Kaley Tea's Ceylon based Christmas blend

 

A vendor who had sent me Ceylon tea to try in the past, Kaley Tea, recently sent a Christmas tea blend version to try.  So nice!  Earlier in this blog history I would experiment with making Christmas blends every year; it seemed a good time to make an exception from only drinking plain teas, and to experiment.  

This says that it contains tea, cardamom, and cloves, so it's a simplified variation of masala chai.  Masala chai is a good start for a Christmas blend; from there people could add fruit, like orange peel, or cacao, or pine needles, but keeping it quite limited could work well too.  It might allow the tea to play more of a role, where if you mix enough things in it wouldn't matter what the tea is.

drying fruit and peels for use in a Christmas blend (covered here)

It's nice to feel like I'm observing Christmas too.  It's a little early for that, since it's around Halloween time, but holiday experiences never match up here anyway.  It might not be so hot in another two months but otherwise the weather in Bangkok is generally consistent year-round, beyond when it rains more.

I'm brewing this using their recommendations, sort of.  They suggest using a teaspoon to make a cup, brewing that for 3 minutes, with an option to brew it a second time.  I brewed more than that, I think, and for longer, so maybe this will be a little strong.  Ordinarily I'm opposed to diluting tea, adding water, no matter what happens, but I could always make an exception if I've screwed this up.

it's definitely less monochromatic in person; I think shading inside the infuser caused that

Review:

Infusion strength isn't bad, maybe just a touch strong.  It wouldn't be unusual for people to add milk and sugar to this, not to cut overwhelming astringency, since this is mild enough, but just to play up the dessert experience feel, or how masala chai is usually made and enjoyed.  I could drink some and then adjust it, to review it both ways.

The spice balance is good.  Cardamom and clove alone really work, and it seems like this is pretty good tea matching with those.  The flavor input of all three is reasonably balanced; it would be easy for spices to overtake the tea range, but they all show through.  It's pleasant like this, but the extra infusion strength pushes it a little far, off of being sweet, light, complex, and approachable, as the softest and sweetest black teas are.  The tea input seems pretty good but I'll stop short of adding a flavor list here.  Malt doesn't show through, so it's not like an Assam, and maybe some of the mineral base that is distinctive in Ceylon is giving this good balance.

The general effect is very clean; there is no negative contribution of any aspect.  Not very poetic a description, right, compared to bringing up some childhood image of people around a fireplace, drinking tea and eating gingerbread Christmas cookies, or whatever else?  This would go really well with cookies; that's what is missing in the overall balance, a reason for drinking a clean and positive black tea with spice inputs.  

I like the tea but it's not what I'm accustomed to, and this really would make a lot more sense in some sort of late fall or winter context.  It probably would make a nice iced tea, but it's odd mentally switching channels like that, considering a radically different context.  For drinking it plain maybe it would be better with food or those cookies.  I'll try it with a little milk and honey and see how that works.

It's good with those added, probably better.  I used skim milk, what I'm drinking right now; surely that's not optimum, but it's still nice.  As with plain black tea all the flavors fall into a completely different balance when you add milk and sugar (or honey, also what I had most handy).  Going even heavier on infusion strength and using more full cream milk than I added would probably be more optimum, to get the full effect of both inputs.  I tried a second infusion brewed for longer (with the same leaves), this time using whole milk (my wife couldn't sleep at night knowing there are two cartons open at once), but of course the effect is better from the first round, the intensity.

One nice part about drinking it this way--adjusted--could be that people who don't drink tea might be more likely to like it.  These particular spice flavors might appeal most to people with more developed food flavor background (in Thailand or in the West), but to me it's quite approachable and pleasant.  For people familiar with this spicing range there would be no need to mess around with this recipe form, and aspects balance, but for others continuing on to add cacao and a fruit input might be good.  Using an apple peeler to remove some outer rind off an orange might be a nice addition too, giving a touch of extra fruit edge.  I don't see this as working well for coupling with some sort of alcohol input (which can come up as another Christmas theme), but people on that page may take that differently.  A little cognac or brandy would definitely completely change this.

It works for evoking a Christmas feel, I think.  It needs those cookies though, not just any one kind, whatever theme people tend to connect with their own expectations.  My Mom would make a lot of kinds; we had large trays of many types around in the holiday season.  This would be perfect with a kind we didn't make then, which we called whoopie pies, two soft chocolate cookies sandwiching a cream filling center.  Maybe even better with gingerbread men; that would round out the typical set expectation of ginger being the other main input in a traditional masala chai (as I see it; for others black pepper or other things could be added).

This might be a good year for messing around with your own Christmas blend experience; either go out and buy one, or keep an eye out for spice inputs, like spearmint, cacao, or whatever else.  There's still time to work out how adding pine needles to tea works for people in the US, which tree type needle inputs definitely won't poison you, and how drying or chopping the material changes infusion results.  Making adjusted masala chai versions takes practice; you might need a couple of trial rounds to prepare something you can serve to others (all of which I've covered in this blog).

Many thanks to Kaley for sharing this, and an early happy holidays for all readers!  

White chocolate masala chai Christmas blend

Originally posted as:  http://www.tching.com/2017/12/christmas-tea-blend-2017/


I've been meaning to get back to making a masala chai and a Christmas tea blend, so to clear through both I combined the themes.  This also contains a touch of bitter orange marmalade to fill in the spice range with a little fruit but the title seemed wordy adding it.

