Mate (Yerba Mate, Prepared the Argentine Way)

Name: Mate (Yerba Mate, Prepared the Argentine Way)
Total time: 10 min
Yield: 1
Cuisine: Argentine
Ingredients: 60 g Yerba mate, dried and milled; 1 L Water at 80 °C; 50 ml Cool water, for the first wetting; 1 set A gourd (mate) and a metal straw (bombilla); 1 tsp Sugar, orange peel or mint (optional)

Dried yerba mate packed to one side of a gourd, wetted first with cool water, then filled with water at 80 °C and drunk through a metal bombilla. It is refilled and passed around the circle, one gourd and one straw for everyone, and it is the national drink of Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.

Source

Recette de Argentine home kitchens · 🏺 Traditionnel · Italian and Spanish grandmothers cooking with Argentine beef and Andean corn — a cuisine that arrived by boat and then grew its own roots.

Southern Cone · the national drink — An ownerless traditional drink, so no cook is credited. The cited article confirms mate as a caffeine-rich infused herbal drink made with yerba mate, made by soaking dried yerba mate leaves in hot water and traditionally served with a metal straw called a bombilla in a container typically made from a calabash gourd, originally consumed by the Guaraní and Tupi peoples and today the national beverage of Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, with a similar preparation called mate cocido that removes some of the plant material and sometimes comes in tea bags. The 80 °C rule, the cool-water wetting, the dust-shaking step and the quantities are this book's own.

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Fuego Loco Yerba Mate Argentina Yerba Mate Lab🧉

⏱ 10 min🍽 1 portions🔥 15 kcal🇦🇷 Argentine

VéganeVégétarienSans glutenSans produits laitiersSans fruits à coqueHalal

Étapes

Fill the gourd about two-thirds with yerba. Cover the mouth with your hand, turn it upside down and shake gently, then turn it back — the dust settles into your palm and the coarse leaf stays on top.
Tip the gourd so the yerba banks up against one side, leaving a hollow at the low edge. Pour the cool water into that hollow and let it soak in 2 minutes.
💡 Cool water first, always. It swells the leaf gently and protects it from the hot water that follows; skip it and the first three gourds are harsh.
Put your thumb over the flat end of the bombilla and push it down into the wet hollow, all the way to the bottom. Do not stir it afterwards.
Pour the 80 °C water slowly into the same hollow, never over the dry mound. Drink it all, then refill the same hollow and pass it on.
Refill twenty or thirty times, until the mate lavado — washed-out mate — tastes of nothing.

💡 Astuces

Do not stir the bombilla and do not say thank you until you mean it — 'gracias' when you hand the gourd back tells the server you want no more.
Mate cocido removes some of the plant material and comes in tea bags; it is the same leaf, drunk from a cup, and is what children are given.