Chai concentrate substitutes

The real thing, built from black tea, whole spices and sugar simmered together and strained.

Best for

chai lattes and iced chai, chai cake and cookies, overnight oats and puddings, chai syrups and cocktails

Better than the bottle, not merely equivalent, because whole spices simmered fresh give a fragrance that pasteurised concentrate loses. Simmer 4 black tea bags with 4 crushed cardamom pods, a 2-inch cinnamon stick, 4 cloves, 6 peppercorns and 3 slices of fresh ginger in 1 ½ cups water for 10 minutes, steep 5 off the heat, strain, then stir in ¼ cup sugar while warm. Compared with bottled it tastes brighter, gingerier and considerably less sweet, so if you are using it in a recipe calibrated for a bottle, taste and add sugar.

The quick fix, using the spice blend already packed into a chai tea bag and simply concentrating it.

Best for

chai lattes, baking and overnight oats, iced chai, chai frostings

Fast, reliable and needs nothing you would not already have if you drink chai. Tea-bag chai blends are generally lighter on ginger and black pepper than a real masala chai, so the result tastes politer and rounder, with cinnamon leading and less heat at the back of the throat. Grate in half a teaspoon of fresh ginger while it steeps if you want that bite back. Eight minutes is deliberate and long; four minutes gives you tea, not concentrate.

Assembling the concentrate from its components using ground spice instead of whole.

Best for

chai cake, cookies and muffins, chai frostings and glazes, overnight oats, quick lattes

In baking this is as good as anything, because the ground spice ends up dispersed through a batter where nobody notices its texture. In a drink it is the weakest option: ground spice never dissolves, so the latte comes out slightly cloudy and leaves a fine gritty sediment in the last inch of the cup. If you must drink it, let it stand five minutes and pour off the clear liquid. Pumpkin pie spice works well but has no cardamom, so add a pinch of ground cardamom if you have it.

The dry cafe-style powder, which is usually milk powder, sugar and spice with a little instant tea.

Best for

chai lattes, frostings and fillings, milkshakes, quick drinks

Convenient and genuinely popular, but be clear it is a different product. These mixes are built on milk solids and sugar rather than on brewed tea, so what you get is sweeter, creamier and much less tea-forward, with almost none of black tea's tannic grip, and the colour is pale beige instead of deep tan. In a cake that sweetness and those milk solids will also change the crumb slightly, so cut a tablespoon of the recipe's sugar per quarter cup used.

Finished chai from a pot or a cafe, used as-is rather than as a base to be diluted.

Best for

iced chai, chai lattes, chai overnight oats, chai pancakes and French toast

Sensible when you have a pot of chai and no concentrate. Because it is already diluted with milk, do not add the milk the recipe calls for or you will end up with faintly spiced warm milk. In baking this route brings dairy the recipe was not expecting, which can slacken a batter, and the spice reads faintly because it is spread through twice the liquid. Boil it down by about a third first if you can spare the time.

The bare-cupboard version: the tea half of chai concentrate with the spice half improvised or omitted.

Best for

chai cakes and cookies, cake soaks, iced tea drinks, puddings

Used entirely unspiced, this fails at the thing chai is for: a chai cake made with plain strong black tea just tastes like a tea cake, pleasant and unremarkable. With the ground spices added it gets most of the way back, and cardamom is the ingredient that makes people recognise it as chai, so include it even if you skip the ginger. Without added sugar it will also taste flat, because bottled concentrate carries two to three teaspoons of sugar per half cup.