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Oh dear. Drinking this tea was absolutely no fun whatsoever.
Turmeric is well known for its health-giving superfood properties. It’s been quite the fashionable darling of the health food and supplement purveyors in recent years. I’m assuming it’s still on trend. I’m not sure I’m quite as au fait with such things as I could be. Maybe the health-conscious Instagram crowd are all drinking tea made out of moonwort or asafoetida now.
I had managed to go forty seven years before sampling turmeric outside its normal curry-based habitat and, honestly, I don’t feel like I’ve been be missing out any. Tea India’s Turmeric Chai smells exactly like chip shop curry sauce (you know, one of those fantastically terrible ones that are probably made entirely of turmeric and cornflour, and practically glow in the dark in their yellowness).
The blend’s ginger, fenugreek, galangal and cinnamon probably do give it some extra flavour, but really it just tastes of turmeric. It certainly doesn’t taste of tea. This is because, unlike the other teas in Tea India’s Chai range, tea is not the primary ingredient here. Turmeric Chai is 40% turmeric root, and just 18% Assam black tea. And, well, it really wasn’t very pleasant to drink.
Turmeric apparently is a powerful anti-inflammatory, an anti-oxidant as well as boosting neural hormones and fighting degenerative processes in the brain. These are all good things certainly but I fear I will never know how effective the health giving properties of a cup of Turmeric Chai are. It could promise me eternal life and I still wouldn’t fancy a second cup.
Today’s featured book is The Virgin and The Gipsy by DH Lawrence.
