Ginger honey tea recipe is a traditional Indian cold remedy.

I'm going to make some ginger tea because I'm halfway through filming and my throat's getting a bit scratchy. Let me move this pot so we can. So I guess of all the spices in the Indian householder kitchen, the most, I guess the ones that come straight from the medicine cabinet as it were, would be fresh ginger and turmeric powder. All spice has medicinal capacity and with masala that's really what we're working to is that idea of holistic consumption all the time. Not just food but the way we think, what we do, everything that we consume. That being said, ginger is one of the spices of the householder's medicine cabinet. So it has a lot of benefits around the respiratory system, classically in terms of when we're talking about Ayurvedic practice. Domestic Ayurveda is the Ayurveda that's given to us in bits and pieces throughout our childhood. Domestic Ayurveda focuses on the information that's related sort of in an oral storytelling tradition. When you're a kid growing up and you're told don't eat bananas when you've got a cough because they'll create phlegm or don't eat too many mangoes you'll get diarrhea or in summer they're too heating for your body systems or if you've been unwell you can only have khichdi for dinner because it's soft and it's good for your digestion or I mean there's so many. It goes on and on and on. But ginger is, oh salt water goggles when you had a sore throat because of the antiseptic quality of salt water. I used to hate that. My much preferred ginger tea so that's what we're going to do now. So with ginger tea really what you're doing is you're playing into the capacity for fresh ginger to its antiseptic qualities in terms of any sort of sore throat. It's considered to be pungent and heating in terms of Ayurveda so rasa the Ayurvedic taste. Pungent has great quality to lift tired systems and that sort of heating warming quality. Similarly when you have a cold it's considered a way to rise the body up out of the sort of physiological slump that a cold entails. This is just such domestic language but you can see where I'm going. It's kind of how we speak. Now for about a cup and a half of water you don't have you don't drink full full cups of it because it's quite strong. What we're doing is I'm essentially putting in you know almost so if you have a look in the pan Trav you can see how much ginger is in there as opposed to water like it's a really high ratio. I don't take the skin off I don't think you need to and then what we're going to do is put this on a low simmer on the stove. First is I'll bring it up to heat I'll do one more up to the boil then I'll put the lid on and put it on a low simmer for anywhere between five to ten minutes until the colour of the liquid becomes quite golden and the viscosity of the water changes to become a little thicker a little more syrupy. I put the lid on once it's simmering just to help prevent too much evaporation because otherwise what happens is you put the water on you put the ginger in and at the end of it you get left with the tiny thimble full you have to do the whole thing again. So over here move this and then just choose a jet that's not too excessive. So like I said I'm going to bring that to the boil and then let it simmer. While we're doing that I can chat to you about ginger if you like or about really the idea of what domestic Ayurvedic practice that sort of kitchen as medicine cabinet entails. Really what we're looking at doing is attempting to restore equilibrium in the body via nourishment and consumption. It's not so much about killing the cold as it is raising the body's ability to provide its own immune response to that cold and so things like you know ginger, warming masala, foods that are inherently nourishing but quite digestible that have a certain gentle kind of a density so things like rice, soft dals, masalas that have a lot of you know turmeric powder, ginger powder, cumin seed, familiar flavours that can be received by the body without too much challenge, without too much cacophony or noise or stimulation. A body that has a cold is a body that's tired essentially that's what we're saying and so we're working to nourish our systems in order to provide ourselves the strength to find wellness again. So it's a really gentle way to approach what you would consider to be minor conditions obviously for real health problems seek real medical advice and then part of the practice of the householder, so the householder being the idea of that person in the home who sets the tone for love and for communication and for family togetherness and structure and the ways in which we understand who we are in our family is building into the children from a young age the the handles that we use to climb ourselves up out of illness. So what I mean by that is ginger honey water is something that we introduce to our children young and we use it throughout their whole childhood. It creates connection and it creates a language between the child and the aromatic so that when it comes to consumption of that aromatic there's actually like a framework for communication so we know what the ginger tastes like, we know what it does, we know the feeling of love that comes from being presented with that cup by our parents or by our caregivers and then when we go to make that for ourselves later or for our own children later when we become householders ourselves that information is actually messaged through the food and that's where comfort comes from and comfort plays an enormous part in healing when it comes to those kind of just day-to-day domestic the illnesses you wouldn't go to a doctor for. So it's a nice way to think about flavour as being part of a tradition of caregiving as well not just as not just applying a medical overlay to to food but actually having the DNA or the imprint of care in the foundation of that dish as well. I don't know if that makes sense it makes sense to me in my head I'll see when I come to the edit it might not make sense to you on the other side of the camera but you can see so it's getting a little bubble so just like that just a gentle we'll come back in a few minutes. All right so come and have a look ready for the reveal what's getting there see how the colour's changing the texture of the ginger is changing the quality of the water itself so the texture of the water its viscosity is changing. Heat's a remarkable thing it really does transmute produce dish aroma no wonder discovery of fire was a big deal thanks Prometheus you know the Greek myths we've got Rick Riordan to thank for that Prometheus was the Greek god who gave fire to humans and then was banished from Mount Olympus and basically submitted to a lifetime of torture yeah so yeah yeah they weren't exactly a generous compassionate bunch well you ready that's pretty nice you actually can keep simmering longer than this until it gets quite rich and dark but just for the sake of efficacy of editing and all those things we're going to leave it here but have a little look obviously the longer you leave it the richer it becomes but see how the water's even moving differently now because it's heavier ginger's quite sticky it becomes slightly syrup like just like a little bit and then a little bit of honey so this is from friends who live nearby roosevelt that means anything to you but yeah it's honey from their bees so bush honey smells amazing so just honey to taste now one thing about ginger honey tea is that when you have the first sip if it's too hot it will give you the hiccups it happens to me every single time and i end up with the hiccups so i'm going to wait for it to cool a little bit if you want you can put a little bit of lemon or lime in it i'm going to put a bit of lime and it just brightens and actually sweetens a little bit the tea because the contrast of acidity highlights that sort of syrupy sweet quality in the ginger and then obviously in the honey you could put a little bit of salt in there as well you know it smells so good yum it's spicy and the lime's really beautiful and fresh and the ginger is um just really warm like as soon as it hits your chest like if you were an adult and you wanted to hot toddy it like put some warm whiskey in there it'd be pretty exceptional but just any kind of head cold any sort of tired any voice issue like talking to a camera all day yes this is beautiful ginger honey tea the remedy of remedies medicine cabinet right in your kitchen delish