.:homemade chai tea recipe:.

Hello my dear blog-reading friends! It's been awhile, hasn't it? Well, since I've been MIA for so long, I'm going to share something with you. My dear prayer partner and sister, Keila Peña-Hernandez, is both an Indian cuisine enthusiast and tea connoisseur, like myself, so when she introduced chai tea made from scratch during our weekly times together, I was pretty excited!

So, as my peace offering this week, I've put together a how-to guide to making your very own delicious, healthy chai tea from home. The great news is that, as with pretty much all Indian recipes, chai tea is not an exact science so add and subtract as you go to make your perfect brew!

Here's what you'll need:
5-7 whole cardamom pods
1/4" ginger root
2 tsp. black loose leaf tea (ceylon works best but you can pretty much use any black tea)
5-7 whole cloves
pinch of cinnamon
1.5 cups of water
1.5 cups of milk or Silk's Very Vanilla Soy milk
sugar or honey to taste
a sieve

STEP 1 GATHER & CRUSH ALL OF THE INGREDIENTS:

Start with your ginger. It looks like this. (Weird, huh?) Fresh is always better and you can rip off a small piece from a larger root in the grocery store if you want. You'll find it in the fresh veggies/pepper section.


Slice off a 1/4" piece.


Next, peel the skin off and then smash it (the bottom of a spoon works nicely). Dump the smashed ginger into your soup pot.


Next I usually grab a small amount of cardamom pods (you can buy the pods in Middle Eastern and Indian stores or you can just purchase the little black seeds sans pods. Six or seven is usually how many I put in there. Again, it's whatever your preference is! The more cardamom seeds you throw in there, the stronger it will taste. If you're using loose cardamom seeds, 1/4 tsp. is pretty equivalent.


You get to smash these, too! Throw the smashed pods and seeds all in the pot with the ginger.


Pick out 5-7 whole cloves.


Guess what? Yup, you smash the cloves, too (I've tried smashing the rest with no success so I normally just smash the heads of the cloves by pinching them)! Throw all of the smashed goodness of the cloves into the pot.


Grab a pinch (or three!) of cinnamon and dump that into the pot.


Next grab some loose leaf black tea and measure out a spoonful or two and dump it into the pot. (If you don't have any loose leaf black tea in the house and want to know what to get, we use Ceylon tea.)


Lastly for this part, measure out 1.5 cups of water (I normally add a little extra just because some boils off) and add it to the mix.



STEP 2 BRING INITIAL INGREDIENTS TO A BOIL:
Bring your mixture to a full boil. Turn to medium heat and let it slowly boil for 3-5 minutes.



STEP 3 ADD MILK AND LET IT SIMMER:

Add 1.5 cups of milk (we use Silk's Very Vanilla Soy Milk which is better for you, tastes DELICIOUS and ensures I don't have to add extra sugar later) and let the mixture come to a simmer.



STEP 4 LET IT COOL:
Remove the tea before it begins to boil again and let it sit for at least 3-5 minutes.



STEP 5 USE THE SIEVE:

Using a small sieve, pour your chai tea mixture over your coffee cup to separate the liquid from our ingredients.



STEP 6 ADD SUGAR AND SERVE!:

If you use milk, you'll probably want to add sugar or honey to your final drink. Serve it with a few Indian cookies (or, as they call them, biscuits!) and you're on your way to some amazing chai.

Yay! Thanks for sticking around for our first (and likely, last) cooking lesson with Mallory. If you're looking for a printable version of the recipe, I've put one together that you can download here at http://bit.ly/aviachaitea. Now I think I'm going to go make some more!

Happy Chai Day!

Mallory (& Brian)