5 Creative Ways to Use Your Tea Infuser

If you're an avid tea drinker, then you've probably fully embraced the sometimes unwieldy loose-leaf variety. True tea connoisseurs arm themselves with the trusty tea infuser, a handy little tool invented for the sole purpose of steeping your tea while keeping the loose leaves out of your cup. What you might not know about this seemingly single-purpose tool is that it can be used in a variety of ways that extend far beyond your daily (or hourly) cuppa.

Resembling a mesh ball on a chain — or sometimes on tongs — the tea infuser works like a mesh-lined cage that traps the tea leaves as it gets dunked into a cup or pot of hot water. But tea is just one of the many things you can put into the mesh contraption. In fact, a tea infuser can be used to infuse so many flavours into so many different substances, it should really just be called an infuser. Here are five smart hacks you can pull off with a tea infuser.