Sundays with my son are sometimes lazy days playing on the ocmputers and trying to find something interesting on TV or reading.
He’s not as much a coffee fan as I am, so we experiment with teas, chai to be exact. Aside from the fact that the term “chai” means tea in a whole bunch of places, the term “chai” in America means a spiced tea.
I’ve bought a few different commercial offerings to try, but I wasn’t too impressed. Like coffee, I figured I could do a better job. A quick google and I find quickly that there are plenty of chai recipes, and the variety of chai I was looking for was called “masala chai”, of Indian (dot, not feather) origin.
So let me give you a couple of places for ingredients. For tea, try Davidsons Tea. For spices, I use Penzey’s. That’s what you need: tea and spices.
So this stuff is supposed to be a strong spiced tea but you need the spices to boil a bit before you add the tea or the tea part will be bitter.
I used a dark tea, whole leaf stuff, not bags. If your previous tea experience has been little bags, this stuff will take your taste buds to a different universe all by themselves. If you’re going to do chai, you just as well start with good stuff.
Spices: According to various recipes, masala chai contains cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, star anise and black pepper. That’s where Penzey’s comes in. Fresh spices. If you buy, don’t get carried away and buy a pound at a time. Buy small amounts and use them up while they’re fresh.
Then there’s assembly. I start my water boiling on the stove while I crush the whole cloves, cardamom, pepper (just a few kernels) and star anise, and dump the result along with chunks of cinnamon and ginger into the boiling water. Son says it makes the house smell like somebody just opened a package of spice flavored NECCO wafers.
Meanwhile, load up your French press coffee pot (you do have one, don’t you?) with appropriate amounts of loose tea. After the spices have boiled for three to five minutes, pour the spicy water over the ea leaves and let steep for three minutes. If you don’t have a French press coffee pot, then you’ll end up with a mess of tea with all sorts of seeds and leaves in it. You can pour that through a strainer into individual cups.
Serving this stuff: it’s meant to be sweet, so sweeten with honey, sugar or both. And then add cream. Or half and half. And sit back and enjoy.
What? I didn’t give amounts in micrograms or whatever? I didn’t weigh or measure too much. Maybe a quarter teaspoon of cardamom. Two whole star anise. A teaspoon of cinnamon chunks. Another of ginger. A half teaspoon of cloves. A couple of grinds from my pepper grinder. This made two cups of tea. If you like one spice more than another, use more. Or less. It works with only one or two. And I’m thinking this is just one more reason to wish for those stormy cold winter days…
And yes, it’s wonderfully delicious. The steam from the spices is almost therapeutic. With the richness from the sweeteners and the cream, it’s a perfect mid-morning break.
