Masala tea is more commonly known as chai. Chai is the drink many youngsters discover freshman year in college, when their tongues prefer the spicy sweetness of chai over bitter black coffee, thus finding a drink to order with confidence at the local cool coffee shop before panicked study sessions to learn the transitive tense in French. I actually didn't go through that phase- I thought chai tasted kinda goofy, and I thought ordering it was even goofier. Much like the clove cigarette of the tobacco world, once you saw someone drinking chai, you knew they were a drama major.
Obviously my opinion of Masala tea (which is what I am going to refer to it as for the rest of the post, since what I'm about to discuss is pretty different from what you'd get at the average American coffee shop) has changed. I decided to do a study abroad for my last summer in college, and, since I studied East African political systems, went to Tanzania. Tanzania is (obviously) on the east coast of Africa, right underneath it's better known but less stable sister state of Kenya. There were many, many great things about Tanzania, but, for the sake of brevity and for relevance, I'm going to talk about Tea Time.
Tea Time was every afternoon. Everyone in the program, students, teachers, other people staying at the compound we were based at, all stopped whatever else they were doing and gathered in a large outdoor gazebo and drank ungodly amounts of wondrous spicy mystery tea and ate peanuts. It was excellent, a little ritual that afforded everyone a mutual break. So many people talk about how the US needs to institute siestas, but screw that noise. Tea time. Tea time is where it is at.
The fact is, I did not know that this delicious tea that we drank in Tanzania was "chai". It tasted much, much better- the spices were stronger and tasted more fresh, and it wasn't overwhelmingly sweet. And actually, I didn't figure out that it was chai until last week. Because obviously I am really smart.
Last week I found myself in Minneapolis for two days, just to hang out. I was told to stop by a place called the International Coffee House for coffee, which, after many attempts, I did. I mention this because this coffee house does not have hours posted and is not open before noon, at least, as I tried to get a drink there at about 9am on a Tuesday morning, and then again a little after noon, and then went back past 7pm to finally claim my prize. And prize it was, because, as the windows proclaimed, this coffee house was a Somali business, and it sold "African Chai".
And after drinking that amazing tea again, I decided I had to know how to make it. So I tracked down a recipe and made it tonight! First, the specs. You need:
2 inches of fresh ginger, sliced thin 7 cardamom pods 11 whole cloves 1 pod of star anise 2 sticks of cinnamon fresh ground pepper 4 cups water 6 black tea bags 3 cups milk 1/2 cup sugar 1 whole vanilla bean
Now, first off, cardamom isn't cheap but it's a good spice to invest in. It's great in curries, and a must for lentils. The only thing I had to go out and buy was the star anise, which smells like licorice. As far as the black pepper goes, I just did about 3 turns of my pepper grinder.
So what you do is you throw your first six ingredients into a pot and "bruise" them. I took a wooden spoon and mashed the spices about a bit- broke open some cardamom pods, broke up the star anise, the cloves, etc. Then you pour in the water and bring to a boil. At first I thought something was wrong because my kitchen started smelling awful, but I soon figured that it was something my roommate had spilled on the burner. The actual mixture started smelling pretty good really quick!
Once you've got a boil going, you take it off the heat and add the tea bags to steep. I used Constant Comment because I had a bit of a brain freeze in the grocery store aisle and couldn't really find a basic black tea due to all the crazy fancy teas they're marketing these days, so I just grabbed one that I knew was tasty and probably would be a good base. Plus, when I was a kid, I definitely thought Constant Comment was the best name ever, so I've been a fan ever since.
Once you steep your tea and it cools a bit, you add the milk, sugar, and vanilla bean and then bring it all back up to a simmer. Be sure to slice open your vanilla bean lengthwise so all the little beans are exposed to the liquid. I even waited for the tea to get pretty warm and then fished the vanilla bean out and scraped my wooden spoon along the pod to get all the goop out, and then mixed them in with the tea, just to make sure the vanilla flavor would come through well.
Then, you run it all through a strainer and you're done! You have really tasty, nice and spicy Masala tea. It's not exactly the same as the tea I got in the International Coffeehouse or in Tanzania, but it is delicious all the same! I think it would be pretty easy to veganize this recipe, and I'm definitely going to experiment some more with different spice ratios and combinations to see how close I can get it. I did take pictures of this process, but since I was doing this at night in my crappily lit kitchen, none of them are good.
And yeah, yeah, yeah, this is definitely a winter drink, but it was cold in Minneapolis!
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