Hot
Chai, made the long way
Cooked in the pot in front of you, strained from a height, handed over hot enough that you hold it by the rim for the first minute.
Our chai
Boiled, not steeped.
What separates chai from tea with milk in it, why it takes four minutes and a pan, and what comes out of the pot at a pop-up.
01
On the day
Two things come out of the pot.
Which one depends entirely on the month. In August the queue wants ice; in December, on a rooftop, nobody asked for ice once.
Iced · limited batch
Iced chai, while it lasts
Summer only, made in limited batches, and it does run out — the August pop-up at Alchemist Coffee Lab went in two hours.
02
The build
Four things decide whether it works.
None of them are exotic and none of them are a secret. Chai is not a difficult drink. It is an easy drink that most places make badly, quickly, on purpose.
The tea
CTC, not loose leaf
Looks like gravel and gives everything up fast. Delicate leaf goes thin and grassy in boiling milk.
The spice
Whole until it is needed
Cardamom stops being cardamom a month after grinding. Whole pods keep; jarred powder has given up.
The order
Water, then milk
Tea boils hard in water before any milk arrives. Skip it and you have made milk that has met tea.
The pour
From a height
From a height, on purpose. It aerates, cools it to drinkable, and looks good — which is not nothing.
- Black tea
- Cardamom
- Ginger
- Cassia
- Clove
- Black pepper
- Fennel
The usual cast. Every house has its own proportions and every house thinks theirs is correct.
03
The method
Four minutes. One pan. No teabag anywhere.
Make it at home between pop-ups. The order matters more than the amounts — water first, milk second, sugar last.
1
Cold water first
200ml water, one heaped teaspoon per cup, into a cold pan. Not a kettle. A pan.
0:00
2
Boil it hard
Two full minutes. You want the water to go almost black and smell like tea, not like hot water.
2:00
3
Milk in
100ml whole milk. Let it climb the side of the pan three times. Take it off on the third.
3:30
4
Sugar, then strain high
Sugar to taste, then pour from a height through the strainer. The height is not showing off. It is aeration.
4:00For two, for six, for a lot of people
Scale the water and the milk, not the time. Two cups: 400ml water, 200ml milk, two heaped spoons. Six cups: you need a bigger pan than you think, and an extra minute on the first boil because the water takes longer to get properly black.
Oat milk
It works, with caveats. Use a barista formulation, add it later, and do not let it boil hard or it will split and you will spend the evening picking bits out of the strainer.
Without sugar
Fine, but go one notch lighter on the spice or the pepper takes over. Sugar is doing more structural work in chai than anyone admits.
Things that will ruin it: a teabag, a microwave, skimmed milk, vanilla syrup, adding the milk at the end, boiling it for ten minutes because you got distracted, and any recipe that begins with the words “chai concentrate”.
Come to a pop-up
Next one Saturday, August 29th, Fresno, CA.