Teaching Kids to Make the Perfect Cup of Yogi Tea
Yogi tea is a brand of popular tea products, including a number of black teas, green teas, herbal teas, and red teas. Yogi tea is available all over the world, and is part of the Golden Temple of Oregon, LLC. Yogi tea has an interesting origin in the west, starting from the students of Yogi Bhajan who set up the Golden Temple Vegetarian Restaurants in the United States, Europe, and Canada. After tasting what was basically a traditional cup of masala chai made for them by their guru, these students started referring to the beverage as “yogi tea”. The original yogi tea is a simple chai mix of black tea, cardomom, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and black pepper, all of which are traditional Ayervedic spices. However, the Yogi Tea brand is now involved with a number of other kinds of tea products.
Traditional Indian chai or Yogi tea is simple to make, and a great project for any young children who want to get busy in the kitchen. While really young kids should not make this beverage due to access to hot liquids, upper primary school kids and secondary school kids should run into no problems. There are a variety of ways to prepare traditional chai tea, many of which vary according to the way they use sweeteners, milk, and spices. While black tea, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, and ginger are always used, pepper is optional as is nutmeg and a number of other herbs and spices.
The basic preparation of chai or yogi tea involves the boiling and simmering of water that includes a combination of the tea and spices that you wish to use. Many people also choose to simmer milk products, honey and other sweeteners, although this is totally a matter of taste. Once the mixture has been brought to the boil, it then needs to simmer in order for the flavours to come out, with longer times normally leading to a more tasty beverage. Chai tea is a wonderful drink, and great for kids due to the ability to measure the amount of black tea that is used. It is even possible to make a herbal blend of chai, leaving out the black tea and associated caffeine altogether.