I've done Christmas tea blends before, and talked through what that's all about quite a bit.  Two years ago I did a fruit and spice blend, and last year's version went a bit further from the basics (black tea, orange citrus, and cinnamon) to include vanilla, cacao nibs, and black cherry jam, so based on chocolate covered cherries.  It was nice, just a bit removed from a typical dry tea and spice blend.

This year I didn't put the advance thought in and prep was mostly limited to what I had around.  That actually came up as both a positive and negative factor in the outcome.

Christmas nativity play; there to see that cow in the lower right

my cheerful Christmas cow

Ingredients

-Thai organic CTC black tea
-ginger, clove, cardamom, touch of salt and black pepper
-bitter orange marmalade
-white chocolate
-palm sugar, milk


I did have to buy the black tea for this; funny there was no CTC tea in the house.  I think my wife picked up a couple of free tea bags in a hotel stay once but I went ahead and bought some loose black tea anyway.

I used all dry spices; spice-rack versions.  If the spices are relatively fresh that's fine (not on the old side, I mean, anything in jars isn't fresh in the other sense), since spices have a pretty good life-span.  Flavor dropping off is one thing but after a couple of years they really can pick up a mustiness.  Ginger is typically easy to use fresh, since we cook with the root here, and it's even easy to find back in the US, but we seemed to be out.  I think the powdered ginger was the oldest of the spices and did contribute a slight mustiness.  Luckily the proportion of ginger was quite low in this version, something I'll get to more in the next section.

I would expect that black cherry would be nice for the fruit balance, or orange peel for citrus, but bitter orange marmalade was the closest thing on hand.  I considered squeezing in a bit of fresh pomelo juice (Asian grapefruit), since that was on hand around, but didn't expect it to work as well.

White chocolate was sort of a gamble.  I wasn't sure the texture would work, but then using real vanilla bean (in the past) does contribute a really thick, creamy texture to spice and tea blends, which is still ok.  Adding a touch of salt gives blends balance.  I'm not sure it changed much but I went with a dash of black pepper for this version, which isn't atypical for masala chai, I just don't like peppery chai.  Palm sugar isn't that different than a natural brown sugar; it was really just what was around.

Proportions, process

The blend was mostly black tea.  Clove was heaviest after that, with this version light on ginger.  There was a good bit of chocolate, nearly as much as in a Hershey bar, but not enough to make the drink into a tea flavored hot chocolate instead of a chocolate flavored tea.  I didn't measure those, which leads into an aside I've been meaning to mention, and probably have already covered, about not sticking to well-determined proportions or parameters.

It comes from an approach to cooking.  I taught myself to cook in my 20s, based on my mother's cooking (which is quite good, mainly traditional foods back in Pennyslvania), and on a partial study in making dorm food in college.  Part of my approach was to never, ever use recipes, except maybe for something like chocolate chip cookies--those are touchy.  It was about the process as much as the outcome.  Funny that just came up in talking about making tea; you can probably imagine why.  People get into the ceremonial aspects of that, or see it as some sort of Zen practice, with the Japanese tea ceremony based on that sort of thinking.  I could be more careful about using ideal parameters (I am an engineer too; I get it), but then it becomes about optimization, not the experience.  For me winging it is part of an organic process, and experience limited natural variation is too.

So back to that blend.  I mixed the ingredients and simmered for around 15 minutes.  For more whole spices I'd probably go with at least 20 minutes, but that's fine for finer processed versions.  Whenever you taste such a mix without milk it seems like you've completely ruined it, but adding the milk swings it all into a reasonable balance.  It's probably more typical to simmer along with the milk, and it's my impression that the milk does actually cook a little, changing the flavor, but this time I didn't.

Conclusion, outcome

It worked!  Often the first go at something novel really points towards how to get it right the next time instead, but this balanced well, and was nice.  The chocolate fell into a nice relation to the spicing, and the levels of all of the flavors worked out well.  Clove was strongest of the spice elements, but they all mixed so much that no one element was really pronounced over the others.  The marmalade folded in so well that it was hard to notice it even had any citrus aspect, but I think it probably supported the other flavors more than was evident.  The texture was fine, a little thick, but then ordinary masala chai tends to seem a little thick too.

It was a bit close to hot chocolate, of course, really in between a masala chai version and that.  It worked well for me, but I wouldn't want to drink either of those things too often.  It's a lot easier to review; it tastes like those ingredients.  It would match well with cold weather but it's in the mid 20s here (C; probably up to around 80 F now, cool for us in Bangkok but not cold weather).  I made enough to have two very large cups with breakfast, and judging from the amount of soaked tea and spices I was probably good and dosed with caffeine from that.


Part of the point was trying something new, and part was also about encouraging others that making tea blends is possible.  You don't just need to rely on Teavana or David's to hand something over, and really don't need to go find whole spice versions to make a costly tea blend either.


I'd think lots of things might work well for this holiday blend theme, lots of which I've seen in review posts about them:  pine needles (more on using those here and here), peppermint candy, etc.  It might be cool to try and figure out how to integrate nuts, or other things that wouldn't typically go in a tea blend, cognac, or egg nog, whatever comes to mind.  At worst a batch would be awful, so the time and ingredients would be wasted.

drying fruit for a version awhile back

Messing around with the tea input would be a natural variation.  I often use both CTC black tea and a mid-range quality orthodox black version (if I have both around), but an aged shou mei might fold into spice flavors just as well, or maybe better if you could balance the richness and subtlety well.  Smoked tea (Lapsang Souchong) has blending potential, but you know how it goes with those, finding a good one and getting the balance right would be tricky.

