Perks of being an Indian immigrant in Canada is that most of your culture’s food is a couple of city blocks away. I can get matar paneer, palak paneer, paneer butter masala¹, and stuff like that pretty easily here. But sometimes you want tea. Green tea and earl grey and whatever are cool, but you want tea like they made it at home. “Chai” is the Hindi word for tea, so using “chai” to mean “Indian-style tea” is a pretty neat hack. Anyway, Indian restaurants don’t make good chai for some reason? It’s always too bland, too watery. I don’t understand why, it’s very easy to get right.

For a 500mL cup of chai, you will need:

• 500mL of water
• 4-5 tablespoons of milk or equivalent
• 2 tablespoons of sugar or equivalent
• 3/4 tablespoon of black tea leaves (my parents are a fan of Wagh Bakri and I can’t say I disagree)
• 1/4 tablespoon of powdered cardamom (not optional, don’t even bother if you don’t have this)

And what you want to do is:

1. Add water and sugar to a saucepan and get it to a boil on high.
2. Add the tea leaves.
3. Turn the heat down to medium, lift the saucepan for a couple of seconds and swirl it before putting it back.
4. When the water is at a rolling boil again, add the milk. This will cool the water down and it’ll take a while to get back to boiling.
5. Once it’s at a rolling boil again, add cardamom, swirl again and wait for it to boil, plus like 30-40 seconds.

And you’re done! You’ll want to filter the tea leaves out of the chai before you drink it. My parents have a very fine sieve back home specially for this, but I just dumped my tea into my French press² and pressed. Maybe I’ll try my AeroPress next time.

This is pretty easy, right? I’m not sure why it’s so hard for the restaurants. My fan theory is they don’t boil the tea leaves enough, and don’t add the cardamom. It’s not optional.