Lately I thought I should try drinking unsweetened iced tea in lieu of one of my usual Diet Dr. Peppers. I even bought some tea at the grocery store and made it a few times. I generally like sweet tea more than unsweet, but unsweet isn’t bad at all and it was nice to make a big insulated mug full of iced tea and drink from that all afternoon. I even found some green tea in my cupboard from when I tried to do something similar a year or so ago and would drink that sometimes.
Meanwhile, I had a month of free Amazon Prime and I started thinking about making Thai iced tea. I had this first in Thailand in the late 1980s, but you can often get it at Thai restaurants here, but it really adds to the bill. At first I thought Thai iced tea was just tea made with sweetened condensed milk, but looking into it further it seems to have added flavors including vanilla, cardamom, and maybe star anise. If you gather the right spices you can make something similar with black tea. You can also buy a bag of Thai iced tea mix from Amazon that has everything in one giant one pound bag of loose tea, which is what I did. Since the only ingredients on the package are green tea and yellow food coloring, I’m not sure what exactly the mix consists of (it is certainly not actual green tea). Some sources say that Thai iced tea was originally made with Ceylon tea which has a distinctive orange color when mixed with milk, but now wild Thai tea is used instead, adding yellow food coloring (Yellow No. 6 which California says causes cancer and which Kraft no longer uses to color Macaroni and Cheese, but I feel like is probably pretty safe). I’m not sure if spices are also added or whether wild Thai tea just has these extra flavors that people are trying to replicate. Maybe a little of both. A lot of the online recipes make substantial changes to the original flavor of the Thai drink, including some who add cinnamon or use other kinds of milk. I’d rather get something similar to the original.
Since it uses loose tea, I needed some way of straining the tea after steeping and decided I should get a stainless steel filter for my Aeropress and could use that as a filter (I didn’t want to waste more filters or turn my resused paper coffee filters bright orange). So $9 for a pound of tea and $6 for two metal filters. I like the set of filters I got because the two have different size holes, one is fine and one is extra fine.
The instructions on the bag say use 4 tablespoons of tea for one cup of tea. That’s a lot. The old nutritional information (from Amazon) said a serving size was one tablespoon though. Since I lost my tablespoon measuring spoon, I measured out 4 teaspoons which seems to work fine (later cut back to 3 teaspoons, which is one tablespoon, still 5 grams or so). The newer nutritional label on the bag I bought has the useless information that one bag contains 227 servings and one serving is 1/227th of a bag (which they say is 2 grams, so at least you don’t have to make 227 equal piles to figure out a proper serving). I heat some water to boiling, then throw in the tea mix and wait about 5-10 minutes for it to steep. Then I filter it into a cup using the Aeropress.
Thai iced tea (in Thai, “cha yen” which just means cold tea) is usually very sweet. You add sugar, but also sweetened condensed milk. Restaurants here drizzle some evaporated milk or half and half on top for a nice appearance of white drizzle on top (which you stir in before drinking). I don’t remember if evaporated milk was used in Thailand or not, but they definitely used sweetened condensed milk. I bought cans of both (a little over $1 each), but I feel like you could get away with condensed milk only and then add regular milk. The Thais would use sweetened condensed milk and evaporated milk because fresh milk was hard to come by and required refrigeration while the cans had a long shelf life in hot weather. I use a couple of teaspoons of sugar and then a couple of spoonfuls of sweetened condensed milk (which is hard to work with since it like molasses). You want to add the sugar and condensed milk while the tea is still warm so it will dissolve. Then you can put that over ice and drizzle on the evaporated milk, which I didn’t do a good job of, so I just add a little and mix it in.
It may have been healthy to substitute unsweetened iced tea for a diet soda, but Thai iced tea is not at all healthy. Now I have cans of milk I need to use up though, so I will keep at it for a while. You really can’t be shy with the condensed milk or the sugar to get something authentic tasting, but it does work.
After about a week of making 1 or 2 of these a day, I ran out of condensed and evaporated milk and decided to try it with just regular milk plus some extra sugar that would have been in the condensed milk. Not quite as good, but still pretty close and I always have milk. I probably used half water and half milk, plus ice. I heated maybe 4-6 oz of water to boiling instead of 8 oz (so I could add more milk), steeped for 5-10 minutes, strained, added 3 teaspoons of sugar, and then 2% milk. Could probably back a little off of the sugar.