Kami McBride: [00:00:00] And I will tell you that everybody loves red tea. If you put out a jar of tea in a clear glass, the green one, people will go "eh", but everybody will drink the red tea and go, "Oh, that's so good." It's because it's red. I'm really specialized a lot in how to help moms and families get everybody on board. And so I'm just like, just make it red. Just add some hibiscus and turn it red. And so this is what we do. I always have a pitcher like this on the table or when people come over or some kind of like a dispenser, and people go, "Oh, that's interesting." And they drink it.
Josh Wilder: Welcome to the Mother Earth News and Friends podcast. At Mother Earth News, for 50 years and counting, we've been dedicated to conserving the planet's natural resources while helping you conserve your financial resources in this podcast. We host conversations with experts in the fields of sustainability, homesteading, natural health, and more to share all about how you can live well wherever you are in a way that values [00:01:00] both people and our Mother Earth.
Kenny Coogan: Good day everyone, I am Kenny Coogan and joining me is Kami McBride, author of The Herbal Kitchen. Kami has taught herbal medicine at the University of California School of Nursing for over 35 years and helped thousands of families get comfortable using herbal remedies as their primary wellness strategy.
Today we're going to be doing a deep dive into herbal teas welcome to the podcast, Kami.
Hey, Kenny, I love Mother Earth News and I'm really happy to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Kenny Coogan: We are very excited to have you. And before we do a deep dive of recipes and blends, can you tell the listeners what exactly are we talking about when we say herbal tea?
Kami McBride: Okay, so what is herbal tea, right? Everybody's got that concept oh, I'm not a tea drinker, but basically, herbal tea is a beverage, right? It's made by steeping various parts of the [00:02:00] plants in water. You can make the tea by adding hot water. You can put it into a jar and put it out in the sun and make sun tea.
And the thing is that water is an amazing solvent for extracting nutrition and the medicinal properties from the plants. So you're using the water, the warmth, and the time to extract the beneficial properties of the herbs into the water. And so just one thing I want to say is that, we've all heard, we all know here that you are what you eat, like that's a kind of really common thing, right?
But you are what you drink, you are what you eat. You are what you drink. And as far as health and lifestyle hacks, go herbal teas. I want to just preface that herbal teas are way underused. So an herbal tea is not just this I want to go to sleep now. They're full of vitamins and minerals and they're full of easy to absorb nutrition and that they're easy to make.
Kenny Coogan: Kami, what are some of the more common herbal tea ingredients?
Kami McBride: I think, even when you go to [00:03:00] just, you go to a regular restaurant or just different places that have tea bags, I think that's what most, I know that Mother Earth News, all of, everybody here is more informed than that. But, we know about chamomile and peppermint and ginger, hibiscus, lemon, that kind of thing, turmeric, those are all really popular.
Kenny Coogan: And what are some more rare or unique ingredients? Have you seen?
Kami McBride: Most people have heard of, turmeric and peppermint right now, but I think what I love to talk about is I love to expand how we perceive our spice rack.
So everybody's got a spice rack and we all, most of us think that our spice rack is for, flavoring, barbecue, seasoning, right? But your spice rack is an incredible apothecary onto itself. Our spice racks are full of just so many amazing spices that make delicious teas that I don't think that people always turn to the spice rack for their tea, so things like cardamom, cinnamon, coriander, cloves, allspice, anise, all of those dense [00:04:00] spices in your spice rack. Again, it's not like what we usually think of turning to our tea for. And there's one other not unusual ingredient, but I think it's, I would like for it to be more commonly known, and that is rose petals. So we can take the, any colored rose petal, any rose petal fresh or dried and make herbal tea with it.
You want to stay away from hothouse roses and roses bought at the store because those are full of pesticides, but any homegrown rose without a bunch of, chemical fertilizer on it is highly medicinal. And we can drink our rose petals are fresh and dried rose petals. And that's one of the kind of lesser known herbal teas that I would really like to see people realize.
