Shai Haleeb

This Shai Haleeb recipe is a famous middle eastern recipe for tea with milk, mostly known in the gulf areas. The flavor and fragrance of the cardamom provide an amazing aroma and are also known to be an essential ingredient of Arabic coffee. Perhaps the most beautiful thing about autumn and winter is the time for a hot drink, specifically afternoon tea, that is flavored with milk. But why do we add milk to tea, and is milk added before or after tea? The history of this practice dates back to the British in the eighteenth century, and it turned out that it stemmed from the nature of the British environment at the time and the conditions of life and not because of its flavour. The British in the eighteenth century boiled tea in pots designated for boiling over wood, so this drink was a little expensive for the rest of the people, and it was poured into luxurious glass cups designed to withstand high temperatures. But because the price of such cups was expensive and the vast majority of the people could not afford it, they poured it into cups that could not withstand the high heat and were always broken. And the solution is to add milk. The British poured the cold milk first into the cup, then the boiling tea; to reduce the heat of the tea, the cups do not break is the Sun. However, this trick also mitigated the bitter flavor of the boiled tea. According to some sources that the tea was a product cherished in the historical era, indeed, poor families economize on the use of dried tea leaves and increase the amount of milk, while the richer families adopted reverse this equation by adding a little milk and enjoying tea. Tea experts are likely to adopt this practice due to the ancient shipping conditions of tea leaves. Long sea voyages and poor storage led to a change in its taste when prepared, so adding milk was a British way to soften its sharp flavour.