The Secret to Better Sweet Tea Is Already in Your Pantry

Sweet tea is more than just a beverage in the southern U.S.: it’s a family staple, a rite of passage, and even a lifestyle.

“I drank sweet tea probably as early as I was drinking milk from a bottle,” says Ivy Odom, senior lifestyle editor at Southern Living, a sibling brand of Food & Wine. “In the South it is the most common next step. We go from milk straight to sweet tea.”

The beloved Southern beverage features in Odom’s forthcoming book My Southern Kitchen, which will be released on October 7. The book includes plenty of stories, table inspiration, and party menus, as well as over 100 recipes influenced by Odom’s south Georgia upbringing and culinary travels. You’ll also find a number of secret and not-so-secret ingredients that can transform both classic and contemporary recipes — including a genius hack for the best sweet tea.

The secret to better sweet tea: baking soda

Sweet tea is typically a simple, two-ingredient concoction, not including water or ice: just carefully steeped black tea transformed by sugar or simple syrup. However, there’s a common pantry ingredient that many aficionados swear by for the best sweet tea: baking soda.

Odom stumbled upon this hack while working on a series of TikTok videos for Southern Living that covered the classics, like biscuits and fried chicken. 

“Our official Southern Living recipe for sweet tea called for all the normal ingredients that you would put in sweet tea: just tea bags, sugar, and ice,” says Odom. “And then it called for baking soda.” 

Upon tasting the sweet tea with baking soda — just an eighth of a teaspoon for two quarts — Odom had a revelation. “Unbeknownst to me, I had been having sweet tea with baking soda my entire life,” she says, referring to an exceptional sweet tea her grandmother always served at Thanksgiving.

“Mimi’s was the best sweet tea ever, but I never was curious enough to ask why it was always so good,” she says. When Southern Living’s recipe brought on a serious case of nostalgia, she confirmed that Mimi had indeed been putting baking soda in hers all along. “She told me: ‘I thought you knew that,’” says Odom.

Why this trick works

The result of adding baking soda is twofold, according to those who swear by it. “Tea includes tannins, which are bitter, astringent compounds,” says Odom, “and baking soda is thought to neutralize those elements,” which creates a more mellow blend. “I think it originated as a fix for oversteeped tea, when home cooks would accidentally leave their tea bags in the water for too long,” she says. But it also creates a smoother, mellower taste in tea that is perfectly steeped.

Those who swear by baking soda also say it helps clarify the brew, which makes for a more appealing beverage. “If the tea is chilled too quickly, the tannins can tend to make the tea cloudy,” Odom explains. 

Food science aside, Odom can confirm that baking soda makes better iced tea after testing various recipes for her book. “I’ve done multiple side-by-side blind taste tests with and without baking soda, and nine times out of 10, people pick the baking soda tea,” she says. “They don’t know why they like it better, but they almost always do.”