This summer was the second year for our modest but thriving fennel forest. Tulsi and I harvested enough seed to fill a few pint-size mason jars. I’m totally giddy, but I keep thinking, I could have saved 3 times as much. I learned that timing is essential or the seeds will drop (another reason why gardeners advise to plant fennel OUTside of the garden or it will grow into a true forest).

I don’t even know if fennel spiced chai was very common in our household before our daughter was born, or if we even tried it in our masala. But when Tulsi was born, Patrick started tossing in a handful of sweet fennel seeds to every batch. Why fennel? Just ask our now chai-seasoned, ayurvedic, still-mama-matte-lovin’ (as in Mother’s milk) 2-year-old, and she will say with a LOT of enthusiasm, “Fennel helps make more matte!” And she’s right of course. Fennel is one of the spices in many “Mother’s Milk Teas” that “helps promote healthy lactation”.  Tulsi also knows if she chews on some seed, it will help settle a tummy ache.

But it’s more than fennel’s medicinal properties — it’s YUMMY.

It’s my goal next year to grow, and save, enough fennel seed for a whole year’s supply — a few pounds would do. As for the rest of my chai fantasy, we would be in heaven if we could grow ginger in our 4-season, geodesic dome greenhouse. Even at 8000 ft in the  mountains, I think it’s possible…just need to research and find the right variety!

Anyone have experience growing ginger in a greenhouse, or blessed with your favorite masala chai spices growing in YOUR backyard?

LYNDSAY…AND –since Tulsi was so excited to pick “presents for people!” — we decided to send a second print, which is going to PURVI.  Lyndsay and Purvi, would you email me your addresses so I can send you my spice print? Hope you enjoy it!

This print is now available in my web shop here. And for a little spice history and inspiration — the 3rd BBC episode of “The Story of India” that we watched last night via Netflix — Spice Routes and Silk Roads. Thanks for playing everyone.

While traveling in India we collected discarded matchboxes on the roads. There are so many, and it’s sorta like trading cards among travelers. These, along with the countless, amazing retro designs from India’s past (recorded in the beautiful book, LIGHT ON INDIA by Warren Dotz), inspired me to create these masala chai spice icons. I added a page here with this art, a description of each spice and tips for using it in chai.

We thought it would be fun to send an archival art print to one of you fellow chai lovers. If you’d like be included in the give-away drawing, share YOUR favorite masala chai spice(s) you like to use in a comment. We’ll draw a name February 21st and mail it off to the lucky winner. After the drawing, this print will be available in my shop. I hope you enjoy it!

There are many factors to consider when selecting masala chai spices.  Earlier we discussed how the Gunas, or qualities, that are inherent in the spices determine the effect that it will have on our being.  But there is another level of quality that is paramount when we embark on making a deliciously healthy cup of chai – good quality.  As the vendors in India often touted, “cheapesht and besht!”

When possible, choose the highest quality, freshest, organic, whole spices that are available to you.  From an Ayurvedic standpoint, high quality in a spice means that it full of Prana, or life force.  If we use Prana-full spices, our chai will come alive, and if we use old, stale, powdered, dead spices, the end result will reflect this.

Within a plant, Prana is the living intelligence that is transferred to our body upon ingestion and digestion.  This botanical intelligence is what communicates to our cellular intelligence how to go about healing itself.  To protect the life force of the spices, it is important to keep the spice in tact, in its whole form, until we are ready to place it into the simmering water that will extract its Prana.  The easiest way to do this is by purchasing whole spices instead of powder: fresh ginger root, whole cardamom pods, cinnamon sticks, peppercorns, etc.  When we use spices that have been pulverized on the other side of the world months or years ago and then sit on the shelf for just as long, the Prana, and with it the flavor and healing potential, has escaped by the process of oxidation.  For this reason it is also beneficial to store spices in airtight glass, porcelain or tin containers, preferably in a relatively cool, dark location in your kitchen.

It may seem like a lot of trouble to crush your own spices, but it really takes only a few minutes.  The best tools to have are a mortar and pestle, a coffee/spice grinder and a cheese grater.  Indian chai wallahs will often just use a rock to smash the spices.  We have heard of saddhus that will simply crush the spices in their teeth, but for hygiene reasons, we do not recommend this. Personally, we use a cheese grater for the ginger, the electric coffee grinder for the cardamom (which is very hard) and a mortar and pestle for everything else.

