Beginner
Korean
Kimchi Jjigae (Kimchi Stew)
Source: Traditional
30 min3420 kcal
Dairy-free🌶️🌶️
Masala Chai (Spiced Milk Tea)
Black tea boiled hard with milk, sugar, ginger and cardamom until it is thick and coppery — the drink sold on every Indian railway platform, and a five-minute skill worth owning.
Source
Recipe by Indian home kitchens · 🏺 Traditional · Everyday Indian household cooking
Traditional dish — no single author — A pan-Indian drink with no single author. The reference names cardamom, grated ginger and cinnamon as the most common spices, with cloves, star anise, peppercorns, mint and lemongrass as regional additions, black tea (usually Assam) as the base, and describes the method of simmering the spices in water, brewing the tea, straining and adding milk — which is the sequence used here. It also notes western Indian versions often omit cloves and peppercorns. The prose and proportions are our own.
Watch it being made
⏱ 12 min🍽 2 servings🔥 130 kcal🇮🇳 India🌶️
VegetarianGluten-free
Steps
Crush the ginger, cardamom pods and cloves roughly — a mortar or the flat of a knife. You want them broken open, not powdered.
Put the water, crushed spices and cinnamon in a small pan and boil hard for 3 minutes, until the water is fragrant and slightly coloured.
💡 Spices first, in water alone. Milk coats them and stops them releasing properly, which is why chai made all at once tastes weak.
Add the tea leaves and boil 1 minute more, until the liquid turns dark reddish-brown.
Pour in the milk and the sugar. Bring it back to the boil, watching closely.
Let it rise up the pan, then pull it off the heat just before it goes over. Return it to the heat and repeat this twice more.
💡 The rise-and-pull is not showmanship. Each boil thickens the milk slightly and pushes more out of the tea — three boils is the usual street standard.
Strain into cups through a fine sieve, pouring from a height so it froths, and drink hot.
💡 Tips
- Common mistake: brewing tea like a Western cup and adding warm milk. Chai is boiled — the leaves, milk and spices cook together, and that is the whole character.
- Ginger and cardamom are the common base; cloves, peppercorns, star anise, lemongrass and mint all appear regionally. There is no single correct blend.
- Oat milk is the best plant substitute — it survives boiling. Most other plant milks split when you boil them three times.
- Adding a pinch of black pepper turns it into the version people drink for a cold — noticeably hotter in the throat.
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