Chan Kam Pong: Hello Everybody! I am Chan Kam Pong. I am the author of my book, 'First Step to Chinese Puerh Tea'. Today, I am going to show you a video, a further information of how to break up a hard tea cake. First of all we have to have our tea cake which is very hard, you can see, and you can hear that, it is very hard, and how can we break it down without any difficulties. What we need to have is a very simple tool. You may have one in your home, that's it. Just a letter opener, now this one, a stainless steel one, you see. You have to chose the one with a sharp edge, which can let you an easy insertion into the tea cake. First of all what we have to do is to insert the letter opener into the tea cake like this. Can you hear a sound? We just inserted this letter opener into the tea cake in the different directions, like this one. The purpose of inserting the letter opener like this is to cut down the tea cake first of all into a two half in the middle like this. After you insert the letter opener into all directions around the tea cake, you can easily get a marvelous tea cake into half, see, it's so easy and beautiful, right?
So you have to know how to break up a tea, because you have to first of all know how is the structure of a tea cake. The tea cake comes from compression, the tea leaves is ordinary tea leaves and before it is compressed it's a tea leaves, so the structure is like this. The tea leaves are like this, before compression, after compression they are compressed like this. So the layer of the tea leaves is like this. If you prick down the tea cake with your force like this, the tea leaves will break up easily. However, if you use some method like this one, to make it looser and looser, you can see here, from the pricking knife you can see the tea leaves, the original one, then comes out, can you see this one? The whole tea leaves do not break up, see, and you use the same method like this, and the original shape of the tea leaves, dried leaves can be retained, see that's it.
So actually braking a tea cake is not so difficult. The point is you have to use a perfect method to break down the tea cake like this one. Oh, marvelous, you can see, the tea leaves here is retained. Very beautiful, okay. So after that if you find some places it's hard, just use your stainless steel letter opener to insert into the hard part like this, and then use a little force to break them into half. This is simple, right?
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