Making Boba

For the past few months I’ve had a new obsession: bubble milk tea! It all started at a debate tournament when my team was late to the lunch stand thing. The people kindly informed us that they were out of everything, but they had bubble milk tea. All the Asians on our team were perfectly happy about this, so I handed over my $3 and stared at the sealed cup in my hand. While I was trying to figure out what to do with the  brown blobs on the bottom, the girl who handed me the bubble tea kindly pointed out that I would need one of the oversized straws. After a quick glance at what everybody else was doing, I stabbed the plastic film on my cup and took a tentative sip. And just like that, I was hooked. I think they put crack in bubble tea or something. Because for the next few months, I lived for the bubble tea fundraisers at school. I would be at the classroom door 3 minutes before the bell rang waiting to run like a mad woman to the bubble tea stand. My school is generally pretty tame, but on those afternoons we dissolved into an anarchous mass of bodies trying to get our bubble tea fix. And then we would be in withdrawal for the next week or so.

Then I discovered that Quickly was not the only place in the world to get bubble tea. When I went to one of the little cafes in my town, my mind was blown. Bubble tea became an every-other-day thing for me. But it was also a little hard on my limited funds – it was like $40 a month! So I decided I was going to make my own. I ventured into 99 Ranch Market and found a bag of tapioca pearls, complete with instructions.

Green tea tapioca pearls

The instruction said 8 parts water to 1 part tapioca, so i picked out a pretty big pot.

Pouring in tapioca

I let it boil for 5 minutes. By then the pearls had floated to the top of the water and swelled up.

Boiled pearls

I added a bunch of sugar and stirred until the water was practically syrup. Then I turned off the heat, covered the pot, and let the boba cool down.

The boba turned out a little harder than it was supposed to, but everyone else said they were fine – I prefer my pearls gummy bear like in texture. Okay, now I want to try flavor milk with gummy bears. Do you think a tapioca place will make it if I bring the gummies? Haha we’ll see how that goes.