40 Indian Tea Recipes, Collection of Chai Recipes, Tarla Dalal

Ginger Cinnamon Tea

At beaches, parks, markets and in office areas, his ware is eagerly consumed by tea lovers, even though it is a simple milk tea sometimes with a touch of ginger or cardamom – nothing exotic, but it offers simple homely comfort to the drinker.

Evolving taste for tea

Today, the taste for tea has evolved and we find the chai-wallahs competing with dispensing machines (nothing more than a runner-up in the race!) and tea shops that sell dozens of varieties of green, black and chaai teas reinforced with spices and herbs. With people developing a taste for black and green teas, it has become common for offices to have tea counters with different varieties of tea bags, slices of lemon, pots of honey and sometimes spice powders too.

Fresh Mint and Lemon Tea

People are becoming more knowledgeable about the different types of tea, and are beginning to try tea from different regions, of different stages of fermentation and so on. You have varieties like Oolong, which were not much-known a decade back, finding a prominent place in store shelves. Over their cup of tea, nowadays many people are discussing tea itself rather than topics of national importance!

Fennel Tea To Relieve Constipation

Indeed, tea is a magical and versatile beverage. Every person has their favourite brew – black, milky, hot, cold, plain, masaledar, and so on, and depending on how it is made, tea can not only wake you up but also soothe you and warm your soul when you feel down in the dumps! And of course, there is always ‘chai pe charcha’ with friends and colleagues, which is obviously incomplete without the perfect cuppa!

All about Indian teas

In Indian supermarkets, we commonly come across green teas and black teas. Green tea is unfermented tea while black tea is fully-fermented. In between these two, there is a semi-fermented tea called Oolong tea, which is also readily available in stores these days. Oolong is gaining popularity because of its distinct flavour and digestive benefits.

Black Tea, Basic Black Tea

Amongst black teas, Orange Pekoe is the highest grade, while dust is the lowest quality. Leaf tea is graded between these two. A blend of leaf and dust is ideal for making chaai. Orange Pekoe tea, which is best had without milk, is the highest quality of black tea, picked with the balls of the fingertips, untouched by fingernails or cutting tools. This keeps the bud intact. The best quality of Orange Pekoe has only the tea bud, while the rest is graded depending on the number of leaves that were plucked with the bud.

You will also often come across the term CTC when you are shopping for teas. CTC, which stands for Crush-Tear-Curl is a method of processing tea to make it into uniformly-sized granules. Here, the tea is passed through a series of cylindrical rollers with sharp teeth that crush, tear and curl the tea into small and hard pellets or granules.

Tea of different grades, from different plantations, can all be dumped into the roller to make a good, strong CTC tea. While CTC is ideal for making traditional Indian milk tea or chaai, it is not for the tea connoisseur who likes to compare and relish teas from different plantations, because the CTC process tends to homogenize the flavour of the teas. CTC or mamri tea from Assam and Nilgiris are quite popular.