Noon chai
Kashmiri salted milk tea with a distinctive pink colour, produced by boiling green tea with bicarbonate of soda and then shocking it with cold water before the milk goes in. The colour is a genuine chemical effect rather than an added dye.
Also called Kashmiri pink tea, sheer chai, gulabi chai.
What it tastes like
Savoury and mild, with the salt in place of sugar surprising anyone expecting a sweet milk tea. The nuts on top are structural rather than garnish.
What it is built on
Teas
- Gunpowder green tea — Blunt, brisk and faintly smoky — a long way from delicate. The tight rolling keeps it fresher than open-leafed greens for far longer, which is why it travels and stores well.
Brewing method: Boiling and decoction — Leaf, and usually other ingredients, simmered in water or milk rather than steeped — the basis of masala chai, butter tea and noon chai.
Ingredients
- 20 g Green tea, coarse
- 2 g Bicarbonate of soda
- 1 litre Water
- 500 ml Milk
- Salt
- Crushed pistachio or almond, to serve
Preparation
- Step 1. Boil the green tea with bicarbonate of soda, aerating by ladling, until deep red. (40 minutes)
- Step 2. Shock with cold water and continue to reduce.
- Step 3. Add milk and salt, and bring back to a simmer — the colour turns pink here.
- Step 4. Serve topped with crushed nuts.
Serves 6. About 60 minutes from start to finish, including anything that has to simmer or cool.
Equipment
- Tea strainer — A gaiwan lid or a pot’s own integral filter usually suffices; a strainer catches what they miss, particularly with broken leaf.
There is no single correct version
Kashmiri, and drunk daily rather than occasionally. A sweetened version exists but the salted preparation is the traditional one.
The steps above are one workable account of how this is made, not the authoritative recipe. Households and regions differ on proportions, on order and sometimes on what counts as the drink at all.
Common mistakes
- Rushing the first boil, which is where both the colour and the depth come from
- Sweetening it by default
Sources
This page is TeaHQ synthesis. The proportions and the sequence are written from common practice as TeaHQ understands it, with no external source behind them, which is one more reason to read the note on regional variation as the more reliable part of the page.
This page describes how the drink is made and where it is made that way. It says nothing about what drinking it does to a person, and the quantities of milk, sugar or spice are recorded because they are part of the recipe rather than as any kind of recommendation.
Written comparisons
Where TeaHQ has set this drink against something it is routinely confused with, and argued the differences out in full.
- Po cha vs noon chai — Two salted teas from the Himalayan region, both a long way from what most drinkers expect tea to be. Po cha churns brick tea with butter and salt into an emulsion; noon chai boils green tea with bicarbonate of soda until it turns pink, then finishes it with milk and salt.