Chai Concentrate
Last week I decided it was time to get back to my curry making that did so much of last winter. While the calendar says spring and 3 out of 4 days concur, the 4th day likes to remind us that snow is still a real possibility around here for a good many weeks yet. Curry just sounded really good. I love my curry with chai though. The milky base allows me to enjoy more flavorful heat in my curry than I could otherwise.
I do find many of the readily available chai concentrates on the market to be a bit too sweet for my tastes and the balance of spices not how I would do it. It is also quite expensive. The bagged chai tea, while with a more favorable price tag, I always find much too weak. So I decided a while back it was time to look into making my own chai concentrate. If you buy your spices in bulk from a local food co-op it is much less expensive than the boxed concentrates and just requires time, much of which is not hands-on.
Basically I pour boiling water over the spices and let them sit for 12-24 hours. Then I bring the mix to a boil on the stove for 15 minutes, add the black loose leaf tea (in a T-sac so I can remove the tea without removing the spices) and let simmer for 10 minutes. Next, I remove the tea and shut off the burner and let it cool for 20-30 minutes. I strain out the spices in a coffee filter lined strainer. I put the tea back into the pot, add sweetener of choice (I’ve used honey, agave nectar and raw sugar and all have worked fine, though the honey does add a bit of its own flavor). Then I let simmer until it has concentrated down to half of the original starting volume and bottle it. I use a bail top bottle from French Lemonade that we buy at Sunflower Market it holds just under a liter. Enough for me to fill the bottle and have one cup of sample chai :-)
To drink, I mix it half and half with milk and heat slowly in a small sauce pan on the stove. In the summer I also have drank it over ice, but mix it more like 2/3 chai concentrate and 1/3 milk because of the dilution from the melting ice. I’ve found the concentrate to keep in the fridge for 10-14 days.
I still haven’t mastered the taste I think of as great chai (that of our local Indian restaurant in Old Town). This most current batch was a tad light on the spicier spices (ginger, clove and cinnamon and perhaps even the cardamom) and a tad sweet. The sweetness might have been right if the other spices had been a bit more forward. I think everyone has their own thoughts on the spice profile of chai. But a great source of recipes to start working from can be found at http://www.chai-tea.org. This one combined with a recipe the fabulous Rahchayl from Monday afternoon knitting shared with me are my starting point and I just take notes on each batch I make. This is my fourth batch I’ve brewed and I’m getting closer. I think another batch or two and I might be there.
