(Don't be that person that calls it chai tea. Chai means tea, so you're calling it tea tea.)
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| Winter in So Cal. You can tell because no one's in the water. |
A couple years ago, I went on a chai binge. I googled recipes for hours upon hours for weeks and weeks. I tried out the chai concentrate from BGSK, some crazy recipes with 20+ ingredients, and almost almost almost brought chai to a food swap. Sadly, the perfect cup eluded me.
I've since realized that what I lacked in experience I was trying to make up for in ingredients.
This morning, I was reading Indian for Everyone (Anupy Singla), and happened upon her recipe for chai. It wasn't so much the ingredients as it was the introduction to the recipe that inspired my revelation:
As a young girl, I associated waking up on the weekends with a cup of steaming, fragrant chai. It was my job to make it for my parents, and I took my task very seriously. Now my girls make it for me. Neha, my older daughter, has been making chai since she was four and loves it with extra cardamom. It's what good chai should be--a perfect balance of spice, milk and sweetness.When I read that her daughter had been making chai since 4, I was dumbstruck. Of course. Chai is one of those recipes that is learned through experience, not through recipes and ingredients. I've been making milky black tea only for a few years and I still haven't perfected it, and that's just tea, milk and honey.
A good cup of chai, I think, might take me my whole lifetime. So, my first long-term goal: make a good cup of chai. Since I'm still a beginner, I'm going to start with Anupy's recipe.
Good, simple chai
Ingredients
Yields 2 generous cups
10 green cardamom pods
5 whole cloves
5 whole black peppercorns
1 small cinnamon stick, lightly crushed (~3 in)*
2 in piece of fresh ginger, thinly sliced or grated (~2 tbsp grated or 1 tbsp dried ginger powder)*
1-2 fennel seeds (optional)
2 cups water
3 servings of black tea (either loose leaf or tea bags)
1/2 cup milk
1-2 tsp sugar
Grind dry spices (cardamom, cloves, peppercorn and fennel, if using) to a powder using a mortar and pestle.*
In a small pot, combine ground spices, plus cinnamon stick, ginger, water and tea. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 3 minutes.
Add milk and sugar, then boil for another 2 minutes.
Remove from heat, let sit for 1 minute. Pour into mugs using a very fine strainer.* Best when shared with a friend before breakfast.
Notes
* Put the cinnamon stick on a cutting board, and lay the flat side of a large knife over it. Hit gently but firmly with the heel of your hand until you feel the stick break.
* Fresh ginger is best, but you can use powdered if necessary. If you have a problem with fresh ginger going bad before you use it, freeze it! Peel the fresh ginger before freezing whole. For best results, cut the ginger root at each junction where it splits, so you only have straight pieces. To use, grate or slice the frozen ginger just as you would fresh. It will keep for quite a while in the freezer.
* You could use a coffee bean grinder/small food processor/blender if you don't have a mortar and pestle, but something just feels right about using the M&P. You could also put the spices in a ziploc baggie and crush them with a rolling pin. To rid your coffee bean grinder of the smell of the spices, throw in a handful of rice afterwards and grind to a powder.
* I found the perfect strainer at an Indian grocery. It's a double lined, flexible mesh strainer. It strains out everything but the super fine sediment--the kind that's so fine, you barely notice it. If you don't have one of these, you could use a regular mesh strainer lined with a coffee filter, paper towel, cheesecloth or clean kitchen towel (that you don't mind getting tea stained). Alternately, if you lack any sort of straining implement, let the tea sit for an extra couple minutes, which will let all the spices settle to the bottom. As gently as possible, slowly tip the pot and pour the tea into mugs.
Recipe adapted from Indian for Everyone by Anupy Singla
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