Kenny Coogan: A couple of months ago, I was in Brno, Czech Republic for the International Carnivorous Plant Society's conference, and after a long hike, I stopped at this cute little coffee shop, and [00:05:00] I had vanilla chocolate tea, and when I got home, I bought ounces and ounces of this vanilla chocolate blend tea.
And I can't tell you all the ingredients, but it's delicious, soothing and it brings me right back to when I was hiking in Brno .
Kami McBride: Wow. Isn't it amazing how those flavors and that aroma, helps have such strong memory with that. That sounds really good.
Kenny Coogan: It tastes delicious, but I also like just to put my nose over that mug and just breathe it in for as long as possible.
Kami McBride: Vanilla, right?
Kenny Coogan: Now on that package, I think it has one out of five for the caffeine level. Does herbal tea usually have caffeine in it or does it vary?
Kami McBride: Yeah, it varies for in general, most most herbal teas are not caffeinated, most of your general, but then there's black tea and green tea and the yerba mate. Those are the most common caffeinated [00:06:00] herbal teas. But in general, we're talking about peppermint and chamomile and orange peel and cinnamon no they're not caffeinated.
Kenny Coogan: And you've been listing a lot of different herbal teas. that I know for a fact are delicious. But what are some of the benefits of some specific herbal teas?
Kami McBride: Okay, so we could start with rose, the rose petal tea, it's incredibly restorative to the nervous system. And so actually rose is rose petals are good for stress. It's also a very cooling herb. So it helps, it's a really good tea for summertime. So you can make rose petal tea and it helps cool the body down and calm down all that irritation that comes from when you're overheated. That's a really good one.
And also and so going to the space, spice rack. I love cardamom. Cardamom tea is amazing. It is one of, the best herbs for the stomach. It provides all kinds of digestive relief from [00:07:00] constipation, bloating, intestinal spasms, upset stomach. And so that's one of the herbs that you can reach to into your spice rack and just be like, "Oh, okay. Yeah. I'm going to, this is for nausea, upset stomach". And then while you're in there, you can think about cinnamon. Okay. So cinnamon tea. is very antimicrobial. And so it helps to fight off colds. It's really good in your, so the first sign of a cold, I make a really hot cup of cinnamon tea with a little honey. And I drink that cinnamon tea and it helps. You really want to catch it before the cold sits, settles in, but when when, those first symptoms. Then you drink that hot cinnamon tea and it just calms everything down. And so the cinnamon is really good for that. Cinnamon is also really good for the digestion.
And then ginger is in there too. It's in your spice rack too, your dry ginger, right? It's, it supports circulation. It helps with nausea. It's one of the herbs it's actually prescribed by medical doctors now for nausea. So that's good.
And [00:08:00] then when you're in there, there's the green leafy herbs in your spice rack, like rosemary. And rosemary is an amazing tea and the tea benefits include supporting circulation, supporting memory, it's brain restorative. So all of those it's, yeah, it's really, it's one of the herbs. It's warming. It helps move the blood. So ginger tea is like one of the things that we drink in the wintertime to keep moving. And, so I live in a cold climate. And so those things that like keep us warm and keep us sweating and keep us moving are really important.
Kenny Coogan: What about the opposite? What about peppermint?
Kami McBride: Oh, peppermint. Oh, yeah. Peppermint is, yeah, that's the tea that you can get everywhere. And so peppermint is another one of those herbs that is specific for stomach upset. It's a really good herb herbal tea for children.
If a child has an upset stomach and nervousness associated with the upset including nausea. And also peppermint is, again, full of those aromatic [00:09:00] oils that help to disinfect and so peppermint is one of our cold and flu herb teas also.
Kenny Coogan: I think this is akin to tea, but I love to make golden milk, which is turmeric, ginger, and cinnamon and milk. At least that's my recipe. Yeah. It just warms you up, feels so good.
