use aluminum structures around the bushes, and then they use just kind of that black cheesecloth fabric that you see to like, sometimes people put it down to keep weeds from growing up in the landscape. Yeah, like landscape fabric.

Right, exactly. That's exactly what it's called, Chuck. Now they use that to cover up the tea bushes. They've got it down kind of pat, but it's remarkably similar to the same techniques they've been using since the 13th, 12th, 13th century. Yeah, I mean, you know, they made the switch to aluminum because they would have to take these wooden frames out

and care for them in the off season, and I think the same holds true with the straw. I'm sure there are probably some traditionalists that are doing it in the old way, but yeah, aluminum and landscape fabric is sort of the modern version. Have you ever smelled musty straw? It's not a good smell.

I believe I've been on a hay ride or two. Is that what you mean? Yes, yeah, basically. But when you make something out of straw, like something to cover over shrubs with or whatever, you leave it out in the rain, roll it back up. Oh yeah, yeah. It's not a good smell when you unroll it again.

Yeah, like, or if you have a straw hat that falls in a body of water, it's never gonna be the same again. Has that happened to you, Tom Sawyer? Yeah, Emily, I mean, Emily has these, she's a gardener, so she has these huge straw hats. Oh, okay. And if they get wet, they get kind of stinky.

You're right. I gotcha. So you want to take another break and then we'll talk about health benefits of matcha? Sure. Okay, we're going to do that, everybody, and we'll be right back. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

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Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know. So, I think we should say, Chuck, before we get, before we get into the health benefits, when, when Tencha is produced, apparently all of it is brought to one market in Kyoto. And Kyoto is like one of the greatest cities on the entire planet.

And it's just perfect that they have the macho market is in Kyoto and people go there and say, I really like this leaf and I'm going to buy your entire stock. Yeah, they have an auction. It's amazing that they do this this way. They have an auction, I think, once a year at the Kyoto tea market, which opened in 74, 1974.

And I'm getting all my centuries wrong. But this was 1974. And like you said, these wholesalers and vendors, they come in and they do blind tastings, which is really cool. So you can't say like, you know, you're just not acquainted with the brand before you taste it

because every year is going to be a little different, even if you're trying to produce a consistent product year over year. You know, every year brings a little different thing, just like the wine business. So they go in there, they blind taste the stuff and they're looking for kind of, you know, you end up mixing these things together

to get your matcha at the end. I had no idea, did you? Yeah, I think I'd heard that, that it's not just one kind of tea leaf. You want a variation for fragrance, for flavor and for color. And these tea masters pick this raw tingea leaf blindly and just say, hey, this is what I'm looking for.

And I'm looking for this one, and I'm looking for this one. And I'm going to get all three of those and I'm going to bid on them at this auction and then dry it up, stone grind that junk into good, good green powder, magical Japanese powder. Yeah, and then blend it together

and there's your matcha, pal. That's the slogan. So the reason we keep calling this magic powder is not just because of the ceremony and like the whole Zen vibe that it has to it. It definitely has all that. But it is verging on magical as far as the health benefits

that it bestows on humans goes. At the very least, it is very clearly qualifies as a superfood. If there is such a thing as a superfood, green tea and specifically matcha definitely is that. Yeah, and you talked already about the theanine a little bit. They've been using this in Japan and China

for a stress remedy for thousands, literally thousands of years. They say that it can help with aging, with memory and recall. Apparently if you drink gentlemen, if you drink five to seven cups of matcha a day, it can really reduce your chances of prostate cancer. That's what they say.

Yeah, and all green tea is good for you. We should point out, but this is just like on steroids. Yeah, that's the thing. Like matcha is green tea, but most of the time when you drink green tea, again, you're steeping green tea leaves and you're not actually ingesting the leaves themselves with matcha powder, you are.

And so you're getting exponentially more of this stuff, including theanine, including the catechins, including something called epigallo catechin gallate, which has been shown to improve memory, mood, along with L-theanine. And then one of the other things is these catechins are antioxidants, Chuck, which I know you're kind of chomping at the bit

to give a bit of an overview of how antioxidants help us combat disease. Backstory? We were poking fun at each other because you sent me a thing, a primer on antioxidants. It was like, this is like the fifth or sixth time we've probably given an overview of antioxidants. Right, but out of that back and forth,

we agreed to finally do an episode on antioxidants and aging, right? Did we agree? I suggested it. I just assumed that you didn't respond that you were agreeing. No, no, we should do that. And then we'll never talk about it again, right?