Another benefit to processing the spices manually is that your own energy, or Prana, is infused into the spices as you crush them.  This is where chai making becomes alchemical and you can transmute your chai into a golden prayer for your friends and family.

Traditional masala chai spices assist in increasing the body’s Prana in another way.  Ginger, cinnamon, cardamom and other chai spices support the function of the lungs, thereby allowing you to absorb more elemental air Prana through the breath.  In addition, almost all of the spices are digestives that help the body to assimilate nutritive Prana from food.  And many of the heating chai spices act to burn up toxins in the body, thus clearing away unwanted sludge that impedes the flow of healing Prana through the channels of the body.

Ayurveda, “ the knowledge of life,” is the ancient healing system from India that illuminates how an understanding of one’s interconnectedness with the natural universe is the key to a life of balance within the body, senses, mind and soul.  It reveals that we exist in a creation of essential energies that are in a constant dance to maintain the balance of the Universe, internal and external.  Everything in the world is seen as interconnected and, therefore, effects and is affected by everything else.

Lesson 1: The Karma of a Cup of Chai

Everything that exists in the universe, you, me, our thoughts, the season, the elements, spices, a cup of chai, absolutely everything, has inherent qualities, called gunas in Sanskrit. These qualities are understood along a spectrum, between pairs of opposites.  Something can be hot or cold, light or heavy, moving or stable, etc.  We can take any substance, look at its qualities, and know the effect it will have on anything else.  For example, fire is hot.  The hot quality of fire has the effect of warming anything it comes into contact with.  The fire, its heat and its ability to warm are inseparable, so we know that when we sit next to a fire, we will warm up.

As far as masala chai goes, with an understanding of the qualities of the substances that we are ingesting, we can know the effect, taste, feeling and healing properties that are present in our cup of chai.  Every”thing” held within the liquid vehicle of our masala chai, the water, spices, tea leaves, milk, sweetener as well as the love, prayers, intentions, and thoughts that are imbued into the chai during preparation, has a specific action, or karma, on anyone who imbibes it.

Lesson 2: Like Increases Like and Opposites Balance

Any substance, even masala chai, can have a healing effect on our being if it brings about balance, or a detrimental effect, if it brings us into imbalance. The scientific law applied is that like increases like and opposites balance.  For example, you are very cold while taking an unheated overnight 2^nd class sleeper train across Northern India in January.  You are suddenly awoken by a train station chai wallah, yelling “chaiiiii, chaiiiii!” and a steaming cup of masala chai is placed into your frozen hands.  You happily drink it up and become comfortably warm.  Opposites balance.  Cold + Hot = Balance.  If you had an iced, unspiced chai (we never saw iced chai in India, but just for the sake of an example) you would have become even colder.  Like increases like.  Cold + Cold = Colder.

This law is universal and applies even outside of India.  When cooking up a batch of chai in the winter, which where we live, is dominated by the quality of coldness, we choose ingredients with a hot quality that will balance the cold quality of the season.  We utilize warming spices like ginger, cardamom, cinnamon and maybe even some very hot spices like black pepper or clove.  If we had a visitor who was hot-headed or had a fiery bodily symptom like a red rash or heartburn, we would make them a masala chai without so much heat.  If you are a person whose constitution is dominated by heat, especially if it is the middle of the hot summer, it would be wise to prepare a cooling masala, using spices like mint, coriander and fennel.

In this way, we can consider how much tea to use, if at all, depending on whether we are serving a person who is tired or anxious.  The amount and type of milk can be determined by whether the drinker has congestion, is overweight or has digestive issues.  Asking questions like: “What will the weather be like today?  Who is coming over?  How buzzed do I want to be?” will help determine the formulation you choose as you brew up your chai.

Lesson 3: A Strong Agni (digestive fire) is Essential for Health

Another factor to consider is digestive strength. In Ayurveda, our digestive capacity is likened to a fire in our stomach.  It is called our Agni, or fire of transformation.  Promoting a strong digestive fire is essential for good health, because when food is digested properly we are able to assimilate all of the nutrition and Prana, or life-force, present in the food.  The qualities of our digestive fire are hot and light.  If we apply the above lessons, we know that eating light, warming foods will help keep our fire burning while eating cold, heavy foods will put out our fire and hinder digestion.  Milk is a food with cold and heavy qualities.  Ayurvedically speaking, drinking a large, cold glass of milk out of the fridge will extinguish our fire, making it difficult to digest and potentially causing indigestion and mucus formation.  What to do?  Make masala chai, of course!  Milk can be made into a balanced, digestible food by heating it up, watering it down to make it lighter and infusing it with warming chai spices.  Yummmm.

