LOS ANGELES (AP) -- More than a thousand years ago, Buddhist monks in Japan began a daily ritual of grinding green tea leaves into powder, mixing it into hot water with a bamboo whisk, then sharing the tea from a single cup.
Today matcha in the U.S. is considerably less monastic. It's being blended into lattes, dusted onto cheesecakes, mixed into chocolate, even infused in bourbon.
The finely ground green tea is experiencing a U.S. renaissance, with specialty matcha tea bars popping up from Los Angeles to New York and industry giants like Teavana adding it to their product lineup. Chefs are mixing matcha with grains, using it in toppings for Bundt cakes, and mixing it into cocktails, adding a punch of opulent green color along with a cool, mellow taste to playful culinary combinations.
Teavana president Annie Young-Scrivner even uses matcha as a beauty mask.
"It's fantastic," she said. "It tightens."
The uptick in U.S. demand for matcha is having a spillover effect in Japan, where production of tencha, the raw green leaves that are ground into the powder known as matcha, has doubled in Kyoto prefecture during the last 10 years, rising from 564 tons in 2003 to more than 1,163 tons in 2013. Once picked by hand, advances in technology have paved the way for mass production. Specialized machines pluck the top leaves from tea shrubs and remove the veins and stems before the remnants are ground with granite stone and sealed in tin cans.
Industry leaders hope matcha one day will become a staple in the American kitchen the same way soy sauce did after World War II. They also hope the tea's long and rich culinary history doesn't get dissolved in the process.
"Ideally, people will learn how to prepare tea as well, not just drink it," said Kazumi Nishiguchi, a director at the Chamber of Kyoto Prefecture Tea Public Interest Incorporated Association. "We need to export the culture, too. And it's important that it be done right."