Kami McBride: Yeah. That's more than a tea, right? It's got milk and sometimes it has dates and a little bit of coconut sugar. And so I think one of the things is I'm really like evangelical about herbal tea because I think herbal teas are underused.
People think it's for bedtime or hanging out with a friend. Herbal teas are an everyday thing for, to support your health. And I like to call them herbal beverages and just go beyond our concepts. There's more possibility of herbal tea to herbal tea than we realize. So I call them herbal drinks, herbal beverages, because we can add that, that warm milk, or we can add, there's so many other things, little things that we can add to our tea that turn them into a beverage or drink [00:10:00] for daily consumption.
Kenny Coogan: You have some citrus peel tea benefits?
Kami McBride: Yeah. Citrus peel contains pectin. Okay. So your citrus and your lemon peel contain pectin and pectin is one of the substances that just heal the gut lining. It's very anti inflammatory to the gut. And so anybody that's dealing with dysbiosis or digestive issues or doesn't digest well, orange peel tea is one of the best teas that you can drink. And you want the pith. It's the pith.
Kenny Coogan: What about dandelion tea benefits?
Kami McBride: Dandelion is one of the teas that I use for energy. I have an herbal tea recipe for energy and it's it's equal parts dandelion, roasted dandelion, roasted burdock, and chicory root roasted chicory root.
And all three of those roots, including dandelion, contain inulin. And inulin is a prebiotic. And so the prebiotics are in those roots and all [00:11:00] three of those roots, including dandelion are beneficial to the gut microbiome. And we're hearing a lot about that, these more and more How, medications and pesticides disrupt the microbiome and that your microbiome is where all your feel good hormones are made is where your immune cells are made.
And so supporting the gut microbiome is really important. And so these three roots, including dandelion, they contain inulin. And so this inulin is a prebiotic to the microbiome. And so it really supports gut function without having like that spike that caffeine has. And so that's my herbal recipe for energy, my herbal tea recipe for energy that includes the dandelion.
Kenny Coogan: Are there any adverse things that we need to worry about for herbal teas? Are there any side effects?
Kami McBride: Yeah. So the thing about herbal teas is in general they're safe,? But the thing is that especially so many of them increase gut function. They increase your [00:12:00] metabolism. They support the liver. They get the liver functioning better. That's just like dandelion. You have, it supports, it increases liver function. But the biggest contraindication is that herbs that support gut function and liver function is it changes the metabolism of any medications you're on.
Okay. So if you're on medications, you, and you start drinking a lot of these herbs, you want to stay in touch with your doctor to make sure that your medication dose dosage is still correct? You don't want to all of a sudden have be metabolizing it better. And then it's then the dosage is too high.
And the other thing is when you're pregnant, you want to each herb you want to check out okay, this one's really not for pregnancy.
Kenny Coogan: We're going to take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsor, and when we return, we are going to talk about herbal tea recipes.
We're back with herbalist Kami McBride, author of The Herbal Kitchen, available now, our Mother Earth news store. Kami, you had mentioned that wonderful roasted root [00:13:00] tea, but how do you make it?
Kenny Coogan: How do you, how long do you roast them? Where do you roast them? How long do you seep them for?
Kami McBride: Yeah. It's the more motivated people that roast your roots yourself. So you just put them in a cast iron pan and roast them until they're aromatic for just a couple minutes, but you can buy all of that. You can buy your chicory and dandelion pre roasted. So just so you know, if you don't want to go all in, but what you do when you're making herbal tea, it's so simple. You put your fresh or dried herbs into a pot of water with the lid on. Okay, you bring everything to a boil, and then you turn off the heat, and you leave the lid on, and you just let those herbs steep for 10 to 20 minutes whether it be the dandelion, chicory, or any of the other blends that I'm going to talk about.
And then after they steep , you strain them out with a metal tea strainer. I have a compost pile that's just for my spent herbs, because they slow your compost pile down, but I do have one compost pile that's just for all my herbs. So then you strain [00:14:00] them out.