It starts to go a bit far but a Hunan brick tea might have interesting potential, keeping the spice a little lighter in that case so the unusual nature of that tea would have a chance to shine through.  One of those with a little cinnamon and nutmeg, dried orange peel, apple, and some dried fruit (raisin or date) might be great.  Crazy spicing like rosemary and sage might work for a different version, in the right mix.

Or just mixing black tea, cinnamon, and dried orange peel would be great, I'd think.

2016 Christmas in PA, with snow

visiting grandparents last holidays

an extreme take on a Christmas tea blend

A few different things have reminded me of tea blends lately.  One is seeing the Twinnings Christmas blend; interesting because it contains clove, not interesting enough to actually buy because it's commercial, mass produced tea, and it's not as if I've ever tried a Twinnings tea that was so amazing that I wanted to go buy some.  But to be fair their loose Earl Grey is not so bad.

vanilla pod (bean, if you rather)

One other reminder was a decent flavored Thai green tea (coconut).  Before trying that I was already considering how the local, Assamica based Thai black teas might work in blends.


This related to trying some teas and also to researching a semi-mythical original version of Thai iced tea awhile back, that orange bubble-tea-like version, which supposedly stemmed from a real, respectable tea.  It was intriguing for using crushed tamarind seeds and orange blossoms in a blend, versus the mix of artificial flavors now used (in powdered tea mixes--just nasty).

I also recently tried an Indonesian black tea that turned out to be a commercial, machine made, essentially ground black tea.  It was so astringent that I  couldn't drink even a diluted infusion of it without milk and sugar, although it was decent with those added.  I almost considered reviewing that tea with the milk and sugar but I've not been drinking enough others to use as a baseline, and those additions really do mute the original flavors.  Eventually I probably will do such a review, just because it's a crazy idea.


It was kind of shame about that tea because I really wanted to get more of a feel for how the volcanic soil affected the taste of Indonesian teas.  Not that I was going to really be able to separate the inputs well, but it seemed possible the black tea would fill that in a bit beyond trying a green and white tea (both recently reviewed here).  So the tea brought blending to mind.  Usually I only make masala chai from teas designated as ingredients, but this was a chance to broaden that.



So I researched a bit and made my own Christmas blend.  I just ran across a Tea for Me Please post about an interesting version I didn't see prior to making this blend, but I'll mention it here anyway.  That Twinnings tea, which may or may not be the same product I've been seeing in grocery stores here, was described as follows:


The Twinings Christmas blend this year is Winter Spice.  It is a black Assam tea from North-East India, expertly blended with warming spice flavours, safflowers and orange peel for a delicious festive treat.


No specific mention of clove, but descriptions I've seen before only cited clove and orange peel.  One of the recipes that turned up in a blog post looked like just what I wanted to go for:

Vietnamese black; really too good a tea for blending

200g orange pekoe tea
2 oranges, zest only
4 tbsp pink peppercorns
4 tbsp cloves
5 cinnamon quills, broken up into pieces
1 vanilla pod, halved lengthwise and finely sliced


200 grams is a good bit of tea; my plan was to make it in steps, to put some ingredients together and adjust across different tries, to make it batch by batch instead.  This would still require making dried fruit separately, per something like their method:


1. Peel thick strips of orange zest and then tear them into small pieces and arrange them on a baking tray lined with baking paper. Bake for 20 minutes at 100ºC until dry. Cool.


2. Combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix well. Store tea in a jar/airtight container for at least a week so that the flavours are allowed to develop.

those two black teas used for this batch

The orange peel was a given, but I decided to add some cherry as well since we had it on hand, from a fruit basket gift.  I was going to add apple but it turned out to be a nectarine (from that basket), so I added a good bit of dried nectarine peel and fruit.  As wet as those were I dried it at around 120 C (250 F) for more like a half an hour.  The orange peel didn't need that long to be ready, just the other two did.


I actually had vanilla pods on hand from a trip to Java and Bali (spices are inexpensive in Indonesia, it seems), so I did add that, along with the clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, and a dash of salt.  I think the salt really did help make it work, but of course getting that level right is critical; it wouldn't take much to ruin it.

drying peels and some thin sliced fruit

The mixed storage wasn't going to work, because of the plan to make it by batch.  For the first go I didn't brew it per a normal tea infusion process, just steeping, but rather made it like a masala chai, boiled instead, mixed with milk that went through the boiling process as well.  The basic blend would work for either, it was just going to be easier to do that way, and including milk and sugar would smooth out potentially overdoing spicing elements.  And plus I felt like making it that way; my intuition said I should.


I had backed off the clove enough that part wouldn't have mattered, spicing intensity, and since I did sweeten it with a little each of sugar and honey the only remaining hurdle was achieving balance.


And the final tea was--AMAZING!  It was like a Christmas themed mixed fruit tart, condensed into the form of a masala chai.  I've did an awful lot of baking but I've never experienced fruit in that way before.  In a way it was cheating because I didn't brew that much at one go, one very large coffee mug worth, essentially two cups of tea, and adding a pod of vanilla to almost any slightly sweet drink in that proportion would come out ok.

wouldn't try it; I'm raising a tea snob

The overall balance was pretty good, although I could've ramped up the clove a little more.  Even though I had boiled it for about 10 minutes I was wondering if the fruit had more to give, so I added more tea and a dash of clove to it, and it made one more large mug worth by way of a normal steep that was just a bit diminished in intensity.


