DIY- Chai Tea

Hello peeps! It’s been raining in my area since 6am which is pure coincidence as I already planned to share a tea recipe today. This chai tea has been in the works for a while now, it all started when I bought a pack from Woolworth last year. It was a smooth blend of spices, I just couldn’t get enough of it 🙂 . Then it finished, then Woolworth left the country and I couldn’t find it anywhere else.  Naturally the only option I was left with was to make mine and share with us mindful of the fact that all the ingredients should be within reach.

I picked ingredients from around, nothing too elaborate. All the ingredients can be found in Shoprite,  infact a supermarket in my area De-Prince sells whole cinnamon sticks so I assure you this tea is very do-able. Although you can get the powder form of all 3 spices used for the tea, I prefer the whole spices because they are fresh and add more depth of flavour to the tea. If you would rather use the powder versions however, use half the ingredients because while the whole spices I used are roughly ground, the commercial ground ones will most likely be more in volume if same measurements are used. *As much as possible, don’t use our locally dry ground ginger, buy Spice Supreme ground ginger instead.

Cinnamon

So here I am finally with a recipe after hunting for different dried spices, I finally narrowed them down to the ones I’m about to share. It’s not news that I love tea, during my university days one of my hubbies was tasting different types of tea. I hardly bought the same pack of tea twice because I wanted to taste as many different types as possible. When I found one I liked, for that period I bought my new favorite plus a new one and the circle continued into NYSC days….yeah, I’m a tea addict 🙂 . Now I stick to the ones I like and try a new tea once in a while.

Ginger

Food blogging has made me bold enough to create my own flavours so here goes….

Cloves

Chai means tea and is believed to have originated from India and China, God should sha bless them for me 🙂 . Will share different versions in the future, todays own is chai tea 101 now let’s go there…

Ingredients :

1 cup black tea -2 packs Dilma Vanilla Tea (40 teabags) & 15 teabags PG tips

4 tablespoons roughly ground cinnamon,  about 6 cinnamon sticks (2 inches each)

2 tablespoons whole cloves

3 tablespoons roughly ground ginger, about 3 dry whole ginger

An empty honey jar

Method :

Dry roast the cloves and cinnamon sticks for 3 minutes then pound all the spices individually so they can be measured appropriately.

Empty the teabags into a clean dry bowl.

Vanilla Tea

Measure out all the ingredients and add to the vanilla tea.

Roughly ground cinnamon, ginger and cloves

Mix well, pour into the dry jar.

Pour 1 cup of water into a pot, add 1 teaspoon of your freshly made chai tea mix and let it boil for 2/3 minutes,  strain into a cup, add 2 teaspoons of sugar and 1 teaspoon of milk and your life is perfect! 😀

Serve hot or cold!

Azu 🙂 .