Kashmir Tchai

Made on the stovetop with Teavana English Breakfast (High Grown) as the extra black tea, just because it was close at hand having arrived as part of the tea of the month club for August while I was on vacation.

I haven’t made chai in forever, it seems. I forgot how much I like it. To me, it’s really a comfort food instead of a drink. I’m wondering how this one will turn out.

This mix says it has six spices in it, but declines to be more specific. Let’s guess, shall we? A few are easy to discern. There are big honking whole cloves in this mix, as well as green cardamom pods, and a light brown bark-like substance that is probabably cinnamon though it could also be ginger, I suppose. There are also some broken, crispy green leaves that look suspiciously like bay leaves though I somehow doubt that’s what they are. And there is an aroma of anise or fennel though I don’t see anything that looks like anise seeds in here.

Then I cheated and looked it up on Amazon, where the full product description is far less coy than it is even on the Kusmi web site: cardamom, ginger, laurel, cinnamon, anis seed, and cloves. The green must be laurel. Guess what? I looked up laurel and one form of it is the source of bay leaves!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Laurel

Am I good or what? ;-) This is a different mix than any I’ve had before and also missing pepper, which completes me if I am a chai. I’m skeptical about how I’ll feel about the taste, given the lack of pepper. I am prepared for this to be a rather mild chai, based on past experience with Kusmi flavors.

The flavor has more of a black tea flavor than I’d expected, but I’m going to attribute this to the Teavana addition and move on. There’s just a hint of the anise, not enough to make it taste like licorice, which I’m thankful for. I get a fair amount of cardamom, a bit of ginger, not a lot of cinnamon. Whatever function the bay leaves are serving is not immediately apparent to me. It isn’t converting the gingerbready effect of chai into something savory in any case. If I really concentrate, I can make out a bit of bay leaf like flavor around the edges. But for the most part it is probably there to boost the flavor of something else in a way that isn’t obvious.

I’d say this tastes almost exactly as I expected. It isn’t at all spicy, there’s no kick to it. I like it better than some of the other milder chais just because I find the flavor a bit more interesting. It’s been a long time since I had the GM Kashmiri Chai. I really should have some of that soon to compare. I’m not sure whether I like this better or not, primarily because I can’t remember the GM well enough.

BTW, my Brita pitcher recently began to insist on growing something that looks like algae. I washed it well, changed filters. Algae again. I washed it really, really, really well and am waiting to see if it grows more algae. Anyone else had this happen? Is there a solution or should I buy a new one?

I have had a little tin of this for awhile now and am just now getting around to trying it. I get cardamom, cinnamon, cloves and an okay but not awesome strength of tea. I actually really like this. I tried it without sugar at first, but didn’t get much spice. After adding sugar the spices came out. They still aren’t super strong spices, just a nice level. I would replace this when I run out if I ran across a Kusmi sale. I might try using a teaspoon more tea next time as well or maybe steep a bit longer. I was in a bit of a hurry tonight. :)

I used my standard half water/half-and-half. Chai without milk just seems odd to me. :)

Warning: brewed this up in milk, with brown sugar, simmering for about 8 minutes or so. Done with water the “proper” way it will probably be different.

I am rather on a quest for chai, more chai – I should probably just bite the bullet and go buy some more Chandernagor while I can find it. Chandernagor has been so far my one perfect chai: just 4 spices cinnamon cardamom cloves and pepper and it seems to work oh so well for me.

But I had a chance to get 50 grams of Kashmir Tchai for a not too pricey amount and had to try it. It´s not bad, I think it might be one of my favorite Kusmi blends so far, but it´s not quite up to being my ideal chai.

On individual taste notes – there is fennel or anise or liquorice or something in here. I don´t quite hate it at these concentrations but it´s there and making me notice it at every sip. I don´t like anise-liquorice so not actually sure how strong it is, or it is just me focusing immediately on something I do not like.

There is also no heat to this mix, no pepper or chillies or anything of the sort.

The tea base is a bit weaker than usual for a chai – it´s strangely enough for a chai and one called after Kashmir, a chinese black tea base. If there is a place for Assam, it´s on chai mixes with spices! But I think this is meant to be a pretty mild innocuous chai. Not bad, but not awesome.

Chai teas have definitely been growing on me. I now know the specifics in which I enjoy them and try to stick to those guidelines.

