Oreanthi: Greek Herbal Teas For The Soul

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge

“Occasionally, though, doom and gloom act as a gadfly, spurring people into action, into doing something positive to right the balance. The Oreanthi Herbal Tea Collection partnership is an example.”—Diana Farr Louis

By Diana Farr Louis 

ATHENS Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—3/17/2014—What do most people do when they get depressed? Usually, we just get more depressed. A heavy gray miasma drifts over us, filling our nooks and crannies, emotions and thoughts, convincing us that the world’s a mess, our country is going down the drain, our politicians suck, and that the feathered thing called hope has flown the coop. Occasionally, though, doom and gloom act as a gadfly, spurring people into action, into doing something positive to right the balance.

The Oreanthi Herbal Tea Collection partnership belongs in the latter category. Eighteen months ago, the financial crisis here in Greece had taken hold, businesses were collapsing like matchstick constructions, and a tsunami of taxes threatened to sweep away life as we knew it. Three Athenian women—Sophia Stathatou, Yota Pavlaki, and Eleni Vafeiadi—who’d been friends since school, started going to the gym as a refuge and, one day, instead of groaning about the prevailing misery while on her treadmill, Yota exclaimed, “I’ve got it! Why don’t we make fantastic herbal teas and show the world that Greece can make good, trendy, cosmopolitan products?”

Instead of poo-pooing the idea and resuming the dirge, Sophia and Eleni caught her enthusiasm. As Sophia explained, “It seemed like something that we could make happen. We have a mixed background. Eleni had a career in market research and is a whiz with numbers, Yota worked in advertising and branding, as well as creating a beautiful handbag business more recently, while I’ve got the knowledge of plants from decades of designing gardens and as caretaker of the botanical garden at Kaisariani. Besides improving our own morale, we wanted to improve the image of our country. At the same time, we didn’t want to be too ethnic, waving the blue-and-white flag or emphasizing tsarouchia [the pom-pommed clogs worn by the Evzone presidential guard] and little old ladies in headscarves.”

Herbal teas are as much in the tradition of Greek country remedies for whatever ails you as chicken soup is to Jewish families, with the difference that herbs present a far greater diversity of tastes and healing properties. Talk to a knowledgeable Cretan villager and she’ll fix you a tisane of camomile for your gall bladder, pennyroyal for your stomach, mint or sage to lower your blood pressure, oregano for a cough, or dittany to soothe your menstrual cramps. But she won’t boil them up together and her emphasis is far more on the medicinal as opposed to the pleasurable properties of her chosen concoctions, some of which can be hard to swallow, even if good for what ails you.

“And that’s what we were determined to avoid,” said Yota and Sophia, almost in the same breath. Eleni wasn’t present at our meeting, but it was obvious that these two partners/friends are on the same wave length, finishing each other’s sentences, picking up where the other leaves off. “We want people to love our teas, not to think of them as a prescription drink.”

“We’ve even invented a term to describe them: Mediterranean wellness. We thought these two words captured what we want our teas to convey. And if that wasn’t an expression, it is now. If you Google it, ‘Oreanthi’ comes up first.”

There are many other firsts.

“One innovation is that we mix herbs and flowers—that’s where the name ‘Oreanthi’ comes from. It’s a girl’s name from Chios Island, which means beautiful flower,” said Sophia, “and we’ve taken hibiscus, jasmine, rose hips, passion flower, even scented geranium, which is used in making some spoon sweets [Greek preserves]. We combine them with common herbs like pennyroyal, mint, dittany, sage, lemon verbena, marjoram, fennel, but also with more unusual ingredients like lavender and even olive leaves. There are six to seven in each blend, each carefully chosen to taste good and produce the desired effect, whether it’s Energy, Detox, Light+Lean, Relax, or Harmony.”

A second feature that sets Oreanthi apart from other brands is the appealing packaging (and the website www.oreanthi.com). Immediately eye-catching, the boxes for each of the five blends come in a different color—violet, forget me not blue, olive green, rose, pale orange—traced with delicate floral and bird motifs inspired by folk embroidery patterns but which actually depict the herbs they contain.

Including olive leaves?

“Yes,” continued Yota. “We discovered the Spaniards drink a tea made with them, and we liked it. It has a lemony flavor, lots of antioxidants, and plenty of vitamin E.

“But we’re most proud of what we’ve done with Mountain Tea [also called ironwort or Sideritis]. We’re actually the first company to put mountain tea into a bag.”

