Golden Chai Tea Latte
Need something to warm you up on these cold days? May I present this sunshine golden chai tea latte made with from scratch with warming spices, strong tea, and some antioxidant power. This latte combines the classic flavors of chai with the more recently popular golden latte for a really delicious pick me up. You can go and buy something like this from the hipster coffee shop down the block, or you can make it yourself and make it better too!
This latte is built off of a milk base, which as we know is an excellent source of high quality protein. The cool thing here is that we start with 12 oz. milk and with the short heating needed to make the tea, we reduce the volume to 8 oz. That means all the great nutrition in milk gets concentrated along with its slight sweetness and velvety richness for a very smooth tea latte. Then of course there are the spices; cinnamon, cardamom, black peppercorns, turmeric and fresh ginger. These all provide warming, even slightly spicy notes to this awesome drink. But wait, there’s more!
Turmeric is known to have strong antioxidant powers. The catch though to reap any of its benefits is to eat kind of a large amount to get a good enough dose of its active compound, curcumin. Also, it is important to consume turmeric or curcumin with black pepper as black pepper drastically increases the amount of curcumin our body absorbs. This latte is built with those things in mind. There is a decent dose of turmeric in there, and there are black peppercorns steeped in the milk.
I hope you give this a try soon as a treat for the body in more ways than one. Enjoy!
Golden Chai Tea Latte
Makes 1 cup
12 oz. (360ml) low fat milk
1 black or english tea bag, paper tag removed
1 smaller or ½ large cinnamon stick
1 tsp. turmeric powder
½ inch (1.75cm) piece of ginger, thinly sliced
6 whole black peppercorns
3 cardamom pods, crushed open
Combine all ingredients in a small sauce pot. Heat on medium low heat, stirring frequently as the milk heats up to prevent scorching on the bottom of the pan.
When small bubbles start to appear, turn off the heat and let sit 4 minutes. Then squeeze all the liquid from the tea bag into the milk, and remove tea bag. Strain out all the large spices.
Transfer to a mug and add a fun cinnamon stick to serve if you wish.
Notes: This totally can be enjoyed iced as well if you like. You can use ground cinnamon, pepper, and cardamom, but it won’t be the same. In ground form, those spices may easily overpower the flavors of this latte. So, I would definitely suggest picking up those spices whole. I am sure you will use them for other delicious recipes soon anyway! Alternative milks would probably work just fine here, but I haven’t tried it myself.