Making this as a tea blend to be infused normally, not boiled, and probably without milk or sugar, would require a good bit of adjustment.  I'm not sure the effect would be the same prepared as an unsweetened tea without milk, and I really don't plan on drinking enough fruit blends to go through all that preference curve again in a different form.  But I'll try it and see how it goes.

Taking it the next step

I tried to imagine how to really improve this beyond making adjustments, and it seems something related to the role peppercorns would play might be it.  Of course I've been through all that with masala chai (maybe not a given, that I've experimented with variations of those, but some of you know what I mean), and pepper sort of works but it's not for me.  So what else?  Ginger jumps out as the obvious alternative, but I also think better not for this.  It would have to take over, even a trace of it, and the spice role is different.  This is going to sound crazy but I did have an idea.


Dried chili pepper.  You might be thinking of some bright red spice-jar powder version that would drag the profile just a little towards Tabasco, so that just a dash would seem close enough to using peppercorns, but that's not at all what I mean.  I'm talking about warm, rich, sweet, smooth roasted chilis, a completely different thing.  Think mole sauce; more like that.  The following is a reminder of what that even is, but if none of this part is familiar you might try getting into some decent Southwestern food, since a really, really good enchilada is a transcendent experience.


Mole poblano is the best known of all mole varieties and has been ranked as number one of "typical" Mexican dishes.[14] It has also been called the "national dish" of Mexico...

Mole poblano contains about 20 ingredients, including chili peppers and chocolate, which works to counteract the heat of the chili peppers,[14] but the chocolate does not dominate. It helps give the sauce its dark color, but this is also provided by the mulato peppers.

Here is a description of a dried chili type I mean, from the same reference page this picture is from:


Ancho: The name means "wide chile" in Spanish, a fitting moniker for this wide-shouldered, nearly black pepper, made from ripe poblano peppers. They have a high yield of flesh to skin, which makes them a workhorse in sauces. Anchos are mild with a rich, dark cherry/raisin sweetness.


But I don't have that, or easy access to it, so I'll probably shelve that idea for years, if I ever even get to it.  I did cook a lot with a range of dried peppers quite some time ago, and these do have great scope, and are easy to use.  You can just about soak the chilis in hot water for awhile then blend up the mix, and you're done, you just use that.  Some versions would bring up issues of excessive heat, and then you'd be on to considering not using seeds, or figuring out tricks like cooking with sugar to drop that level, but all that is the fun part.


The trick is finding them.  Going to a farmer's market around Phoenix or Albuquerque would turn up lots of options, and better grocery stores all over the US should have something, but beyond that it might take some doing.  Call me crazy but a smoked version might work really well, aside from sourcing that seeming even less likely.  Some peppers seem to have a bit of natural smokey element, but even claiming that is going outside my current range a good bit.  If one only had the right lapsang souchong on hand that tea could bring the element to the table instead.  Even I'm not out there far enough to put that last smokey Silver Needle I reviewed in a fruit and spice blend, which probably makes for a good place to leave off.

Making masala chai from a packaged spice blend

An Indian friend visited awhile back, Suzana Syiem, and passed on some interesting tea, and some Indian snacks, and masala chai spice mix, which is what I'm writing about here.

I usually make masala chai once the weather gets a little cool; it seems to help me pretend that it's winter, even if it's still hotter than a US fall out (or summer, in most places).  There was just a touch of chill in the air a couple weeks ago but it didn't amount to much; it wasn't down below 25 C / 77 F even in the very early mornings.  It warmed back up and I'd missed my chance.  Now that it's past Thanksgiving, and Loy Krathong, I'm making masala chai anyway, even though it's not cool at all. 

Later edit:  it was down to 24.5 C this morning, around 75 F, positively chilly for Bangkok, finally!

Looking at the blend ingredients it's not like the versions of masala chai I make every year, from-scratch versions.  Those include cardamom, cinnamon, clove, and ginger.  Per my understanding star anise and black pepper are also relatively standard spice additions but I typically leave them out.

That package label shows the ingredients in this:  fennel seeds are listed first, with clove at the end.  Cassia is related to cinnamon, per my understanding (and Wikipedia's take) more often sold as cinnamon.  This blend version won't be like what I've been preparing.  It's a powdered spice blend, which is completely fine, only an issue related to storage conditions and storage time after you open it.  Recipes and some individuals recommend grinding or crushing fresh spices with a mortar and pestle right before use, which of course would be a little better, but powdered spices work too, especially when they're fresh.

I'll keep this explanation of brewing process and tea description short.  I simmered the spice mix along with a Thai version of CTC black tea I bought for blending (around a year ago; I don't get to that much), and threw a couple of Lipton tea bags in to shift the black tea character.  My wife picks those up in hotels when they're in the room and such, and they tend to just sit around.  That Thai black tea isn't astringent at all but it is a bit woody for flavor aspect, not typical of CTC teas in general.  Malt doesn't really stand out either, or mineral undertone, mostly just the mild wood tones.

kind of an odd look while it simmers, before adding milk

not ideal as black tea goes but it works well enough

I added some cloves to bump up that spice flavor range, really the only adjustment.  I also added a small dash of salt since I like the way that evens the balance.  It wouldn't take much of that to be way too much.  Instead of carefully measuring it all so that I could duplicate and adjust amounts later I sort of just dumped it in; one and a half very small spoons of the spice, a spoon half the size of a teaspoon, and unmeasured black tea.  It's possible to adjust the intensity a lot by adding more milk at the end, a factor that doesn't come up in almost any other teas I prepare, maybe just the orange Thai spiced (artificially flavored) black teas I've been drinking more of recently.

