My recipe for Thai Iced Tea that has moderate sweetness, rich flavor and no rough powdery after-taste:
- The water: tea:sugar ratio is - 1 cup water : 4 tablespoons tea : 3 teaspoons sugar. Don’t worry about the high sugar quantity. This mixture effectively becomes a syrup. 1/8th cup of the syrup is used in 1 cup of tea.
- Bring the water to boil.
- Add the tea. Drench completely. (That’s a lot of tea!) Stir and boil till it froths.
- Strain with a collander. Then with a finer collander. And finally with a cheese-cloth. Try to “double-layer” or “quadruple-layer” the cheese cloth. The fine black powder is really annoying and scratches the throat. The more you can remove this visible powder, the better the final product. Do not get tempted to “leach” the leaves more by boiling with more water, or boiling the chaff again. Not worth it.
- Let the concoction sit in a mixing bowl or a jar from which you can later (after 10 minutes) gently pour. Throw away the last powdery layer.
- Heat the concoction and add sugar. Remember to clean the initial vessel to remove that pesky black powder.
- Stir the sugar till it dissolves.
- Store the syrup in the refrigerator (throw the last powdery layer again. I’m not kidding - the more paranoid you are about the powder, the better your tea will be).
- To make the final tea, add 1/8th glass syrup, add 1/2 glass water. Add 1/4th glass milk or half and half. Taste and add more water/milk as per your preference. Add ice cubes.
- If you want the final iced tea sweeter, do not simply add sugar to the iced tea. Boil the syrup again, add sugar and stir till it dissolves.