Wild Food | Nettle Tea

Description

In this video I take a look at making tea from the common stinging nettle, (Urtica dioica) his tea is quick, simple, Refreshing and good for you. Nettles contain Vitamins A D & K as well as containing calcium. This tea also acts as a diuretic and helps the body remove toxins from the blood. Traditionally nettles have been used for Treating joint pain & kidney stones, though there is little scientific evidence to back this up.

Tags: Bushcraft,survival,ray mears,bear grylls,camping,how to,Common Nettle (Food),Food (TV Genre),Survival Skills (TV Genre)

Video Transcription

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alright guys I've come out on this beautifully warm mid-april day to do a little bit of filming go through some skills whilst I was here I thought I would share with you one of my absolute favorite wild edibles in spring and it's one that we should all be quite familiar with especially as children will have been stung and stung and stung by this stuff and what it is is that we're going to have a look at the left I will be using this quite quite a few things throughout the year but today I'm going to be using it to make some nice refreshing nettle tea it's excellent stuff so let's have a bit of a closer look at the plant itself as loads of it over here so I'm going to bring the camera in give you a closer look at it and have a look at some identification for those of you who might not be too familiar with this which is probably quite unlikely I feel okay so this is a stinging nettle and it has got these really big teeth on it and if you have a bit of a look underneath the nettle you can see what sort of the camera is picking up but you'll see lots of little tiny spikes and these are actually what causes thing cause of the stings they've got our technical name a Catlin what it is but they're nasty little stingers and what they do is inject a kind of acid histamine into you which causes a very very itchy rash and there's quite a few ways of preventing this well kind of remedying this rash and the most common and it does work it's not an old wives tale is this one tends to be ones saying similar places the Nettles it's good old dot Lee so you just mash that up or shoot up a little bit or mix it with a bit of water rub that on and then it'll get rid of that sting really nicely there's some a couple of other things that are usable as well never see any of them today I'll learn I'll just quickly demonstrate them to you okay so to make the nettle tea I've picked these I picked this today because they're quite young shoot obviously these nettle greater you know basically as tall as me so good four or five feet and but the fresh young shoots are by far the best and what I want to do is I'm just going to take the top shoots them off there's a number of reasons for this one important me towards and the top shoots are the best-tasting the most the most fresh the young the soft but also just by taking the top sheet rather than the whole plan this actually allows the plant to continue growing okay it's not going to damage the plant too much it will just continue on op so I'm going to ticker a good few of these and put them in my pouch and then we'll get over and actually have a look at making the tea itself

okay so my obvious next stage here is to get myself a small fire going and this pit I've been using for a while nice to say I've got be careful today because it's very hot dry day and this is Pete so this is a dugout pit nice and safe and yeah I'm using cotton wall again because it's nice and quick and simple and I've got some left over from the other day it doesn't really matter it's going nice and quick swear I like it whoops

a couple of pinecones on earth to get it started

I'm getting to stay so just wait for that to get going and then I'm ready to boil some water which is obviously why I need the fire so initially here what I'm doing is I'm just going to fill my kettle with just water I'm actually gonna bring the water to the boil without any of the nettles in it I'm doing this for a number of reasons one want to purify this water because it has been gathered from a nearby water source or needs to be boiled in order to purify it correctly but secondly also I don't want to over overwork the nettles I don't want to over steep them over shoo them and make quite a lot because I'm gonna make myself a cup of this but I also want to demonstrate the color of it in a glass bottle I brought with me so I'm going to get this on the boil and once that's boiled will add the nettles to it should boil in no time to be honest that you

okay so this is my kettle almost boiled or actually boil I should say I think yeah world war luck nice and hot and now the next stage here is just to add my lettuce to this all I'm going to do is take the fresh metal heads out of the pouch still using the gloves they're still got the stingers on them I'm just going to add them to the hot water and the great thing about this is the hot water as soon as it touches them will kind of neutralize those little spikes which cause you to get the stings now I'm adding quite a lot here and there's different things you can add to this to improve the improve the taste of the quality but I'm leaving just the nettles for today just give them a little bit of a stir in and already is telling this beautiful green color now I put this next to fire not enough to boil it we're just enough to keep it warm whilst this kind of what's the word for it well it's this kind of stews stew isn't the right word brews is what I'm looking for isn't it got a bit of forest debris in there not to worry about it the color of them leaves on so when that water was incredible so there we go that's how we make nettle tea the obvious next step is to sit back and enjoy it

you're welcome to get my cup off my belt so I breathe open the kettle because it means that the bars are straining it now I might get some leaves in here but we'll soon see gorgeous color when it comes out and it smells smells incredible smells really really springy you know it tastes hot just very well quit bit to cool down a second spot how to taste now nettle tea is a really really excellent drink to have and the wild it's absolutely packed full of vitamins so it's got high levels of vitamin C bitman k and it's got high levels of zinc in it if I'm remembering always correctly I put more details in the description and I'm not very good at remembering this kind of thing but yeah it's really really good for you and also if you're going to eat nettles which is something we'll have a look at in a later video for a plant it's got incredible like crazy amounts of protein in it obviously not getting much of that from the tea there'll be a little bit in there but for the protein you will be easier having a look at that let's have a try this nice what cool hmm as causing his soul refreshing but it's very quickly I'll show you the color that this comes out when it's when it's nice and bruised cattle so I've got a nice clear glass bottle here which I'm hoping isn't going to crack with the heat from the steam because of course you can drink this cold so that's hopefully

that color is just amazing some a closer look at that just look at that wonderful color that's nettle tea you know it is nice cold as well so there we go nettle tea so there you go guys I hope you've enjoyed this video I hope it's been useful to you I do highly recommend this stuff I mean look at it it's beautiful stuff I'm going to keep that bottled up now that's going to serve me for the rest of the day I'll drink that coal later on to go to the little folks is still quite hot not on the glass to shatter and also on this note if you if you are interested in these kind of herbal teas these natural herbal teas that you can find and make yourself in the very very near future if you get over to the Flying Olive it's gonna be one of our main collaborations is I'm going to go out and find the herbs and the plants which can be turned to teas and Olivia over there is actually going to make the teas herself in proper tea bags at home I'll be doing some out here we'll be doing some indoors do keep an eye out she's an absolute TV and she really knows what she's all about and it should be really interesting so it's an interesting way to look at the benefits both for health and taste of a lot of plants that around those things we might not even usually think about using in such a way so do keep an eye out for that and as always thank you all for watching please do like share comment all of that stuff that you're the more you guys do that the more that I can do and the more ideas I get and as always thank you all for watching please do keep watching and now I'm going to crack on and do some more videos for you see you later guys