English: Cinnamon

Botanical: Cinnamomum zeylanicum

Sanskrit: Tvak

Hindi/Nepali: Dalchini

Cinnamon is called tvak in Sanskrit, which literally means “skin,” because it is obtained by peeling off the sweet inner bark, or skin, of the tree. Like many other chai spices, cinnamon’s warming nature aids digestion and is traditionally used for a variety of stomach and intestinal imbalances such as indigestion, nausea, gas, vomiting and diarrhea. As a home remedy, it can be made into a tea or added to food to improve circulation, thus warming cold hands and feet and relieving a general feeling of coldness. It can also alleviate menstrual pain, abdominal cramping and muscle spasms. The oil is used for toothache and dental infections.

Cinnamon warms the internal body, and is used medicinally in Ayurveda as a tonic for the organs and to increase vitality. It warms the kidneys, strengthens the adrenals and the heart and purifies the blood. Acting as an expectorant on the lungs, it is useful for coughs, congestion and asthma. Cinnamon is considered an aphrodisiac and is indicated for male sexual debility.

When adding cinnamon to chai, it is better to use the stick rather than the powder. This will give your chai a richer taste as well as preventing your chai from becoming “muddy” from fine cinnamon powder that does not thoroughly strain out. The flavor of cinnamon can be overpowering and easily dominate a masala chai if too much is used. Using just a little as an accent adds a wonderfully sweet taste.

English: Cardamom

Botanical: Elettaria cardamomum

Sanskrit: Ela

Hindi: Elaichi

Nepali : Alaichi

Cardamom is equal in standing to ginger as a classic masala chai spice. In fact, if you use only these two spices in your chai, you can create a tasty, well-balanced brew. Medicinally, it is used to improve one’s taste sensation. Added to your masala, it can open your taste buds, allowing you to truly appreciate a yummy batch of chai. It also counteracts the mucus-forming properties of dairy, making it a healthy supplement to a milky chai. It has the additional benefit of freshening the breath.

For the lungs, cardamom is useful for those suffering from asthma, breathlessness or bronchitis. It is used to alleviate colds and cough and as an expectorant to expel phlegm. Cardamom is also indicated as an herbal remedy for many symptoms of digestive upset including indigestion, nausea, vomiting, belching, flatulence, bloating, colic and acid reflux.

For the best tasting masala chai, use whole, plump, green cardamom pods. Thoroughly grind the pod, and the brownish seeds within, with a mortar and pestle or a spice/coffee grinder. If you cannot find the whole pods, the decorticated (pod removed) seeds can be used, but will lack the fresh flavor of the full pod. It is not worth buying the powder because it oxidizes quickly after being ground and has already lost its potency and flavor on the shelf. I have found it is best not to boil the cardamom, but to add it to the masala after turning off the heat and let it steep. The volatile oils, and with them the flavor and medicinal value, are diminished with boiling.

Botanical: Zingiber officinale

English: Ginger

Sanskit: Ardraka (fresh), Sunthi (dried)

Hindi: Adrak, Adarakh

Nepali: Aduwaa

In the ancient Ayurvedic tradition, ginger was referred to as Vishvabhesaja, meaning “the universal medicine.”  It has been utilized as a botanical healer around the world since antiquity for a broad range of conditions. Ginger’s warming quality counteracts many cold-induced illnesses brought on during the winter. It is a common home remedy that is safely used with children for colds, flu, sore throat and sinus congestion. It can calm stomach nausea, vomiting and motion sickness and help relieve intestinal gas and abdominal cramping, including menstrual cramps. We found it indispensable for these conditions while traveling in Nepal and India and always carried it in our daypack, eating it raw as a first aid treatment.

ginger vendor in Bhaktapur, Nepal

Ginger breaks up mucus congestion and acts as an expectorant for the lungs. It cleanses the body by burning toxins or eliminating them through the skin by promoting perspiration. By neutralizing toxins and aiding circulation, it helps treat rheumatic conditions and osteo-arthritis.

Ginger is a powerful digestive because it stimulates saliva flow, ignites the digestive fire and tones the stomach. Dr. Vasant Lad suggests eating a slice of ginger with a few drops of lime juice and a pinch of mineral salt before eating to promote digestion. As an entire medicine chest in one plant, it is a good idea to always have some on hand in your home.

