Home again home again

My but it's been a while.

I've just returned from a month in India, where the air is full of spices, although as I sit here typing in the early Santa Cruz morning (hello jet lag), it seems almost like a dream. There's too much to say about India, a place where splendor and squalor bump elbows, and abject poverty and mind-boggling luxury bump up against each other everywhere you look. So I'll start with food, since this is, after all, a food blog. And because I'm sick and sniffling, I'll start with masala chai, the delectable, spice-heavy cure-all available on every street corner in India.

Chai in India bears little resemblance to the signature drink of the Om generation (Venti soy chai? Come on.) for sale at places like Starbucks. Around three or four in the afternoon, everyone from shopkeepers to cab drivers to barbers takes a break to sip a thimble-sized cup of chai. Workers cluster around chai wallahs, who set up simple stations with a gas burner, milk, tea, and spices, and a handful of glasses. These glasses belong to the chai wallah, so after shelling out your 4 rupees (less than 25 cents), you stand and sip your piping hot chai on the sidewalk, then return it to the stand. Businesses send employees with big thermoses, which they fill to the brim with the tea.

The drink itself is hot enough to blister your tongue, fragrant with cardamom, spicy as hell, and as sweet as you can imagine. Its restorative effects are not to be dismissed; this morning I made some for myself and am already feeling better. We took a cooking class in Udaipur where we learned to make chai and even bought some of our instructor's homemade chai masala, a nose-tingling and sinus-clearing blend of green cardamom, black pepper, cinnamon, and dried ginger. (To make this at home, combine equal parts of each spice and grind to a fine powder in a spice grinder or the like. Our instructor used 25 grams of each spice and kept the powder in a glass jar in her pantry, where it will keep for several months.)

Here is her recipe. The quantities for both the chai masala and tea are flexible and can be adjusted according to taste.

Masala Chai
Serves 2

In a small saucepan, combine:
1 cup water
1 tsp. chai masala

Bring to a boil. Add:
1 tbsp. Assam tea (Darjeeling or any black tea will work as well)
1 cup milk (she used buffalo milk, but any milk will do, preferably whole)
Sugar to taste (a couple of teaspoons per cup works well)
(optional) 1 tsp. grated fresh ginger, washed and unpeeled

Boil for 2 minutes, then remove from heat, cover, and let steep for an additional 2 minutes. Strain through a fine mesh sieve and drink. It will be extremely hot. To cool, you can attempt the super-high pour of the chai wallah pictured above, or if you're like me, you can drink it immediately and burn your tongue each and every time.