My Chai Recipe

The best chai in the world! Here it is:

Fill a 3-quart saucepan nearly full of cold water and put on a low boil. Drop in  1 and 1/2 heaping tablespoons Indian tea. If you can shop at an Indian market, they sell it in big bags -- black, leaf tea.

Both of these teas are excellent for making chai. These are not large loose teas, but more like small black balls.

Add directly into the water:
1 cinnamon stick
1 star anise
5 whole cloves
6 peppercorns
6 whole allspice
6 cardamom pods -- Scrape out the seeds from the inside and discard the pods.
(I've increased these amounts for richer flavor.)

I also buy cinnamon sticks and peppercorns in bulk bags.

 Keep at a very low boil/simmer until liquid is reduced by 25%.

a black "witch's brew" after all the reduction has occurred

Pour the tea into a carafe, putting it through a metal sieve to remove all the loose tea and spices.

Indian/Asian spices can be expensive, so be sure to buy them in bulk/large bags at an Indian/Pakistani/Asian market in your area. These stores are great fun to shop in, and the assortment of teas is amazing. Prices are low. When made with bulk spices and loose tea, this chai is amazingly inexpensive compared with chai you buy anywhere else -- and oh, the flavor!! And your whole house will smell amazing all day as it simmers on the back of the stove.

I keep the carafe of black chai in the refrigerator, using it each morning. You can heat it in the microwave, but I reheat my chai+milk in a small saucepan each morning, and that works fine too.