HMIANG
Long before we humans started to use the tea plant in the way we do today, the people who first populated the mountains along the Himalayan Tail in mountains passing through Assam in Northeastern India, Burma, Yunnan in Southern China, Northern Thailand, Laos and Vietnam used the plant for other purposes. The leaves of the Camelia Sinensis plant were in the beginning eaten as a food and used for medicinal purposes. People started to experiment with different ways of preparing the leaves and one of the ways was to ferment them in bundles. This is a practice that has lived on in both Burma and Thailand, under two different names describing the same dish, Lapetto in Burma, and hmiang in Thailand.
To make this dish, you don't just pick the top leaves of the tea plant as you normally would when you make the tea as we know it today, but instead producers collect leaves from all of the tea plant, even the larger leaves growing further down, using a knife to cut off half of the leaf and leave the other half to not stress the plant more than necessary. These leaves are then collected in bundles with a thin piece of bamboo holding them together before being placed in barrels together with a bacteria culture that will ferment the leaves over the course of weeks, months, or sometimes even years! This all depends on the personal style and approach of the producer.
After the bundles of tea leaves have been fermented for the required period of time, they are brought up from the barrels and are ready to be consumed. When eating hmiang, people normally mix it with peanuts, some lime and salt and eat it with their hands.
After the bundles of tea leaves have been fermented for the required period of time, they are brought up from the barrels and are ready to be consumed. Hmiang can still be found at some local markets, but it's not a thriving food culture as it once was. When eating hmiang, people normally mix it with peanuts, some lime and salt and eat it with their hands.
