One of Older Son’s Christmas gifts to me was a jumbo supply of organic Fair Trade chai from SerendipiTea of Manhasset, Long Island. Of the six chai blends SerendipiTea offers, he picked the perfect one. Cha Cha Chai has just enough black pepper to give it a hint of kick.
And then The Much Honoured The Lady of Reay came bearing a gift of Wystone’s Spicy Black Chai, a flavor involving anise seed. I don’t have much experience with anise seed but whatever it does in a salad, in chai it provides just enough sweetness that the tea needs no sweetener.
Chai is a bit fussy to make a cup at a time so I’ve been experimenting with scaling it up and making a concentrate. It smells wonderful simmering on the stove and my compost has never been classier. I’ve been putting the steeped leaves in the outdoor bin; I’m not sure how the worms in my indoor composter will take to cardamom and cloves, although they gobble up lapsang souchong and Earl Grey fast enough, teabags and all.
And locally, there’s always Rishi Masala chai.
The directions for the SerendipiTea variety suggest using a teaspoon of the tea blend to a half cup of water, but measuring out a teaspoonful of something that contains whole tea leaves and whole cardamom pods is tricky. Besides, I like it strong, especially before dawn.
Chai is traditionally served with an equal quantity of milk; I usually use vanilla soy milk, which gives the tea some body and enough sweetness to discourage me from reaching for a cookie when I’m having my afternoon cuppa. Usually I go for brewed tea in the morning, but I find I need all the incentive I can find to get through the dark and gloom of January.
And because the cheerful Christmas mugs are back in the basement and it’s much too early to bring out the mugs decorated with tulips and daffodils, I get to use this wonderful handmade–and hand-warming!–16-ounce mitten-handled cup, another good incentive to get out a warm bed before the furnace has kicked in.
© 2012 Anne Bingham and Making It Up as I Go
Anne Bingham: Making it up as I go 
I like black pepper in my ginger tea even though ginger has a nice little bite to it all on its own. I just looked up the Wystone’s Spicy Black Tea. ::exhale:: Sounds wonderful. Also saw a Chocolate Cream Whole Leaf. Just saying…
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I wish I could find a good ginger tea! Any recommendations? Most of the ones I’ve tried are too lemony.
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True. Usually, I make my own with a chunk of ginger root. Traditional Medicinals makes a nice organic ginger tea, sans pepper though. Their golden ginger is ginger with chamomile. It’s sweeter, obviously, with less of a bite.
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I wonder if candied ginger would work? {scuttles off to kitchen to give it a try}
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Be still my heart…why didn’t I think of that? Did it work?
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Chai Latte is the new good-morning drink at our house. I don’t know how we ever got going without it.
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Except in desperate weather, I try to keep chai for the afternoon, mostly because of the cost. However, I have noticed my definition of “desperate weather” has become much more expansive lately.
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Growing ‘desperation’? 🙂
^The new Chai- Syndrome.
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Melts down the core of winter, it does…
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The best chai I’ve ever had was in Sendai. The tea was steeped in hot milk, with crushed peppercorns, ginger, cardamom pods, cinnamon sticks, and cloves. I could swoon just remembering it…but I’ll bet that restaurant is no longer standing.
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I LOVE the photograph on the top of your blog, by the way. I don’t know what it is and I don’t even care — candy? Glass decorations? Whatever they are, they’re just beautiful and they brighten up my day every time I see them.
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