Splenda Sweet Tea

splenda

Splenda Sweet Tea

Ingredients:

1 teapot hot water

1 teapot cold water

1 cup Splenda

5 Lipton teabags (small)

Method:

I tied the teabags to a wooden spoon so that I wouldn’t risk paper breaking off in the tea and so I wouldn’t have to fish the bags out later. Worked great! I dumped the hot and cold water in a big bowl then slowly stirred in the Splenda in about tablespoon size amounts evenly distributed across the liquid.

Results:

Tastes great hot! I can tell the difference between tea with Splenda in it and tea with sugar in it. If you cannot tell the difference this is a fabulous way to make a decent sweet tea fast and easily. If you can tell the difference between Splenda and sugar…whether or not you will like it depends on how you feel about Splenda.

I treat Splenda the same way I approach a veggie burger. It’s not meat so I don’t expect it to taste like meat. I appreciate it as a unique foodstuff with it’s own characteristics. Some brands are better than others. Some methods of preparation are better than others.

Splenda is the same way. If I’m at a restaurant, I typically order either hot tea (if it’s cold out or I’m not feeling well) or iced tea (the other 364 days a year). I almost always taste a tea before I do anything to it. You never know if the person who made the tea had any clue about what they were doing. Sometimes teas are pre-sweetened without being advertised as such. Sometimes the waiter has just screwed up and brought me the “flavored” tea by mistake (this actually happens quite a bit around where I live). After I know what’s in the cup, I generally reach for the pink packets of sugar substitute. They taste better somehow….I guess they actually have less of that processed non-sugar taste I get with the yellow Splenda packets. I never use more than 2 in a normal cup of tea.

Sometimes though the tea has been “burned” by being steeped too long, sitting unstirred too long or because some wacko wrecked the tea bag by putting it near a heat source prior to steeping. That’s when I start reaching for more pink packets. If the tea still tastes like crap after 3 or 4 packets I’ll give up and send it back. No sense in rotting out my teeth!

If only the yellow packets are available, I’ll generally just use straight granulated sugar. I just don’t really like Splenda. So, WHY do I have a massive yellow bag of Splenda in my kitchen? Because I ordered something along the lines of sugar from Safeway.com and my big bag of Splenda arrived in the home delivery unexpectedly….right next to the granulated sugar I had intended to purchase.

Consequently, we now have a blog about Southern Sweet Iced Tea w/Splenda.

Basically, this is a decent, fast and easy Sweet Tea – if you like Splenda. It would probably taste great with a bit of lemon. If I had to predict, given that this recipe only took:

1. the time necessary for the water to boil,
2. another few minutes for the tea to steep,
3. time for the water to cool,

in a pinch this is probably going to end up being added to my personal cookbook as “EASY SWEET TEA”.

ADDENDUM: About 12 hours after I made this tea it tasted like the sweetness has faded and gone flat, very much like a soda. This is definitely a make it fresh and drink it quick recipe!