And then, the general guideline for proportions, I have a general guideline, and that is two teaspoons of dried herb per cup of water. Okay. So two teaspoons. The thing is that if you're going to use some fresh herbs, so let's maybe you have some fresh rosemary, fresh plants take up a lot of space. They're bigger, they're bulkier, and they have water, they contain water. So we add, so I always use twice as much fresh herb as dried. So I do two teaspoons of dried herb for a cup of water or four teaspoons of fresh herb per cup of water. You strain it out and you can drink it at room temperature or you can heat it.
And then there's one other thing, some of your herbs and spices are just really strong and dense. So things like cinnamon cloves. So for those really strong, dense spices, sometimes two teaspoons is oh my gosh, per cup is so with those, you just play around with what you like, but I do a teaspoon of those really strong , dense spices per cup of water.
[00:15:00] And what you want to do is if you're using fresh herbs, you cut them up into quarter inch side pieces. If you're using dried herbs, you just crush them a little bit in a mortar and pestle or just rub between your hands a little bit. So just break the herbs up and then you put them into your pot.
And you place the crushed herbs and into the pot with a lid on it. I use stainless steel. You can also use ceramic or glass. And then you go from there, you bring them to a boil, you turn them off, let them sit. Yeah, it's easy.
Kenny Coogan: So for your herbal tea recipe for energy, you said roasted roots of chicory, dandelion, and burdock, and then you let it steep for 10 to 20 minutes.
Are you making one cup at a time, or can you make like a gallon at a time?
Kami McBride: It doesn't matter how much you make. So if you're making one cup you put two teaspoons of each herb or cup. So you do two teaspoons of each herb, and then you're making three cups of tea. So you can, and now if you [00:16:00] want to make more, you can do two parts. You can do four teaspoons, two teaspoons three times three. And then you can add more water. You just keep adding more water to the parts.
Kenny Coogan: Yeah, so for peppermint sun tea, I just put a bunch of peppermint in water, put outside, but I make a lot of it, and then I drink it over the course of a week maybe, or a few days. Do you do the same thing with your energy tea, or do you need to drink it hot?
Kami McBride: All of my teas I make the same way. It's the same proportions, and the only consideration is if they're fresh or dried, or those dense spices. So your peppermint tea, I would put two teaspoons of that herb into that per cup. And so how many cups do you want? You're making a gallon or you're making a half a gallon, you do a little bit of math and you just double it, triple it, quadruple it.
Kenny Coogan: You like it warm or can you have it as a leftovers?
Kami McBride: So When it's winter time and it's cold outside, you want to drink your herbal teas warm. [00:17:00] Okay. When it's hot and you're drinking your rose hibiscus tea, you can drink it at room temperature, slightly chilled. In herbal medicine and Ayurvedic medicine, we teach about how drinking a lot of ice really disrupts gut function over time.
Even when it's hot outside. So I don't teach using drinking iced tea. We'll put like a few, a couple little ice cubes in it and let it get just a little above room temperature. But I know how we are. We go somewhere and it's below zero in a restaurant and they give you ice water, right? It's just the thing. But I think people are becoming more and more aware, especially when it's cold outside that it's really not good to drink ice. It really does dampen your digestive fire. I never drink things cold. And for some people that's too much of a curve.
And so you can drink them just, with a couple, just cut back on the ice. You can start by cutting back on the ice. In the summertime, we drink with just a couple ice cubes or we drink it at room temperature.
Kenny Coogan: You have a herbal tea recipe blend that you can share with us [00:18:00] that helps with sleep.
Kami McBride: Yes, I do. God, that's the problem, right? So an herbal tea recipe for sleep would be that I like, again, I use three, I like this very simple three herb formula. And especially just to begin with but it's still what I do to this day 35 years later. And that is, I love equal parts of chamomile, lemon balm, and lavender.