It would be possible to simmer the milk with the tea or to not, to just boil it with water.  I added the milk at the end to get some of that effect since boiling it does seem to change the taste a bit.  I'm not sure it matters much how long you simmer tea made like this since it's ground tea with powdered spice.  It boiled around 10 to 15 minutes and I think adding another 10 minutes probably wouldn't have changed much.  For more-whole spices it would make sense to give it a longer infusion, maybe by simmering a little, leaving it sit, re-boiling, then leaving it sit.  Or simmering for awhile; it probably wouldn't matter which.

after a bit of simmering

palm sugar; the shapes it comes in vary

Sweetener is the only other factor.  Using white sugar would seem normal.  Oddly we don't keep white sugar at the house all the time; funny how that works out.  I used up all we had that was nicked from hotel room tea and coffee set-ups with that Thai tea I had been making. 



Often we will have palm sugar around; that's a good alternative, not so different than brown sugar, just not exactly like that.  That seems to be the same thing referred to as jaggery I've seen in discussions about making masala chai online.  Since we're out of both I went with honey.  I love honey on toast but I'd as soon just use white sugar in a tea like this, but it sort of doesn't matter.


Skipping to how it turned out:  it was nice.  It was much different than what I was used to, the quite-different spice blend version, but it was good.  I didn't like it as well for it being less familiar, but it was hard to split out the impact of the blend balance not being optimized from that factor, just dumping it all in at no set ratio.  The other masala chai versions I'm used to have a lot of kick from the ginger and clove standing out and this was a lot milder.  Fennel seed was hard to identify as a separate flavor since it all integrated.

I'm guessing that using two thirds as much spice and half as much tea for the same amount of water would've turned out better.  It's hard to judge how much tea went into it since both the tea leaves and spices expand a lot simmering but it looked like way too much for two large mugs of tea produced at the end.  After drinking both my nerves were a bit jolted too.  I think beyond that factor, ingesting too much tea at one time, the flavors would balance better not made really strong.  All the same it worked well enough.

my son made breakfast again (bacon needed another sear, otherwise very nice)

when people ask about how to get dosed on caffeine this will come to mind

I usually make a Christmas blend around this time, and a version last year was based on a modification of masala chai (adding white chocolate and a touch of bitter orange marmalade).  I'm not sure if I'll get around to that or not.  Throwing some peppermint and a touch of chocolate into a black tea could count as one, maybe along with some orange peel for balance. 

It would be nice to be back in the States since pine needle would be a great input for one, and I could walk outside in lots of places and collect that.  Per past experiments I suspect dried pine needle might work best (versus just brewing it fresh then), but that would easy to arrange, laying it out for a bit, or speeding that up by putting the needles in a very low temperature oven for half an hour.

making a chocolate covered cherry themed Christmas blend

I bought some Christmas decorations today (when writing the draft); maybe finding our tiny artificial tree in storage and putting up some lights and the rest will make it seem more natural to get back to that theme.  Cooler weather wouldn't hurt but there's nothing to be done about that.  It's typically cool for about a week at the end of December but it's also not consistent.  Even though it never really seems like we re-create a US version of the holiday, missing the weather, not doing decorations justice, or hearing much of the songs, my kids appreciate how much we do manage to observe, so we'll make what we can of it.

awhile back; like a plastic version of that Charlie Brown Christmas tree

in Murmansk last year; odd to go to Russia to experience more of that holiday

Revisiting making masala chai (Indian style spiced tea)

I had some unfinished business with masala chai due to buying spices to make it in Indonesia last December.   I since used those to make a tea that was really a variation of on as a Christmas blend, borrowing some aspects for that version, but still wanted to try a more traditional take.  We had a cold weather spell during which masala chai would have made more sense here a week ago--down to the teens Celsius, low 60s Farenheit, not all that cold--but I missed it, so I made masala chai when it wasn't "cold" here anyway.

The plan was to make a relatively traditional version, with ginger, cinnamon, clove, cardamom,  and vanilla.   Only the clove wasn't a relatively fresh version, since I only had ground clove to work with.  Ginger is sort of the central spice, as I see it, and I used ginger from a fresh root, grated just prior to making the tea.  I added salt, really an optional element, but in the right limited proportion it makes a big difference.

I did add one extra ingredient, one non-standard variation, based on experience from that Christmas blend,  adding a little orange zest (fresh grated orange peel).  Since I wanted to keep the original flavor profile I only added a little, relative to the other spices.  Based on that earlier Christmas blend experimentation, it would also work well to thinly peel the outer orange skin layer and dry it (on low heat in an oven for half an hour, maybe) and use the dried version later as an ingredient.  Steps like drying change flavor profiles a little, so that could work even better, or maybe not quite as well, or it might be equivalent but different.

Ingredients

The cardamom was from pods, the cinnamon ground from a stick on a grater immediately before, and vanilla from bean pods.  Ordinarily that would make for an expensive tea but those didn't cost so much in a Bali grocery store, at least if you don't factor in airfare to get there.  For tea I used a commercial grade black tea from Indonesia and a better black tea from Vietnam, tea a bit too good for blending, but it's what I had.


