Suffering for Foraged Nettle Tea

As we lounged by Berlin’s canal, one of my friends noticed that we were sitting next to a patch of nettles and suggested that we harvest some leaves to make tea.

Using nothing more than folded flyers, we harvested some mature nettle stalks with lots of leaves. Apparently, if you are careful, you can harvest nettle leaves safely with just your bare hands. Since the pricklies only grown on the underside of the leaves, you can fold the two halves of the leaf together, holding on to the upper side, and then pull the leaf off the stalk.

While making the tea, I got stung! Here I am taking the sting off with a jar of frozen red beans.

To make the tea, I just boiled the leaves for 10 minutes and then strained them. The smaller leaves are younger and less bitter. But I don’t mind bitter in my tea.

If you boil for less than 10 minutes, the stinging chemicals remain. In fact, two of my guests claimed they felt a little tingling on their tongues upon their first sip of the tea. It wasn’t painful or bad, however.

Too bad we didn’t have any lemons, because nettle tea turns bright pink after adding lemon juice, because of the ph change.

Other than tea, the leaves are edible too, like spinach. The tea can be cooled and used as shampoo.