Berlin Reified | Food, design and life in Berlin

Chai on the go

The first time I drank proper Indian tea was the summer of 1997, when I was living with a family friend in Flushing while doing an internship at a poetry magazine. She had gone to medical school in India and developed a taste for the sweet dark concoction that came of boiling Brooke Bond Red Label tea leaves in water and generous spoonfuls of sugar, then adding half-and-half.

My second taste was during a few months I spent in Dharmasala, where every day I visited the tea stand with their two bubbling tureens of tea, which they scooped and deftly poured from cup to cup several times before finally handing it down to the waiting customer.

Since then, the taste has been something I always crave. Only recently I found a recipe that half-replicated the brew I recollected, but office life does not lend itself to pans simmering for half-hours at a time. (Our kitchenette is pleasant enough, but we've only got an electric kettle and a microwave oven.)

And so I was delighted, on an excursion to Mariage Freres last September,  to discover their Chandernagor. Theirs was the first chai blend I found that captured the requisite spiciness without a jarring chemical vanilla overtone. Yet my 100 grams were quickly gone, and the second 100 grams too that the friend I visited in Paris brought when she came to see me in Berlin. I was set to buy half a kilo, reasoning if you're going to do something, you may as well do it right, but then hesitated, looking at the online blurb: "En hommage à ce fameux comptoir français des Indes, ce mélange réussi d’épices impériales: clou de girofle, cannelle, gingembre, cardamome et poivre. Chaud au palais." Hmm...

I went through to the kitchen and got out a jar that had formerly housed sunflower honey, poured some spices into my mortar and roughed them up with a pestle, then added them to the jar, along with some black tea, and gently shook everything together. After leaving the jar for a day to let the flavours meld, I tasted the results and was utterly satisfied.

Chai on the go (after MF's Chandernagor)

• 10 green cardamon pods
• 10 whole black cloves
• 8 black peppercorns
• 1 cinnamon stick (1 inch)
• 50 grams /1.75 oz / 1/2 C loose black tea (I used an Assam TGFOP from my favourite Berlin tea shop)

Use one rounded teaspoon per serving.

Kammermusiksaal (Philharmonie)

Back from the Philharmonie, this briefly, before I go to bed ...

Oderbergerstraße

Suppengrün

The altered palette of produce options in Germany endlessly charms and frustrates me. Butternut squash, ubiquitous in America and its recipes, is an elusive quarry, while the once-exotic quince fills baskets everywhere. Suppengrün is an item I'd never even guessed at before coming here, but stumble across constantly at my local organic supermarket or the many Vietnamese-run fruit & vegetable shops.

A tidy packet consisting of a quarter of celery root plus greens, a length of leek, and two lumpy carrots, Suppengrün provides you with the basics for stock-making in the amounts you need. (In some weird way I've always thought of Suppengrün as Germany's answer to the Italian odori that Nigella Lawson writes of.) Chopped up with some parsley, herbs and onions, it makes a perfect dark and aromatic vegetable broth, reviving by itself or providing a flavourful base for soup.

About Reified

A year or two ago I discovered the world of food blogs. The first few weeks I spent drop-jawed, busily reading through archives, elated to discover so many obsessed with my obsessions. As time went on, my reading branched out and I discovered design blogs and other blogs on this and that. Wowed by it all, wanting to join in the fun, I've meant to start my own blog for months to collect everything I want to share with others. Now I've finally done it.

I'm a twenty-eight-year-old American and have lived in Berlin since 2001.