I'm no cardamom or spice expert but this was the input Wikipedia offers about types, and it seems clear enough it was "black cardamom:"

There are two main types of cardamom:

True or green cardamom (or, when bleached, white cardamom[10]) comes from the species Elettaria cardamomum and is distributed from India to Malaysia.

Black cardamom, also known as brown, greater, longer, or Nepal cardamom, comes from two species, Amomum costatum and Amomum subulatum, which are distributed mainly in Asia and Australia.

Production and tasting

tea and spices, a bit scary looking

I boiled it all for about 10 minutes, then strained out that tea to drink and re-steeped using fresh water twice to see what would be left, and the next two steeps were still plenty strong.  For whatever reason it made sense to me to boil the tea and spices some first then add the milk to boil some with milk included, but I don't think it made much difference to do it that way versus just mixing it all.


The tea was nice, a bit thick.  At first it seemed the salt level was too much but after adjusting milk and sugar level to offset the tea and spice strength it was fine, just better the second time when it had washed out, but still ok initially.


The clove picked up a little the second infusion, and the vanilla was strongest the third.  I think the exceptional thickness and creaminess was coming directly from the vanilla, but really that thick feel to the tea was hard to place.  A lot of times reviews will say an ordinary tea has a full body or feel to it but nothing like this; it was close to the effect of eating custard, nothing like using a good bit of milk would cause.

tea boiling with milk added

It made too much tea to drink in one sitting (although I did consume an outrageous amount of it, maybe four 10-12 ounce mugs of very strong tea) so I chilled the last bit to try later in a cold-tea version.  It was nice cold, just really, really, thick.

Lessons learned

In a sense the general approach was to try making this tea in a way that resembled cooking, to use trial and error, to mix the blend by feel.  I had made masala chai a few times before, when I first wrote a post about different recipe and process research and variations, and again when an intern from Nepal gave me a commercial pre-mixed version to work with, so this is the third time to experiment with it in a year.


The spice balance was ok in this version; it worked out.  I didn't really add enough cardamom to let that show through well but somehow it was more evident in the chilled version the next day.  In general the tea was probably too strong initially, but the nice thing about the tea type is you can dilute it with milk and add a little more sugar to compensate, even if the normal process is to just cook it in the final form, based on a recipe.  The varying forms of the spices made them stand out more in different infusions, since I prepared it that way, with ginger washing out first, and then clove picking up, as I'd noted.  There's something about how fresh vanilla shifts things that really made the overall effect work out, a depth it adds that pulled all the rest together well.


It's best to carefully limit the salt, and I didn't get that perfectly right, but it would've been possible to mix the first and second "infusion," but not necessary since it wasn't really that far off.  It was hard to really taste what the orange zest added since I kept that input level low to retain the normal general profile, but I think I liked it.


Related to tea dosage, it's best to make it for more than one person, but there just isn't anyone else in my household that will drink masala chai.  I think re-heating the tea later would work but I didn't try that.  The tea I drank when I first made it added up to a lot of caffeine to be taking in at one go but I think I felt the spice effects more.  I'm reminded of visiting Indian food lunch buffets as an intern a long time ago, how we would feel the effects of those spices in the afternoon, and imagined that we must have smelled like those spices (but we probably really didn't).  Living in Thailand I've acquired a tolerance for curries but it's a different mix of ingredients in those.


As for what to change, cooking time is always an issue, an obvious place for experimentation.  I only gave the initial version a 10 minute simmer, which was why the tea and spices could make two weaker batches / infusions after.  Some recipes (mentioned in that first post I cited a link for) called for two stages of short boiling mixed with long steeps, and other online anecdotal input claimed one could boil the tea and spice and milk blend for a very long time to get the most out of it.


The final "strength" or concentration level is also a good opportunity for adjustment; diluted to 1/4th the strength I drank the first batch at would probably make more sense.  But I liked it strong, and subjective preference carries the decision making.  As for spicing variation I've added nutmeg before, but there was already plenty going on for this version as it was.

Making chocolate covered cherry Christmas tea blend

Christmas blend tea ingredients (cacoa nibs, the unfamiliar one lower right)

I posted about making a version of Christmas tea blend last year, related to seeing Twinings versions and such around.  It seemed like a relatively standard version:  black tea, clove, cinnamon, and orange peel (the standard set), along with some dried dark cherry and dried tangerine peel and fruit.  The trick was getting the clove spice to balance.  The taste of clove is warm and a little spicy, great for adding a layer to some other flavors, but spicy tea can be a bit much.  As with masala chai--related more to ginger adding spiciness--adding milk and sugar were the obvious ways to offset that.

dried fruit for last year's version blend

So where to go next?  Christmas-theme flavors could include lots of different things, including candy-canes, a range of different hot drinks, and chocolates (see this blog reference covering lots of variations).  Chocolate; how to add that to a tea?  Blends mixing in real chocolate aren't unheard of (David's Tea sells a number of such blends), and I even dropped a Hershey's kiss into a tea once to see what that was all about, but it's not ideal.  The flavor range works but the texture is quite odd, I guess a little towards a hot cocoa.

Really adding anything to a tea or blend that's not completely water-soluble is unconventional.  Cacao or cocoa nibs are part of the actual cocoa beans used to make a tisane (herb tea, to some); that would seem an obvious way to go.  Related to that first naming split, my understanding is that the beans are cacao, and cocoa is a processed by-product used to make things like chocolate, or cakes, so the former might well be more appropriate.  But what's in a name.

