Noon Chai
Green tea boiled long with bicarbonate of soda, shocked with cold water and whipped pink with milk.
CC BY-SA 4.0 · Cropped, white-balanced, graded and re-encoded to WebP by eXir.
Two glasses of pink Kashmiri noon chai, one topped with a knob of butter
Serving
Drink spec, per drink
Every figure above is per drink and does not move with the count, which is what makes the two service modes comparable. Sugar per litre, strength and standard drinks stay in the units their own authorities publish, because they are figures for comparing rather than for pouring.
Diet and allergen labels are computed from the ingredients listed on this page and nothing else. They cannot account for cross-contamination or for the particular product you buy, and they are not medical or safety guidance.
Ingredients
135 ml water
6 g green tea
0.5 g bicarbonate of soda
60 ml whole milk
0.5 g salt
- 135 ml water
- 6 g green tea
- 0.5 g bicarbonate of soda
- 60 ml whole milk
- 0.5 g salt
Glass
Vessel
195 ml of liquid, served without ice, inside the 200 ml the glass holds. The build fails if a recipe ever exceeds its stated vessel.
A batch needs a vessel that closes and fits a fridge shelf.
Method
4 steps · 22mCombine the 110 ml water and the 6 g green tea in a pan with the 0.5 g bicarbonate of soda and simmer for 20m, until reduced and deep burgundy.
Stir in the 25 ml water to deepen the colour further.
The long boil pulls a burgundy colour out of the leaf with help from the bicarbonate of soda, which pushes the tea's pH alkaline enough to change how those pigments read; the cold water shocks that colour deeper just before the milk goes in, which is what turns the drink pink rather than merely brown.
Strain into a clean pan, leaving the leaf behind.
Bring the 60 ml whole milk to a near boil, then pour it repeatedly back and forth between the pan and a jug from a height for 1m 30s, until the tea turns pink and takes on a light froth. Stir in the 0.5 g salt and serve.
Common pitfallMore than a small pinch of bicarbonate of soda pushes the tea from genuinely more colourful to soapy and bitter; the shift happens well before the amount looks large enough to matter by eye.
Keeping and make-ahead
Batched ahead, this keeps sealed and cold. The water line the engine adds is the dilution figure from the spec panel, not a rule of thumb.
About
Green tea boiled long with bicarbonate of soda and whipped pink with milk, a salted Kashmiri drink whose colour is chemistry rather than dye.
Noon chai is usually traced to trade along the Silk Road, with one account holding that it reached Kashmir from Yarkand, in what later became Xinjiang 1. It belongs to a wider family of salted milk teas found across Central Asia, including Uyghur etkanchay and Mongolian suutei tsai, and the salt itself is explained in the same terms in all of them: at high altitude it was drunk as much as an electrolyte as a beverage 1.
The colour is the drink's most distinctive feature and it is produced, rather than added. Green tea leaves are boiled for an extended period (accounts differ on exactly how long, from roughly twenty minutes to closer to an hour), which draws colour-changing compounds out of the leaf; a small amount of bicarbonate of soda pushes the liquid alkaline and accelerates that colour shift toward a deep burgundy 2 1. Cold water is then stirred in to fix the colour before milk goes in, and it is the milk's proteins reacting with those same compounds that turn the liquid pink 1. Getting a full froth traditionally meant ladling the hot milky tea back and forth between two vessels by hand, a step said to take hours to do properly 1.
The tea is conventionally unsweetened, though sugar is common in commercial versions and Pakistani households often serve it with sugar and nuts on the side rather than stirred in 1. In Kashmir it is drunk several times a day, alongside bread such as kulcha, and it is particularly associated with the Bakarwal pastoralists who carry the same recipe with them on seasonal migration 1.
- 1Noon chaien.wikipedia.org
- 2Kashmiri Chai Recipe (Pink Tea)recipe52.com