Why your chai tastes bitter, thin, or curdles — and the fix for each

Almost every complaint about homemade chai comes down to five problems. They are all fixable and none of them requires better tea.

It tastes bitter or astringent

Cause: the tea boiled too long before the milk went in.

Tannins extract fast and they keep extracting. A two-minute simmer gives you color and strength; twice that gives you a mouth-drying harshness you cannot sweeten away.

Fix: once the water boils, hold the simmer to two minutes. If you want a stronger cup, add more leaf rather than more time. This one change fixes more chai than everything else here combined.

Also worth checking: overboiling after the milk is in does it too. Once the milk is added, you are doing three short rises, not a sustained boil.

It tastes thin, or like tea with milk in it

Cause: usually underdosing. Sometimes skim milk.

Five grams of leaf a cup is the dose. By eye, it is easy to use less. Weigh it once — a level tablespoon is about 5 g — and you may find you have been using less than you thought.

Fix: 10 g for two cups, and whole milk. Skim milk cannot carry spice; there is no ratio that fixes it.

The other cause is skipping the ubaal. The three rises are what bring the milk and tea together and give chai its body and give chai its body. Without them you have made tea, then added milk to it — which is a different, flatter drink.

The milk curdles or splits

Cause: acid plus heat, or milk that was on the turn.

Fresh ginger is the usual culprit — if you boil a lot of it hard in milk the proteins can separate. Very old milk will do it regardless.

Fix: add the milk when the decoction is hot but not violently boiling, and keep the rises short. If you use fresh ginger, put it in the water stage so it has done its work before the milk arrives. Dried ginger, as in our blend, is less likely to cause it.

If it has split from ginger, it just looks unpleasant. Strain it and carry on. If the milk was old, start again with fresh.

The spice is barely there

Cause: whole spices that never got cracked, or ground spice that was spent before you started.

A sealed cardamom pod releases very little. It has to be broken.

Fix: press the pods with the flat of a knife before they go in the pan. If you are using a pre-blended chai this is already done. And give the spices the water stage to themselves if you are blending your own — they need longer than the tea does.

The last mouthful is gritty

Cause: one pass through a coarse strainer.

Fix: strain twice, or once through something fine. If you are making concentrate to keep, the second pass matters more, because sediment settles and concentrates in the bottom of the bottle.

One thing that is not a problem

A skin on top. That is milk protein doing exactly what milk protein does when heated, and in a lot of Indian households it is the good part. Stir it in or lift it off. It is not a fault.