I like my blander chai teas to be hot with no additives. I like my spicy chai teas (ones that are heavily spiced, very aromatic) dirty. This chai, while not being overwhelmingly spicy, I do smell some cardamom, I see a clove, and maybe a hint of ginger, does smell very strongly of licorice. Blegh. I do not like licorice, this tells me that making this chai dirty will be the way to go.

My recipe was: boiling water + German rock sugar = simple syrup, add I scoop of tea, allow to boil 30 seconds, then turn heat off (but do not remove from heat source) for 2 minutes. During the two minutes, add splash of coffee, stir. Strain mixture into glass, add milk to taste. (In this case a fair amount of milk).

While still smelling strongly of licorice, I have added enough things so that I do not mind the flavor of it. When the sugar and milk and maybe even the coffee are added to the chai, the flavors seem to marry, I can taste cardamom up front, and a gingery note in the middle, followed up by a clove flavor, all smothered in a milk base. Overall, decent.

I do prefer chai tea when it has an additional flavor added, in this case it was chai with licorice, though that did not sound or smell so pleasant it turned out to be pretty good.

I had thought of making this somewhat earlier, but then I got distracted with cleaning (laundry! floors! kitchen! bedroom surfaces (except I didn’t get to the floor)!) and didn’t have it.

So I’m having it now. I’m thumbing my nose at caffeine. Neener, neener. (Just wait. I might not be able to get to sleep tonight!)

I heated some almond milk on the stove till steaming, then added 2 tsp of this tea. Let it sit about for 3 minutes, added 3 drops stevia, and strained it into my mug.

Pretty nice! I get a lot of bay from this tea, which isn’t surprising. Under the bay, maybe cardamom is next. And perhaps pepper, if it truly is an ingredient. Not much cinnamon or clove at all right now, which I don’t mind.

I think next time I’d steep the tea strong in water, then add hot milk. Just to get a more rounded flavour.

Still, I do like this chai. It’s quite different from my favourite (chandernagor!), and nice to have every once in a while.

I got a sample of this from the generous High Adventure
I awoke this morning to a nasty sore throat, I know it is due to the fact that we are on fire around here and there is so much smoke.
Not only do I have a sore throat, but I can’t turn my neck because it is stiff and sore and all the stresses of this week (month?) have caught up to me and I have broke out in hives.
Blah. Need tea.
So, I have a number of bagged samples piling up and thought this would be a good day to try a few.
Started with this one, because of the sore throat, a chai is required.
I could smell the spices when I plunked the sachet into my favorite mug and poured the water over it.
The first sip tasted of cardamom, the second sip was cinnamon-y.
On the Kusmi website they simply say “Blend of Chinese black teas with 6 spices”
It would be kind of neat to know what spices are all in there, because some of them do not taste like the normal spices I taste in a Chai.
But, whatever spice are in there, I like this tea.
Its not a bold chai, but I like it.
Thank you, High Adventure, for sharing this sample with me!
I am off to curl up with this tea and watch cartoons.

This isn’t a typical chai spice blend, and they don’t market it as such. It’s Nepalese chai as opposed to other blends I’ve tried that are authentic to southern India. This one is on the savory side and has almost a floral underpinning, might be due to the bay leaf? There’s still the trademark cardamom, there’s some ginger. But the base tea is a chinese black, making it a little smoother than the other chais I’m familiar with.

I’m absolutely hooked on the ‘novelty’ (new-to-me) of the flavor. It’s strong without being overpowering, I don’t feel like I “need” the milk to enjoy it to the fullest.
In full disclosure, this is the first Kusmi I’ve tasted, but I’m impressed. I discovered a real-deal authentic southern indian spice blend last week with another brand that I like, but this one eclipses it for drinkability. It was part of my holiday “treat” to myself – new teas, old comfort treats as the workdays wind down and the celebrating starts.

Tonight I enjoyed this with some homemade kolache. Pics of the muslin sample bag I brewed first (came with my order of the 4 oz loose chai) and a simple recipe for kolache are posted on my blog. http://bit.ly/smBTxv

Now this Chai I can handle…pretty good, actually. It’s just enough spice to let you know it’s a chai but the food pairings are endless – too.
It’s not too dark, not to light, not over the top spicy and not much for smell but it is tasty, it is blended well, and it is a good pairing with most foods – I can already tell!