I can't guarantee that, no. But that may be the last overview. So this may be the last overview. How about that, okay? Sure. So in your body, you have something that are called free radicals, which is a type of molecule

that have an extra electron or missing an electron. Either way, they like to go around and bind to other stuff. And when they do that, something called oxidation occurs in your body, right? And oxidation can be good in that, like you might have a pathogen floating around your body. These free radicals, which are naturally occurring, can bind to these pathogens and neutralize them,

and you don't get sick from a pathogen. So it's good. The problem is, is you can have too many free radicals in your body. And so when you're out of balance, you have too many free radicals, you suffer what's called oxidative stress, where the free radicals start attacking stuff you need,

like lipids, fats, like DNA, like proteins in your body. And that's not good. So you have antioxidants in your body, but if you're not producing enough antioxidants, your free radicals can get out of balance. And it's good to do things like drink green tea, which introduces a ton of antioxidants to your body. And then they seek out those free radicals,

they bind with them and neutralize them. But the thing about antioxidants is they don't lose their stability themselves when they bind it, they just keep on keeping on, but now they also have this free radical attached for a ride and everything's all good. So that's why they think that antioxidants are kind of the key to healthy aging,

because when those free radicals start attacking your DNA, it can lead to things like tumors and cancer. It can lead to all sorts of other problems, breakdown of cells and tissues and just general disease. They think like that is the basis of aging is oxidative stress and antioxidants can counter that. And matcha in particular is lousy with antioxidants like catechins.

Yeah, and matcha is literally good for almost every organ in your body. And it's certainly not bad for any of them. It helps with your liver. I think we already mentioned the kidneys, certainly the brain and memory. And the combination of that L-theanine and caffeine supposedly actually helps you multitask.

And like to go back and forth between tasks more easily. So like we mentioned earlier, you're alert, but you're still calm. It is a bit of a miracle powder. It is because that L-theanine can cross the blood-brain barrier. So it goes right to your brain and starts pushing it around, like do this, do that.

But it works synergistically with caffeine and that it also releases GABA, which is a calming, I guess inhibitory molecule. I'm not sure. Yeah, I remember GABA. But it works together with caffeine. So that like you were saying, like you have all of the focus, but none of the jitters.

It's just amazing stuff. It's great. I can't wait for when to come in the mail. It fights cancer and it puts you in the zone. Although be aware of one thing. If you like matcha with like a latte with milk, that milk binds with antioxidants very easily. So it neutralizes a lot of the antioxidant effect

in matcha. Yeah, Emily said, I told her that I was gonna get some and it had been a while and she said something about making me a matcha latte. And I was like, I don't think I want that. I think I just will either dump it in a smoothie or just make my tea. Okay.

It's worth trying though. It's very good. Yeah, maybe. Okay. Whatever you wanna do, I just think it's top notch that we're drinking matcha these days. We're gonna live to 130, 140 maybe.

Do you have it every day? Do you drink matcha every day? No, I don't drink nearly enough matcha, but this has gotten me back into it as well. I made a little bit, had the little bamboo scoop, the chashaku and I started making myself some and Yumi Soda's doing so she came over and finished making it for me.

It was very sweet. She said, here's what you're doing wrong. She said, move dummy. But she said it in Japanese and I was like, what'd you say? And she said, nothing. Yeah, and you went, well, it sounded nice because it's Japanese.

You're right, exactly. And then I think we should finish with this great quote from Wyatt so popular these days and who is this from? This is from Anna Kaba Linnaeus. Of Green Gables. Who is a health coach and co-authored matcha colon, a lifestyle guide. She says this, the Kermit the Frog color

just made it so Instagrammable. That we have goop to thank for it. That's right. Let's see, that's it for matcha. Go back and maybe go try it yourself. It's totally worth it and we hope you like it. And since I said that, it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this my tapeworm experience from Travis.

Hey guys, big fan of the show. Love the one on tapeworms and it gave me flashbacks to my own experience. Four years ago, I was working at a fishing lodge in Ontario, Canada. I had severe gastrointestinal issues for several weeks over the summer. And I visited a doctor and after a stool sample

discovered I had a fully mature fish tapeworm inside of me. Oh wow. 30 inches. Wow. It made for a pretty miserable summer. The doctor helped me trace the timeline back to infection. And the likely culprit was a batch of ceviche that a guest had made.

Oh no. And for those of you listening, ceviche is prepared by soaking fish in citrus juices overnight, essentially cooking it. Ideally cooking it. Yeah, chemically cooking it. I was, and ceviche is great. Love it.

I was prescribed one pill to paralyze the worm so it would release its hold and my body could get rid of it. But I had to wait and agonizing three days for the pill to arrive due to my remote location. Nothing like knowing there's a 30 inch tapeworm inside of you leaching away at your body's nutrients. I can't imagine.

Can you imagine just a little bit like, all right, three days I just gotta know this about myself. No, I can't. I can't. I don't know what I would do to numb that pain. He said it took a year of supplements to get my weight back and he lost 20 pounds. And B12, back to normal, a word of caution.

The doctor told me if you plan to eat any raw fish to make sure it has a hard freeze for at least 24 hours to kill any tapeworm eggs. A lesson I will not soon forget. And that is from Travis in Bend, Oregon. Man, Travis, that was a cruel summer indeed. Yeah. Glad you made it out though, buddy.

Apparently it takes forever to get stuff in Bend, Oregon. I didn't realize that. I think he was not in Bend, Oregon at the time. Oh, okay. Yeah, he was at a fishing lodge in Ontario, Canada. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Great. Well, thank you for that story.

That was just magnificent. It really is a good accompaniment to the actual episode too. Don't you think, Chuck? Agreed. If you wanna get in touch with us like Travis did, you can send us an email. Send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.