Chasing down cacao nibs proved tricky; we don't have the same type of health food store options here in Bangkok.  Lots of things are quite equivalent here but that's not one; the selection tends to be a bit limited.  I was a vegetarian for the first five years we lived here--and a dozen years prior--and was surprised to find that protein powder, flax seed oil, and spirulina aren't easy to find, even in organic foods / health foods stores.  So strange!  I turned up a place outside Pattaya to buy the cocoa plants (I'll get back to that), and eventually sources for the cacao nibs (and one nice looking online source I didn't use), then bought some at Radiance Wholefoods here in Bangkok.  That vendor said people often use them with coffee; kind of makes sense, but I'd give them more of a grind if doing so myself, if I ever get back to drinking coffee.

But what theme / recipe?  Originally I was thinking black tea, clove, and chocolate might somehow balance.  Combining chocolate and mint seems obvious--like a peppermint pattie--but it doesn't sound good to me.  I thought back to my own experiences with Christmas and it hit me; we bought chocolate covered cherries for my parents every year as kids.

So how to make that next...  The cocoa / cacao nibs had that part covered, the sugar and creaminess were easy, just add sugar and milk or cream.  I ran across a foods display in our office building selling a version of dark cherry preserves.  Done!  I watched a China Life tea video on making an iced tea using preserves a few months back, adding a touch of fruit for taste, one video from a nice instructional series.  It sounded a little odd, slightly off the norm, but it makes perfect sense once you think it through.

2015 version; some modest-scale decorations going on

Better to keep the rest short:  I made the tea.  I added a vanilla bean I had left over from a trip to Indonesia a year ago--a great place to pick up spices.  It seemed boiling the nibs and vanilla first made sense, to draw out more flavor, since those weren't going to give up their taste after a four or five minute steep as dried tea leaves tend to.  I kept tasting the "tea" all through the process, mimicking how I cook.  The nibs and the vanilla were tasting pretty good on their own after about three minutes on low boil.  Altogether I simmered it for a little over five minutes without the tea added about the same with it in.  As with masala chai I tend to make a second batch from the same tea and spices to see how much flavor was left in it, and it was only a bit thinner, not so different.

You might wonder what cacao nibs taste like as tea, and now I'm the right person to pass that on; they taste a lot like dark chocolate.  Baking cocoa sort of doesn't, really, it picks up a chalkiness, and sweetness doesn't carry through as well, and something aromatic gets pushed aside related to other compounds stepping forward.  This wasn't chalky, or dry, or even a touch bitter, it was just like dark chocolate.

As for black tea half that I used was Hatvala Wild Boar black tea, really way too good a tea for blending, but I bought a lot of it last year so I still have some around.  Another friend gave me some standard CTC ground-up Assam awhile back I also added.

The tea was nice.  It doesn't require a taste-by-taste review since I've just listed the ingredients; it tasted like those, really close to what a chocolate covered cherry tastes like.  The balance was good.  A bit more cherry would have made sense, and swapping out milk for a mix of milk and cream would've worked better, but otherwise that was dead on.  I couldn't help but notice the only taste that wasn't exactly like those chocolate covered cherries was the tea.  Which leads to another natural thought, doesn't it:  why not try it without a tea added?  It was so well balanced there wasn't much other room for dialing in, just the bit about cream.


A bit on background context on that experience:  if I'd been drinking it while looking out on a snowy landscape, with Christmas lights blinking in the background, it would've been one of those classic, perfect moments.  But it wasn't like that.  It has been in the 90s in Bangkok for a few weeks now (in F; around 30 C).  That's not really a hot spell, just how Bangkok is, with the cool season running late.  It feels slightly cooler and dryer in the past couple days, to me, but some of that could be wishful thinking.  The same day I made that tea (and these notes) was my birthday, and I'd just made a pumpkin pie that is my token experience of Thanksgiving.  That was three days late, but there is no Thanksgiving in other countries.


I still enjoyed the tea.  I'm not really a flavored tea lover; plain is fine for me, with lots going on in better versions to appreciate.  But it was a bit awesome.  I'll tweak the mix a bit, maybe see if chocolate and clove really can balance in a tea, and see if my kids like a version closer to a cherry-themed hot cocoa, without tea.  I think grinding those nibs might work better, might really extract a solid blast of chocolate taste, as opposed to the moderate layer in the version I made.  My daughter and I ate a few small chunks after brewing and they seemed kind of close to eating a fragment of dark chocolate, not at all brewed to flavorless yet.


This past weekend I had a nice experience to fill in for missing Black Friday, visiting a crowded mixed-goods sale.  They had some good deals, and we bought some Legos, but it was horribly crowded and so, so loud.  Thai sales promotion often involves someone yelling into a high power sound system, as if attempting to override your central nervous system and your judgement.

the Legos section was a bit empty; it seemed un-American

I'm getting into the holiday spirit.  It's all going to be ok, another holiday season in a foreign culture, and even that mess the US is working through.  Appreciating the basics really puts it in perspective:  family, holiday foods and customs, and a nice cup of tea.