And the lemon balm, it's a nervine that supports the nervous system, chamomile is for nervousness and irritability. And then the lavender is known to help with insomnia. Now, the one thing about this tea for sleep is that chamomile is also a diuretic. It's really common knowledge that chamomile is to help you get to sleep, help you calm down.
But if you drink that chamomile tea right before you go to bed, you're going to be up in the night. That is a guarantee. And so if you're going to drink chamomile, drink it earlier in the evening when you're starting to calm down.
So you have enough time to get to the bathroom before you go to sleep. So again, it's in the sleepy time, but [00:19:00] that, that really is a contraindication drinking it right before you go to sleep because people that really have trouble sleeping and have insomnia later on, if they're woken up in the middle of the night, then it's hard for many people, it's hard to get back to sleep.
Kenny Coogan: you have a herbal tea recipe for the common cold.
Kami McBride: Yeah. Oh, gosh, I do. There's so many good herbs for that. I love again, we going back to the rose plant and where the hips contain the seed you can purchase them or you can harvest your own hips and then you clean out the hair and the seeds from inside of the hip and you chop it up and you can make tea with rose hips. So I love a combination of rose hips, elderflower and ginger. And the rose hips are really amazing because they're mucilaginous.
So one of the things that happens with colds is that we get dried out, and then the bacteria gets stuck in the tissue, in the mucus membrane, and then it's harder to get rid of the cold. And so the rose hips, they're full of vitamin C and they also really [00:20:00] help to keep the mucus membrane hydrated, moistened. And so then the cold can be resolved quicker. And then elderflower is a diaphoretic, it helps us sweat out the cold and then ginger just helps keep everything warm. So the body can release the infection better. So that is rose hips, elderflower, and ginger, and they're equal parts. And it's really good at the onset of colds.
Kenny Coogan: You have any other herbal tea recipe blends you want to share?
Kami McBride: I also, there's one really classic herbal tea recipe. It's an Ayurvedic recipe called CCF and I have been using it for 30 years. And so I just, I love this tea blend and it's coriander seed, cumin seed and fennel seed, again, going back to the spice rack and it's equal parts and you drink it warm and it is one of the best teas for indigestion.
That big meal or you ate too many different things at a potluck or whatever. And you're just like, "I need some [00:21:00] help." And so you make your CCF and or you just those rich, even if you don't feel bad, like some of these meals around holiday time or party time or whatever they can be pretty rich.
And so if you eat in a really rich meal then you drink your CCF tea and it just helps the body to process all the fat fennel seed helps the body to digest fat. I just, I really do love that tea blend.
I work with a lot of people and stress is the word of the day right now.
People are just experiencing a lot of stress. And so I have a herbal tea recipe for stress. , It's rose petals, hibiscus and hawthorn berry. And all of those herbs contain flavonoids. That are antioxidant and anti inflammatory and they strengthen the circulatory system.
They protect the heart and that blend, because the heart really takes a big hit under stress. It clamps down all the vascular pathways and the heart is really [00:22:00] compromised when we're stressed out. And so this equal part hibiscus, hawthorn berry, and rose petals is just a wonderful destress tea that has a really sweet tart flavor to it.
And hibiscus just turns everything red.
Kenny Coogan: At a local Vietnamese restaurant, they have similar one gallon vessel with a little spout. And it's just water with maybe rosemary and cucumber. Would you call that an herbal tea?
Kami McBride: No, I would call that an herbal water, which is really good. Like you you get just like the hint of the aromatics.
You get the, with the cucumber, you get all the hydration qualities and I love herbal waters. In the summer we have our herbal teas also have fruit in them and in the summer we drink a lot of herbal waters.
Kenny Coogan: Earlier, you mentioned that you like to steep most of these blends for 10 to 20 minutes.
