Recipe: Warming Chai Tea

Chai is a beautiful warming drink for colder weather.

Try to find “True Cinnamon” if you can. True Cinnamon – or Ceylon Cinnamon – comes in quills that look like papery fillo pastry layers:

Ceylon or “true” cinnamon with papery layers

The more common cinnamon quills in shops are Cassia cinnamon. These look like just a single layer of thicker rolled bark. Cassia cinnamon is less effective for encouraging energy to penetrate into the body, compared to True Cinnamon.

Cassia cinnamon looks like a roll of thicker bark

In Chinese medicine, warming herbs are used to submerge energy into the body and encourage vitality and healthy life-energy movement. Chinese medicine practitioners may diagnose “internal cold”, which means slow movement deep within the body that starts to cause obstructions.

Providing warmth and movement, deep within the body, is the solution. This can dramatically improve conditions such as infertility, digestive issues or joint pain (when the person overall matches the “cold” presentation).

Used correctly, these stimulating and warming herbs are a wonderful way to bring vitality into the body – and delicious too!

Use cautiously if you have heat signs such as red face, thirst for cold drinks, mouth ulcers etc. In this case please see us to help restore you back to harmony.

Ingredients

2 Teaspoons English breakfast tea
1 Cinnamon stick
2 slices fresh ginger
3 Cardamom pods
2 Cloves
1 Teaspoon sugar or honey
2 Cloves of black pepper
1 Bay leaf
400mls whole fat milk, rice milk, nut milk or organic soy milk*

Method

1. Put English tea into a small saucepan.
2. Break up the cinnamon stick, bruise the cardamom pods and add to the saucepan along with the ginger, cloves, sugar, pepper and bay leaf.
3. Add the milk.
   Boil and reduce down to thick syrup, reducing the liquid by half (being careful not to let the milk catch on the bottom of the saucepan).
4. Strain.

You should end up with a thick aromatic syrup, similar in consistency to condensed milk.

* Organic soy milk uses the whole bean and avoids genetically modified products. Bonsoy is prepared with herbs and seaweed according to traditional Japanese methods.