The first time I made this, I brewed the tea, added half soy milk after it had steeped, and went to pour in some sweetener. Before I knew it, a very large amount had come out. The drink was overly sweet and the tea flavour that was coming through was rather forgettable. I thought just to give it a fair shot (and also because I needed the stimulation and hadn’t had a cup of chai in a long time), I’d empty out the contents of the tea bags and put all of the liquid into a saucepan and boil it for a while to get more of the tea flavour out. In the meantime, I started writing a review on how this tea is basically another average-at-best black tea chai, one that has confirmed the fact that black tea just muddles the delicious spiciness of chai and that the only worthwhile chais are the large whole spices by themselves or a rooibos mixed with these.

I came back to taste the tea after a while, and I felt inclined to backspace everything I’d written. This tea was a surprise to me in the end, and pleasantly a slight bit reminiscent of my holy grail chai, Rainbow Chai (which I can’t buy in Germany).

Tragically, I was neglectful of the pot because I was trying to get ready for a meeting at the time, and part of the tea boiled over, so I didn’t get the full serve I would’ve liked or that would’ve been useful to give a more comprehensive first impression in terms of the flavour. Instead of two cups of tea, I got about half a cup : ( Some notable things I can share about this tea are that it seems refreshingly traditional and makes cardamom a key player. It’s not a weak cinnamon-ginger bomb, it’s not packed with yucky things like licorice, fennel, pepper, etc. It was pretty tasty. It took me until the third time I tried this tea to pick up on just how evident the presence of the anise is (previously, I had just got a nice spicy melange with black tea that had with the longer steeping miraculously gone from dominating to being put in its place as just one ingredient of a spicy, complex brew), but even by then I didn’t feel like I tasted anything particularly laurel-y, and I didn’t taste that much clove. It seemed to be mostly ginger, cardamom, and anise, with a touch of cinnamon, and a backdrop of tea. It can be a bit hard to pick these spices out, though—probably because they’re often used together in teas and baking, so it’s easy when they’re always mixed to get a bit thrown off. I like this tea, but it could never replace my beloved Rainbow Chai. There’s also something vaguely medicinal about it, and I don’t mean that (appealing) eucalyptus-y cardamom taste. In fact, the smell of the tea brewed and with soy milk for some reason strikes me as a combination of a milky, gingery chai (this one smells a fair bit like lebkuchen) with a very faint, far away note that is for some reason like antiseptic iodine solution. A problem unrelated to the scent or taste, but which is noticeable and must be noted is that the tea is not as spicy as other chais, and I think that’s a real drawback. The spiciness is part of the comfort for me, and it feels much too subdued here.

If you’ve found black chais unsavoury in the past, I’d give this one a go. If it doesn’t satisfy you on the first round, steep it longer with your milk and sweetener. The tastes I got on the second and third tries were unlike like what I tasted the first time around. When I first wrote this entry, I said, “I’m pretty sure I’ll be buying it again. I found it comforting and well executed.” I’ve tried it three times now, and I don’t think I necessarily feel that way anymore. It’s not because there’s anything wrong with the tea as such, it’s that I’m comparing it to something I tried long before and developed a real love for. Kashmir Tchai came as a pleasant suprise to me, and needless to say, I was devastated when I came back downstairs the first time I made it thinking, “The entire cooktop looks brown…why is that?” before realising that it had been inundated with the tea I’d been looking forward to. Ultimately, though, it’s like a chai rebound to me or something. I feel like I can enjoy it when I’m drinking it, but subconsciously I’m thinking about missing Rainbow Chai. This chai still cut it to some degree, as with other chais I’ve had while in Europe, but in a way they all feel like new chai boyfriends that make me reminisce about the good times with my ex-chai.

…excellent Chai blend. Does not need sugar or milk, in my opinion.

I would not suggest infusing it with boiling water. A lower temperature will sort of smoothen one’s drinking experience.

Although there a lots of seeds and herbs visibal I find it amazing how strong those flavors push through. Obviously Kusmi is not very shy when it comes to the use of ( hopefully natural…) oils to parfume their products. But then, in all fairness, who doesn’t, nowadays?
Anyways, my favorite Chai blend so far…