A Liberated Woman

I have an important announcement to make. For this announcement, please go back into your memories for the time you watched Gone With the Wind in your high school film study class. Fast forward to Scarlett standing up, dirty but determined, and declaring that - as God as her witness - she'll never be hungry again. Click here if you need a reminder. Now keep all that in mind as I will now make an equally important, dramatic announcement:

As God as my witness, I'll never go to Starbucks again!

Gives you chills, doesn't it? Ladies and gentlemen, you are reading the blog of a liberated woman. I'm free from the shackles of that siren's enslavement. Let me give you a little backstory before I offer you sweet, sweet liberation: I don't drink coffee. I'll have to wait for the census to be sure, but I'm fairly certain I'm the only adult in America that doesn't ever drink the stuff. Even in spite of that, Starbucks still managed to get me on their chain gang because I need chai. I need chai like like Daniel Day-Lewis needs your milkshake. So, as often as I can afford, I was at the Starbucks drive through ordering my grande non-fat, no-foam chai latte. BUT NO MORE! The Pioneer Woman posted a link to homemade spiced chai concentrate. I made it over the weekend, and I. Am. In. Love. I'm drinking it hot in the morning, iced in the afternoon, hot again after dinner, and iced again before bedtime. So far I've found that husbands love it, moms love it, best friends are seriously considering traveling from Louisiana to try it, and little brothers don't quite like it -- but who's going to listen to someone's little brother? I mean, really.

My friends, if you even sort of like chai, iced or hot, I beg you to make this yourself. I made two batches at once and kept it in a pitcher in the fridge; I have had to refill this pitcher three times since Saturday. It is easy, it's got much less sugar than you're going to find in a coffee house's chai concentrate, and you can play around with the ingredient levels until you find the exact combination that's right for you. Try going to Caribou Coffee and asking for a little more cardamom in your latte and see how far you get. The link to the original recipe is above, but below is an account of how I made my version.

The Domestic MFer's "Fuck Starbucks!" Spiced Chai Concentrate
4-1/2 cups of water
2 cinnamon sticks
3-4 "coins" of fresh ginger, smashed
4-1/2 pinches of cardamom seeds (about 80 seeds, but I wasn't about to count)
2 whole star anise pods
10-12 whole cloves
1/4 tsp ground black pepper
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp grapefruit zest (the original recipe calls for orange zest, but I only had grapefruits in the house)
10 ordinary black tea bags (or a higher quality black tea if you're a fancy pants)
2/3 cup dark brown sugar, packed
1 TBL honey
1 TBL vanilla extract

A quick note on spices before I begin: You're crazier than I am if you think I had all those spices lying around the house. If you always have whole star anise in your kitchen, please invite me over for every meal you ever cook. The per-cup cost of this recipe can be extremely cheap, but the spices can really drive up the price. Do yourself a favor and DO NOT buy the spices at the grocery store. A tiny bottle of name brand spices, like stick cinnamon, is seriously like five bucks, and you'll be lucky if the bottle has more than five sticks in it. Go to the produce store in your neighborhood, even if you've never gone there before, to buy the spices you need. Trust me. I got all the spices I needed in bulk, each priced at less than $2, and I ended up with enough of everything to make ten kits.

Let's do it.

First, set the water on the stove on high heat while you get the spices ready.

Start with the ginger. I fully confess that I've never used fresh ginger before for anything, ever. The original recipe is kind of vague about how much exactly to use, so I just cut a few "coins" from the root, and cut each coin into quarters:



Then, lay the flat side of the knife down on the cut up pieces and let out some aggression:



The smashed ginger will release its flavor better, much like smashed garlic.



Put the smashed ginger with the grapefruit zest for a cute photo opportunity:



Then put it with the rest of the spices (everything except the brown sugar, honey, and vanilla) while you wait for the water to be ready.



Once the water boils, take it off the heat and dump in the spices and tea. Let it steep for 15-20 minutes, depending on how strong you want the flavor to be. Strain out the tea & spices. Mix in the brown sugar, honey, and vanilla. Refrigerate in a pitcher for as long as you can control yourself from drinking the whole thing. I filled a glass with ice and added a half a cup of the concentrate and a half a cup of skim milk.



Delicious. I'm not fancy enough to have a device that steams milk, so instead of combining equal parts of the concentrate and steamed milk for a hot beverage, I nuked a mug with half chai/half milk for two minutes, and you know what? It was also delicious. And then I started to feel really naughty, so I nuked two parts chai with one part half & half, and my husband told me it was the best beverage he's ever had.

As I hinted before, the spices for this amazing, cheap, wonderful, sweet, spicy beverage aren't in my usual arsenal of cooking ingredients, so I decided to make the process even easier by making little chai kits.



The only ingredients missing from the kits are the ginger and zest because those need to be freshly prepared. But as both are cheaply acquired, that's no big deal to me. Now I have a seemingly endless supply of super cheap and oh-so-delicious homemade spiced chai at my fingertips, and so can you.