How to Make a Masala Chai with Green Tea

Green tea adds subtle grassy notes to classic Masala Chai.

Hetal Vasavada is a cookbook author, blogger, and bakery owner who is an expert baker and is known for creating dishes with a unique combination of both her Indian and American backgrounds. She has a degree in biochemistry and uses her scientific background to create recipes.

Experience: Hetal Vasavada is a cookbook author, baker, and blogger. Her first cookbook, Milk and Cardamom, was about Indian-inspired desserts. The cookbook was listed as one of 2019's best cookbooks by the San Francisco Chronicle and The Washington Post. Her recipes have been featured in The New York Times, Buzzfeed, Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, and more.

Hetal owns and runs an online pop-up bakery, Milk and Cardamom Sweets. She also works as a recipe developer, food photographer, and social media consultant. In addition, she runs a popular blog and Instagram account where she shares her Indian-inspired desserts and Gujarati dishes.

Andria Lo

The Masala Chai with Green Tea is a riff on a classic Masala Chai, a traditional Indian spiced tea drink. In addition to the grassy green tea, this warming drink gets is flavored with black tea, ground cardamom, whole cloves, star anise, and ginger. Granulated sugar and whole milk create a silky-textured drink with gentle sweetness.

This version was developed by cookbook author and content creator Hetal Vasavada. For this recipe, Vasavada makes clear that not all teas are created equal. For the best results, she recommends CTC (crush, tear, curl) loose-leaf tea for the black tea used here.

This method of black tea processing turns the tea leaves into small hard pellets and yields brewed tea with a rich red color. Vasavada suggests looking for brands like Wagh Bakri CTC Leaf Tea or Typhoo Tea.

To amplify and concentrate the tea flavor, Vasavada brews the green and black teas in a small amount of water (only 1/3 cup) that almost entirely evaporates during the cook. The spices and aromatics are stirred in along with whole milk and the mixture gets boiled multiple times (a technique called scalding) which yields subtle nutty notes are the milk solids caramelize.

1/3 cup water

2 tablespoons loose-leaf black tea

1 tablespoon granulated sugar

2 1/2 teaspoons loose-leaf green tea

1 teaspoon ground cardamom

4 whole cloves

2 star anise pods

1 (1/2-inch) piece unpeeled fresh ginger, smashed

2 cups whole milk

Combine 1/3 cup water, black tea, sugar, and green tea in a small saucepan, and bring to a boil over medium-high.

Stir in cardamom, cloves, star anise, and ginger. Boil, stirring often, until water is almost completely evaporated, about 1 minute. Stir in milk.

Cook mixture over medium-high, stirring occasionally, until milk boils and rises up sides of pan. Remove from heat just before it boils over. Let mixture completely shrink back down in pan, about 15 seconds.

Repeat step 3 twice. Pour mixture through a fine wire-mesh strainer evenly into 2 heatproof serving glasses; discard solids. Serve hot.