Homemade Chai Spice
Enjoy all of the flavors you love of the popular Indian drink with our Homemade Chai Spice! This DIY chai spice is ready in minutes and a great addition to your spice rack to add chai flavors to a variety of recipes!
Use it in our Chai Latte Bread Pudding!
Bring on fall and all of the cozy fall flavors! The #1 in our house? Chai. While I know pumpkin spice usually reigns supreme this time of year, for us, we prefer the warming and cozy flavors of chai. Which is why we had to make our own DIY Homemade Chai Spice! This spice is perfect to add a lil’ something extra to your favorite baked goods! Already used all of the time for our Chai Spiced Snickerdoodle Cookies, just wait until to see all of the other delicious ways we use it this fall!
What is Chai Spice?
Traditionally, chai is a tea. In Hindi, the term chai means a mix of spices steeped into a tea beverage. Most commonly found as a masala chai. But because the flavors of this popular tea are so delicious, similar to the flavors of other drinks (I’m looking at you, PSL), the delicious complex, sweet, cinnamon, and cardamon flavors have been lent to many other recipes.
Ingredients Needed
- Cinnamon – The base of this DIY chai spice.
- Ground Ginger – One of our absolute favorite spices that we use in both savory and sweet recipes!
- Fennel Seeds – I just love this anise flavor! You can also of course use pre-ground fennel, too.
- Ground Cloves – This brings some slightly bitter and earthy flavor.
- Black Ground Pepper – What brings out the classic sharp flavors of classic chai.
- Ground Cardamon – A key component of chai! This brings warm, sweet, and spicy notes.
- Nutmeg – Bringing more earthy sweet flavor.
Ready in Minutes
Grind Fennel
Use your mortar and pestle, or spice grinder to grind those fennel seeds. While you can of course buy ground fennel, we prefer to grind our own because you get so much more flavor out of the fennel when you grind your own.
Combine
Once you have that flavorful ground fennel, then it’s just a matter of adding all of the spices together into a bowl and giving it all a good mix.
Homemade Chai Spice done! So easy, right?
Recipe Tips
However you’d like! This DIY Chai spice is really best for adding some chai flavor to your favorite baked goods, like our Chai Spiced Snickerdoodles or Chai Latte Bread Pudding! You could also add a little bit of this spice to our Maple Walnut Baked Appes, Easy Cast Iron Apple Crisp, or take the frosting of our Easy Homemade Apple Fritters to the next level with a pinch of this spice!
Unfortunately, no. Because of the ground fennel seeds and other ground spices, the tea will not have the same smooth texture as a classic chai tea, which uses whole spices simmered in water to create the flavor.
This Homemade Chai Spice makes a great gift for the chai lover in your life!
This recipe makes 1 oz of spice mix and a shy 1/4 cup.
So cozy up this fall by adding this flavorful Homemade Chai Spice mix to your fall baking! The possibilities are endless!
Enjoy! As always, if you make this recipe or any of my others, I love to hear what you think! Leave a comment below, email me, or you can find me on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest!
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Equipment
- or spice grinder
Ingredients
- 3 teaspoons cinnamon
- 1 1/4 teaspoons ground black pepper
- 1 1/2 teaspoons fennel seeds
- 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cardamon
- 1 teaspoon nutmeg
- 1 teaspoon ground ginger
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
Instructions
- Grind Fennel: Add fennel seeds to a mortar and use the pestle to grind seeds until they're ground into a powder. Or use a spice grinder.
- Mix: Add all the spices to a small bowl and mix well.
- Store: Store in a small air tight container or jar.
This sounds like an amazing recipe but I am curious. Looking over the pictures and the recipe, I notice that you call out Allspice in the picture and in the recipe, you call out Ground Ginger and Ground Cloves. Is there a preferred ingredient or different flavor profile? If I use the Allspice, how much do I use?
Good question, Billy! It is ground cloves NOT all spice. 🙂
I’ve made a similar Chai spice blend to use for tea. I cut up a coffee filter into quarter triangles, put about 1/2 teaspoon of the spice mix in the middle, fold the point up to the top, fold in the sides twice and then fold the top down and put a staple in the top to hold it together. It looks similar to a tea bag. I’ve added the packet to black tea, green tea or tea of your choice. Then add the milk (or other dairy or non dairy) and sugar, honey or other sweetener of choice. Yumm.
Oh that’s a great tip! Thanks for sharing!
Awesome! This looks great and is an instant Chai Spice. Plus it’s homemade that makes it delicious! It’s great to have this already at home! Thanks for sharing this with us. Loved it!
So great to hear, Jamie! Thanks so much for sharing!