And when I was at that restaurant and I was having my vanilla chocolate tea, my [00:23:00] friend who I was with, because it came in a little sachet, he took it out after four minutes. Yeah. But the waiter had brought us this big pitcher of hot water to make more than one cup.
And I was just wondering, do you have an opinion on that? Because I felt like if I kept my teabag in there longer, I would be extracting more flavor.
Kami McBride: Okay, so we're getting like a little bit more refined here. And that is, so that's the same thing with chamomile too.
Chamomile and a lot of herbal teas are just like a three to five minute thing, right? A little quick step steep tea. And that's what we do with the chamomile and the peppermint. And then you get those aromatics, the aromatics come out and you get the benefits of antimicrobial benefits.
When you steep let's take chamomile, for example, you steep chamomile a little bit longer, and then you start getting the deeper bitter compounds that come out after 15 minutes. And then chamomile tea is no longer this light, fluffy tea. It is a [00:24:00] deep bitter tea that is really going to like work on your liver and do more deeper therapeutic thing.
You let chamomile steep for an hour. You would, now you have some medicine. So we're there's different levels of going to working with the teas. You steep them longer. And a lot of times the bitter and the alkaloids come out and they just don't have that light fluffy because the aromatics are released first.
That's why a lot of the teacups and the teapots have the lid on them because the aromatics will just gone. And so the aromatics, the sweet, lovely, " Oh, I can really smell that." That's what you get first. And so that's why you do that.
Infusing herbal teas into your daily routine is one of the best health hacks out there. The teas the herbs are in are filled with nutrition. Not just all the medicinal benefits, the mucilage and the inulins and all of that, but they're like full of calcium, magnesium, potassium.
Kami McBride: So they're nutritive and you, and [00:25:00] they're really the minerals, the anti inflammatory component pounds, the antioxidants. And so you want to think of drinking herbal tea, herbal beverages as part of your, daily nutritional strategy.
What we do is we'll make a red tea because it's not just about you drinking tea. It's about getting the other people around you to drink tea with you because then you don't have to make it all the time. And so we put, we do a third tea, a third, some kind of juice, like pomegranate or apple, and then a third soda water. And we make herbal beverages, and then we garnish it with lime and lemon and put it in our dispensers. And people love that. And so you can start to take that to your parties, to your gatherings, to, the soccer game where the ice just comes out and it's full of, what, right? And all the kids grow up drinking just junk and this herbal tea, getting comfortable making herbal tea is a way to transform our drinking culture. And, transforming culture begins in the kitchen and the onslaught and the advertising and [00:26:00] availability of drinks everywhere that are just plan bad for you is a big part of our culture.
And we can change that by just starting and making simple, beautiful herbal drinks and taking them and how and normalizing it. You can save money. It's so much healthier and they're tasty and they're easy. It's just like getting into a habit and getting started. And some of these blends I've been using for years and they're time tested and people will enjoy them.
Kenny Coogan: Speaking of herbal drinks, we have a Ukrainian restaurant nearby and they offer carbonated water, tarragon, and lemon, and they call it like a carbonated lemonade, but it has tarragon in it. And after I drank it, I said, "I'm going to make this all the time in my house." It was so different and it was delicious.
Kami McBride: Yeah. Just putting those herbs in a little bit of water. And that's the beauty of just people love the soda. They love the carbonated water. So adding just a little bit of carbonated water to your tea and something a little [00:27:00] bit sweet, it just is a complete game changer and then you're getting your nutrition, you're getting this diversity of nutrition and it's just, it's so much healthier and it is they're delicious.
Josh Wilder: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Mother Earth News and Friends. To listen to more podcasts and get connected on our social media, visit www.motherearthenews.com/podcast. You can also email us at [email protected] with any questions or suggestions. Our podcast production team includes Kenny Coogan, Alyssa Warner, and myself, Josh Wilder.
Music for this episode is the song Hustle by Kevin MacLeod. The Mother Earth News and Friends podcast is a production of Ogden Publications.