This luscious, quintessential flavor of the Greek countryside is habitually sold as it is picked: dried but in branches or perhaps bagged, without the stalks.

“It’s almost impossible to deal with. You can’t cut it,” added Sophia. “It destroys knives and fluffs up, acting like a magnet for the other herbs and making them ball up. It also covered the guys in the factory with a fine powder, so they weren’t exactly enthusiastic about working with it. But, after a lot of trial and error, with us insisting it had to be, could be done, they finally managed.”

Yet another innovation is the tea bag itself. No ordinary Liptonesque flat square, this is a pretty pyramid made of biodegradable cornstarch that allows the herbs and flowers to be cut larger and permits the water to run through it, liberating their aroma more effectively.

I’m intrigued and, at the same time, I’m enjoying my cup of Energy boost while I listen to these stories, as well as amazed that the time from idea to box-in-hand, comprised a mere 18 months, and that the teas are now on sale in Greece and Canada and about to be launched in the UK.

“Well, of course there were lots of hiccups. We started by drawing up a list of 30 herbs and flowers and their properties. Then we had to find the suppliers—most of them are in western Macedonia, where a wonderful GP there had the idea to get unemployed young men back to work both cultivating herbs and processing them for export, mainly to the Arab world. We had some adventures before we stumbled on him, though. After we’d located our master tea blender—yes, there is such a person—he rejected our first selection, pronounced most of the 30 bitter and unsuitable. Only four were acceptable. When we went back to our original source and complained, he confessed that they hadn’t all been Greek. ‘They have to be Greek’, we said. ‘That’s the whole point.’ He just didn’t get it, ‘Why?’ he retorted, ‘Do they need to speak?’”

“We also had a terrible time finding enough rose geranium,” said Yota. This might sound strange given that everyone has masses of it in their gardens, but it shrinks to nothing when dried and we needed enormous quantities.”

“I found some in Crete,” continued Sophia, “but it wasn’t enough. So our hearts leapt when we heard of a friend with a Romanian gardener on Mykonos who said he could ship us some. The gardener was really excited at the thought that we’d actually pay him for the stuff. But imagine our dismay when on the hottest day of the summer, we’re waiting for the boat to dock at Rafina. Yota goes to unload the bags and I see her dragging something down the gangplank. That was utterly wrong. Rose geranium is so light. What did we discover? Three bags stuffed to the gills with ice plant, bouzi [Carpobrotus], heavy as lead and no use to us whatsoever.”

Sophia and Yota sent me home with samples of all five blends and, so far, I cannot decide which I like best. They smell of Greece and live up to Oreanthi’s Mission statement: “To produce high quality Greek herbal infusions using native whole leaf herbs masterfully blended with flowers to produce novel, interesting, and unique tasting blends which enhance wellbeing, the Greek way.”

Readers in the Athens area may buy them at nine shops, soon to be doubled—the website (www.oreanthi.com), under What’s Brewing, will lead you to them. Readers in Canada, where they will soon be appearing in selected retail shops, may find out about them from www.krinos.ca/products, and readers in the US and Britain will just have to be patient, or have friends in Canada.

RECIPE

Yet another innovation being explored by the creators of Oreanthi is using the tisanes in cooking. So far, there are four recipes on their website: for pilaf with Light+Lean, stuffed tomatoes with Light and Lean, Harmony panna cotta, and these delectable biscuits.

Sophia’s Koulourakia/Cookies with Oreanthi Harmony

250 g/9 oz soft margarine

1 cup corn oil

1 pyramid Oreanthi Harmony brewed in ½ cup of boiling water

1 tablespoon Masticha Liqueur (optional)

1 cup sugar (if you have a sweet tooth add 1 ¼ cup)

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 ½ lb flour

Brew ½ cup of strong tea with one pyramid of Oreanthi Harmony and leave to cool. Mix the soft margarine with the corn oil and sugar. Add the Oreanthi Harmony herbal tea and Masticha Liqueur. Finally, add the flour and baking powder to prepare a light dough. Shape the koulourakia/ cookies as you like and bake them at 180˚ C in a conventional oven or circotherm (air bake) at 190˚ C until done.

Oreanthi Harmony is a blend of Camomile and Marjoram, Nettle, Greek Sage, Jasmine, and Rose Hip but, in the absence of the real thing, you could make a tea of camomile and sage, which are easy to find.