Standard Christmas tea blend revisited

I've left some scope unfinished related to Christmas tea blends, getting a standard version to work out without adjusting it with milk and sugar.  Note that reading a Taste the Tea post reviewing lots of types of teas helped trigger this, although I did make a version last year, and was already planning another go.  By standard version I mean a variation of black tea, cinnamon, orange (peel, most likely), and clove (although it could include others).  Since that's the basic set, and since I varied that by including more fruit last year (black cherry and nectarine), I went with just those for a second attempt this year (after the more chocolate covered cherry version--a bit atypical).

two small oranges worth of peel

Related to the orange part, essentially any oranges would do.  There would be strengths and weaknesses related to how essential oils taste in different versions, different breeds and preparations, but not being aware of that I was more likely to go with the first oranges I ran across.  A street vendor truck driving by the house was selling Chinese / Mandarin oranges this past weekend, so that was it.


Prepping those turned out to be a bit tricky because the skins were too thin for stripping off an outer layer, and I was working with two of them my daughter had already peeled and eaten.  It worked better to strip off the white pith instead (which would add a bitterness the blend doesn't need), shaving it away with a peeler.  The easiest fix would be to grate the zest off a whole fresh orange, never using a drying step, but the cooking related work is a fun part for me.  It took a bit over half an hour to dry those in a 90 degree toaster oven.

the dried version

I also added a bit of ground cinnamon and ground clove, spice-jar versions.  In the past I've fresh-ground cinnamon from a stick but I took the easy path this time.  For black tea I used only Hatvala Wild Boar black tea from Vietnam, which I'm getting low on.  It's perfect for the blend, in terms of profile, a soft tea compared to CTC Ceylon and such, with some natural fruit flavor and a bit of earthiness.  If anything it's too good a tea to be using in this way, but it's not like I was committing 50 grams to a blend, I just made enough for one infusion cycle, this time.  I usually mix whatever CTC commercial loose tea I have around with another type but I wanted to see how it would work without that astringency input.

a commercial version (photo credit Taste the Tea site)

Tasting notes / review:

Straight to it then.  The blend worked!  One trick is getting clove to be there but not overpower the other elements, and that's how it balanced out.  The orange element was nice, strong enough to definitely show up, but also balanced.  It tasted nothing like bergamot (the orange oil used in Earl Grey), not even like more typical "Western" orange types, a good bit like the Mandarin orange fruit does.  I went light on the cinnamon and it could've improved by ramping that up, but at the same time it was nice that stayed well in the background.  It was subtle enough to drink plain after a three minute infusion time (or so; I didn't put it on a timer).


The downside:  the taste balance wasn't quite right related to the limited sweetness.  The beautiful part of normal plain teas is that it all really does automatically balance, and absolutely doesn't need sugar or milk (a matter of taste preference, of course).  The clove wasn't spicy, that wasn't a problem, but the different inputs didn't mesh and balance as they should.  I added a bit of sugar--not much, a small teaspoon--and it absolutely did work.

post-infusion; a bit of a mess

Somehow the orange element made a lot more sense with that extra sweetness as a part of the profile.  I'm reminded of reading of how salt is added to some teas to make them come across differently, not a common thing, maybe related to something atypical like a Tibetan or Mongolian butter tea (come to think of it I've not gone there yet; so much ground to cover...).


With just that little bit more sweetness the orange really jumped to the front, and went from a background citrus mixed in to tasting a lot like those oranges actually do, sweet and rich.  They are the same as the ones people buy in cans sold as "Mandarin oranges" in the US, here going by the name Chinese oranges, and neither is probably an accurate formal name.  But what's in a name.

next to longkong for scale

Clove integrated well with that, better for being a secondary aspect, almost linking up somehow.  The level of tea was nice, again continuous, a good match.  Cinnamon was more or less getting lost, layered under at the base.  Prepared this way it almost seemed like a Mandarin orange tea as much as a Christmas themed tea.  The second infusion was similar, and a third, longer infusion didn't need sweetener since the orange was picking up, probably not even close to spent, while the tea and clove were fading a bit.


I want to emphasize how easy this was to make.  At the easiest someone could grate the zest off an orange, straight into the mix, and shake in a couple of dashes of those spices straight off the spice rack.  It might only take a minute.  It's my impression that drying the rind changes the flavor a little, but then everything changes the flavor a little.  The temperature and humidity level in the room probably shifts your sense of taste a little.


Or the opposite approach could work, ramping up the level of effort a little.  This would work better using fresh ground cloves and cinnamon, and including a bit more fruit would work well, as in that version last year, it would just add lots to prep time.  I can't really see adding jam to this, as I had in the recent chocolate covered cherry blend version, but it's conceivable the same blend could be made from orange marmalade.  A friend just mentioned in an online discussion his family would do that; add a bit of marmalade to their tea when they felt like it.  I don't think the same interesting orange oil aspect would carry over, though.  Adding some of those cacao nibs used in that other blend might have worked; I'd have to check.

Of course I'm mostly talking to people that like to cook, for whom that range of demand is a positive thing, but the one-minute version really is worth a try.  Plain tea purists probably shouldn't even be reading this; it could be considered tea-enthusiast blasphemy.  If I was in some sort of club I might get black-listed, or blocked from a pu'er group just for mentioning this there.

I really don't drink blends much, or ever get around to adding sugar to a tea, outside of something like masala chai, but it's nice to mix things up.  I'm just getting over a cold, not ideal for tea tasting, and somehow this works really well for that, a good match for the most subtle level of perception of my palate not working out.  Drying peels from two small oranges looks like plenty for three batches of tea so I will get back to experimenting more with what I made.  Maybe I'll ramp up the spice in the next version, adding a little nutmeg and cardamom to see how that works out.