Kamal’s Special Chai Revisited: For days Global Warming imobilizes you with heavy snow

Kamal’s special Chai revisited.

This is an improvement over the recipe taught to me by Hajji Sahib when we were relaxing in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, back in 1996. It can be toyed with as you please

I am a prodigious drinker of tea and coffee, and this makes quite a lot. Somewhere around 6 or 7 cups. You can have friends over. If you are less of a drinker simply reduce the quantities a bit. Here, I separate the heating of the tea water and the Milk, you can combine but try separated first.

Around 3 cups of milk in pan, I prefer non Homogenized, organic if possible.

Do not use skim milk or else I will personally reach out through this monitor and throttle you for 30 seconds. Skim milk is water dyed white. Real milk has milk fat in addition to lovely proteins. Heating it denatures the proteins and with the milk fat causes certain lovely changes in taste. Natural dairy Fat is bloody good for you in moderation as long as you are not a sedentary couch potato.

Write that on your hand in sharpie marker and look at it thrice daily until you can hear my words echoing in your mind like a pleasant song.

To resume;

Pour milk in pan,
add 1/2 tea-spoon of Chinese 5 spice, as obtainable in any store.
add 14/ tea-spoon of ground Cinnamon or crush half a cinnamon stick and throw it in the pot.
Take 3 whole peppercorns, grind them in a pepper grinder or mortar/pestle. Be exact on the quantity, the pepper should enhance not over-power.
Take a pinch of cardamon seeds, a pinch to be defined as a bit more than the peppercorns. You do not need to be exact on the cardamon. Crush in a mortar/pestle. Throw into the milk.

Cover the pot, heat on a medium heat, you do not want it to boil rapidly. Eventually if you hit the right temperature it will bubble, watch out for over-flows !

Now in a separate tea-kettle put water, I like a ratio of 1 cups milk to 2 cups water. You can switch this around as per your taste.

Put two OOLONG Tea bags, or two teaspoons of loose Oolong tea.
Not Black Tea, but Oolong (do not use green tea for this – it simply will not work well.)
Then add one black tea bag, or a teaspoon of loose black tea.

Cover bring to boil, when its whistling or you are able to determine its boiling by other means.
Let it sit 2 minutes to further infuse, then pour it through a strainer into the heating milk.
Turn up heat on milk/saucepan, if you can manage to get the trick of getting an actual film to develop over the milk (it will appear smooth in some places and show surface tension wrinkles in other places) you have achieved near perfection.

If it doesn’t reach this point then don’t worry, just go with what you have.

Use a dipper or cup to scoop the chai and pour it in your final tea cup. Put the lid back on to retain the steam, which is full of essential oils distilled from the spices.

Enjoy your first cup, go outside, shovel the gifts of “global warming” from around your car, return inside after a shift, enjoy another cup, or two, or three, and eventually drive your way to work across the smooth glacier that has covered a good deal of the Northern Hemisphere.

You can let it cool, put it in the fridge and re-heat latter. It will not taste as good the second time around, however.

I highly encourage you to experiment with this.

No matter what it will come out better than Starbucks, however.

Roll up your sleeves and apply yourself ! Like, Kamal Baba’s totally proud of you. You go there !

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