Jujube
A small dried fruit, sweet and date-like despite being unrelated to the true date. It is simmered rather than steeped and is a standard component of Chinese and Korean household drinks.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Ziziphus jujuba
- Family
- Rhamnaceae
- Part used
- Fruit
- Origin
- China, across twenty-two provinces; cultivated far beyond it, and the authority records the exact native range as obscure owing to that cultivation
- Drunk in
- China, Korea, Iran, Central Asia
Character
Sweet and date-like with a caramel depth and very little acidity. It needs simmering rather than steeping to give much up, and the difference between a five-minute steep and a twenty-minute simmer is the difference between faintly sweet water and a drink with body.
Notes: date, caramel, dried apple
History
Cultivated in China for several thousand years and one of the earliest domesticated fruits in the region. It spread along the Silk Road into central Asia and the Mediterranean.
How it is drunk
Simmered with ginger in Korean daechu-cha, blended with goji and chrysanthemum in Chinese domestic drinks, and used in Chinese cooking as a sweetener. It is nearly always a component rather than a solo drink.
Production
Fruits are dried whole until wrinkled and deep red. Sliced and whole forms are both sold, and slicing considerably speeds extraction.
Preparation
Decoction
Boiling and decoction
1–3 g/100 ml · 98–100 °C · 10 min
Related botanicals
- Goji berry — Both dried fruits from northern China, simmered together in the same household drinks.
- Bael fruit — Sweet, resinous dried fruits from the same latitudes, both simmered rather than steeped.
- Carob — Dried pods and fruits with a raisin-molasses sweetness and no acidity at all.
Comparisons
- Bael fruit vs jujube — Two sweet resinous dried fruits from the same latitudes, both simmered rather than steeped, and both far more familiar in Asia than anywhere else.
- Jujube vs goji berry — The two dried fruits that go into Chinese and Korean soups and flasks, both mild and sweet, and both far less dramatic than their export marketing suggests.
Evidence for this page
The botanical name, family and distribution above are checked against an external authority. Ziziphus jujuba Mill. — GRIN-Global Taxonomy record— retrieved and read, not countersigned by a named human. That source covers naming and distribution only. Everything else on this page — history, culture, production, flavour, preparation and buying advice — is TeaHQ’s own synthesis with no external source behind it.
Brewing parameters here are typical practice for the category rather than measurements of this plant, and each set says so.
This page makes no safety claim. It describes what Jujube is, where it comes from and how it is prepared — not what it does to a person. The absence of a safety note here is not a statement that the plant is safe. How TeaHQ handles this.