As a British Indian, tea/chai is a big component of my life. English tea is pretty simple to make. Chai is a bit more complex. And sadly I’m not very good at it. I know the theory, but my chai never quite tastes as good as my friends’.
English Breakfast tea is a blend of black teas — typically Assam, Ceylon, and Kenyan — designed to be robust enough to stand up to milk. Chai (short for masala chai) builds on that black tea base by simmering it with milk, sugar, and a spice blend that usually includes cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, and cloves. Where English tea is an infusion, chai is more of a decoction — you cook the tea leaves and spices together in liquid to extract as much flavour as possible.
Over Ramzan, I asked lots of different people what they did, and got a range of different answers:
- The teabag-to-cup ratio. I do n+2 teabags for n cups of tea. Someone else does 1:1. A third does 2 teabags for every cup;
- The type of milk (evap, condensed, gold top, whole);
- The milk-to-water ratio;
- How long it’s cooked for;
- Spice blend, sugar (melt it first, sprinkle it in).
A friend recommended Dishoom’s chai recipe, which seems like a good approach. But there has to be a smarter way to find a good (and correct) recipe, and so I decided to go back to the basics.
By basics, I mean my copy of McGee’s On Food and Cooking. Luckily Chapter 8, Flavorings From Plants, has an entire section on Tea and Coffee. Unluckily, there’s not actually much useful info here for me to use.
What McGee says
- For black tea (used in English Breakfast and chai), we need 2–5 grams of black tea leaves per 180ml of water.
- The water should be close to the boil, and it’s a pretty quick infusion (only a few minutes).
- The actual infusion time varies from 15 seconds to 5 minutes and depends on water temperature (hotter water obviously infuses faster) and the size of the leaf (smaller particles take less time).
- Water pH and mineral content matter.
- Overly hard water (e.g. London) leads to tea with a surface scum on top, made of calcium carbonate and aggregates of the tea leaves’ phenolic compounds. Phenols are a family of organic molecules built around a hydroxyl group (–OH) bonded to a carbon ring. In tea, the most important phenols are tannins — they’re responsible for astringency (that dry, puckering mouthfeel) and bitterness, and they also drive the colour of the brew. Soft water extracts too many of these compounds, making the tea taste salty. You need moderate mineral content.
- The water should be neutral, and so the final brew ends up moderately acidic. McGee recommends adding cream of tartar (tartaric acid) to alkaline tap water to neutralise it.
- McGee also covers milk: the milk proteins bind to phenolics in the tea, meaning they can’t bind to the flavour receptors in our mouth. This makes the tea less bitter. McGee also says it’s better to add hot tea to warm milk, so the milk heats up gradually — making it less likely to curdle.
This doesn’t get me anywhere when it comes to making good chai.