Ginger is the primary spice in masala chai. The fresh root (actually a rhizome) is available at most supermarkets. To use it, grate, smash or thinly slice the fresh root and add it to the simmering masala. Using a cheese grater is the simplest method and there is no need to peel it. In a pinch, you can use dried ginger powder, but the whole, fresh ginger root will offer the best flavor.

In the Indian metropolis of Delhi, where fast-paced, cell-phone toting characters out of Monsoon Wedding live side by side with barefoot rickshaw wallahs cycling past roaming cows in the road, we visited the largest spice market in all of Asia, the bustling Khari Baoli bazaar.  At once, all our senses were over-stimulated to an amplified level. Open air shops on both sides of the road displayed sackcloth bags filled with pungent spices, bushels of fragrant flowers, nuts and sticky dried fruits, mountains of bright orange turmeric, mouth-watering sweets, gallons of gooey ghee and enough tea to steep the Indian ocean. We could barely breath.  The intense combination of indiscernible aromas oscillated our insides between gagging nausea and voracious hunger.

Carried along by the throngs of merchants corralled on the sidewalks, we watched as businessmen from all over India tested quality with a sniff or a taste and marked a deal with a head waggle.  Shopkeepers weighed out goods the old-fashioned way, with iron weights on a balance scale.  In the street, thin men carried burlap sacks bigger and heavier than their own bodies, loading them onto hand drawn wooden carts. Whether you need 5 grams or 500 kilos, goods are sold in bulk at rock-bottom wholesale prices.  We walked away with precious clear gift boxes filled with delicate red saffron strands from Kashmir.  This is the ideal place to look at some of the spices used to make masala chai, and their medicinal properties.

As we traveled throughout India researching chai, one question we asked people as we sat around the chai stalls was, “What is the origin of masala chai?” The response we heard, more than any other, was that it is “grandmothers’ tea.”  Grandmother, the traditional caretaker of the household, would brew a blend of plant roots, bark and seeds if a family member became ill, or as a tonic to keep them healthy through the changing seasons. Some of the ingredients now found in a classic cup of masala chai are useful for cold, flu, stomach ailments, digestion, lungs and other common maladies.  These family recipes were handed down from mother to daughter to granddaughters over generations spanning hundreds or even thousands of years.

Then came the Brits. Back in Britain, folks had developed quite an expensive habit for Chinese tea, their most popular beverage.  To make a long story of greed, slavery, drug smuggling, war, deforestation and imperialism short, Britain’s East Indian Company, who wanted independence from the high cost of China tea, took over areas in northeast India to establish their own tea plantations.  This turned India into a big, profitable tea party and opened the floodgates, unleashing an ocean of tea on the subcontinent.

One popular belief, or chai conspiracy story, we heard many times during our travels, is that the British first dispensed tea at no cost to the Indian population, knowing its addictive nature and seeing an enormous new local market.  The marketing plan worked, as even now, India is the world’s largest producer and consumer of tea.  Eventually tea, with its energy giving medicine, made its way into grandma’s spice decoctions.  Add some milk and sugar, coming from both traditional Indian Ayurvedic and British tea-time traditions, and masala chai was born.  There is, of course, no way to verify this chai creation theory, but it seems plausible.

Later, the British tradition of tea sipping seeped into Indian culture.  People (generally men) would gather outside there home on the streets to drink chai and socialize.  Chai stalls became the new meeting place.  At the dhabas, or Indian 24 hour truckstops, Punjabi truck drivers demanded a strong cup of masala chai as a restorative drink to get them through the long hours of driving.  And in homes, chai became the symbol of hospitality.

The inception of masala chai seems to have its roots in a crossroads of cultures, beginning with the Indian grandmothers, coming together in the subcontinent.  It has only recently become hugely popular in the West, particularly in the U.S.  This is an historic ironical twist, considering America was founded on dumping tea into the ocean as an act of civil disobedience, with the Boston Tea Party becoming a symbol of tax resistance and revolution.

Chai is such an integral part of Indian culture, I think they must look at us and wonder “What is such the big deal with chai?”  As a foolish American chai lover, I offer my humble thank you to the long line of grandmothers on the other side of the world, who gave us the gift of masala chai.

Hamro Nepali hajuramma (our Nepali grandmother in Darjeeling, India)