Iced Thai Chai

Thai Iced Tea is pretty tasty stuff. It's made with either black tea or Thai red tea. We tried to find Thai tea, but couldn't find it easily. We don't like to teach recipes with tough-to-find ingredients. We want it to be easy to make our recipes and searching high and low for Thai tea isn't our idea of "easy." Thai tea is redder than black tea and it gives Thai iced tea its distinctive color. Well, we gave up on the color part. It is also flavored with cinnamon and star anise. Star anise isn't really hard to find but it's hard to justify buying star anise just for Thai tea. We started thinking about tea that includes cinnamon and star anise and we ended up at Indian chai. It's easy to find chai tea bags these days. Chai includes a bunch of other spices (ginger, cardamom, among others) but we thought, why not? Besides, we ended up with the snappy name "Thai Chai." We loved it!

Thai iced tea is made by mixing tea with sweetened condensed milk. It's a very simple recipe but it is quite delicious. It is also quite sweet, so best to consider this an occasional treat, not your every-day beverage.

Iced Thai Chai
(serves 4-6, total cost is $2.00)

4 cups water
4 chai tea bags
3/4 cup sweetened condensed milk
ice cubes

Bring the water to a boil. Place the tea bags in a teapot or glass container and let steep until bright orange in color, 3 to 5 minutes. Remove the bags. Let cool to room temperature, about 1 hour. Add the condensed milk and stir well to combine. Fill glasses with ice and add tea to each glass.