Traditional Thai Iced Tea

Traditional Thai Iced Tea varies a bit from the iced tea you may be used to. Find out how to make Thai Iced Tea that's quick and delicious.

What Is Thai Iced Tea?

Today we’re going to make Thai Iced Tea. Thai Iced Tea is a great beverage that’s served obviously in Thailand, but, served in Thai restaurants all across the US. And, it’s a really refreshing, nice beverage made from black tea, usually in combination also with Jasmine Tea. But if you can’t find Jasmine Tea, you can also use this, which is Jasmine essence just add a few drops of that. Works just as well.

Get Started Making Thai Iced Tea

To make Thai Iced Tea you have to start out with boiling water, like all tea. So, here I have four cups of rapidly boiling water. And into that I’m going to add some nice long leaf, loose, Assam Black Tea. You can use tea bags also. Any nice strong black tea, in a tea bag is fine, or, loose tea is great. Four tea bags or about 4 teaspoons of loose black tea.

So, the tea goes into the pot, we give it a little stir. And just let it start to steep. You want to give it about four or five minutes to steep. Most black teas should steep for that long.

Add Galangal to the Tea

Into this while it’s steeping I’m going to add some gall in gall. Or, you can say galangal. Galangal is a cousin of ginger. Sort of like ginger’s sexier cousin from Thailand. It has a more floral piney smell to it versus ginger which has sort of a more pungent peppery flavor to it. So, the galangal it has kind of a tough skin so you just want to peel it. So, I usually just peel it with a knife. You just cut off a piece and you just use a knife to peel it. Like that. Because a peeler can’t really hack it. Once you have it peeled you want to grate it. So, you can use this microplane type grater, or any type of grater. Or, if you don’t have a grater you can just chop it up into small pieces. And we want to grate it right into the tea. Grate about an inch piece of galangal.

Stir in Lime Juice and Sugar

We also want to ad the juice of at least one lime. You want a nice strong limey flavor. But what I actually like to do with citrus is a little trick that I learned while in Vietnam. Where you cut this. Instead of cutting the Citrus, this way, and getting the juice out with a reamer, like that. I turn it the other way length-wise and I cut it just slightly off center. Like that. That way when you cut it, you actually cut across all of the cells. And that way you’re exposing a lot more cells and opening them up and it makes getting the juice out, much easier.

So, I open it up like that. I cut this piece in half and it makes squeezing the juice really easy. So, just squeeze that whole lime into there. Thai Iced Tea should be sweet, Thai iced tea is usually served very sweet. But the amount of sugar you add is up to you. This is about a quarter cup of sugar. Once the sugar’s in, just give everything a stir to dissolve. The liquid’s hot enough that the sugar will dissolve really quickly.

Jasmine Essence

And then we want to add the Jasmine essence to the tea. Remember that this is very strong. It’s sort of like perfume. So, you want to use it sparingly. I’m just adding the tiniest drop. Give that all a stir, and then of course, whenever we cook, all importantly we have to taste. Mmmm, perfect. It has a good balance of sweet and Lime Juice and the Jasmine is there but it’s not over powering, the tea flavor is nice and bold. You can taste the galangal.

Cool, Serve, and Garnish Thai Iced Tea

Now, what we need to do is let this cool down. And then I’ll strain it and pour it over some ice. So, when you’re ready to serve the ice tea, get yourself some nice tall glasses, wine glasses, ice tea glasses. And in the bottom of each glass I have a little bit of sweetened condensed milk. That’s very traditional very typical Thai. You certainly don’t have to do it. But it does make the drink really into something very special. Then fill the glasses with ice and then we want to strain the tea and strain out all those solids. So, I strain out the tea and the galangal. So, once the tea is strained you can just pour it right over the ice. Give it a little stir just to dissolve that sweetened condensed milk. And, of course we want a garnish, and I’m garnishing today with this, which is Thai basil. Thai basil is a variety of basil used in Thailand. It has a little bit more of like a strong licorice flavor to it. It smells great. So, I’ll just put a little Thai basil. And, there we go. Thanks for watching. To learn more, visit us on the web at http://liyiwen198631.blogspot.com/