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asjjohnson · 2 years

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I made some boba tea today. :) Would you like some?

It's a raspberry milk tea. (But I've made several other flavors in the past, too.)

If you keep reading, I'll tell you how I make it (which is probably pretty bad, and I apologize to anyone who knows how to make good boba tea—but, well, it's easy to make with the ingredients I have).

The most important part: Making the boba.

There’s some debate on whether to use Tapioca Starch or Tapioca Flour (and whether a package is even labeled correctly). I use Bob's Red Mill brand Tapioca Flour (…mostly because it’s the only thing I can find where I live—but it works just fine). I’ll just say ‘tapioca powder’, and let you research which to use.

It’s pretty simple, in theory. All you need to do is add some water, shape it into balls, and cook it, and you get tapioca. But tapioca powder is… complicated. Have you ever played with a substance that was both a solid and a liquid? Where you can break it in half, but then it melts between your fingers? Cornstarch and tapioca are both things that will create this when mixed with water. I’ll tell you how to turn that into a workable dough and avoid a lot of frustration.

I start by adding 1/4 a cup water and slightly less than 1/4 a cup light brown sugar to a saucepan (you can use more or less sugar, a different type of brown sugar, and/or use some black food coloring if you want, but you’ll need to work out how to adjust the recipe). (Using light brown sugar will create transparent light brown boba. They’ll appear darker against milk tea, though.) Also measure out 3/4 cup tapioca powder for later, and have it ready (don‘t add it yet).

Turn the stove to medium heat, and stir constantly until the brown sugar is dissolved into the water. Add in the tapioca powder and stir hard. It’ll be really tough to stir at first, and then get easier as it heats, and then it’ll start to get hard to stir again. Once that happens, get it off the heat. (There’s a chance you won’t notice the hard-easy-hard stages. The gradual warming of the stove is important for sensing it, so if the heat is too high or you wait too long after the sugar dissolves, then you’ll be left uncertain about whether the dough is done. But it‘ll be okay. Probably.)

So now you have some tapioca dough. It might not look like much dough, but it’ll be easier to work with in even smaller sections, so tear off a piece of it. Maybe a fourth of it or so. Squeeze it around in one hand. If it’s sticky, wait a few seconds and it’ll dry out more. If it’s crumbly, then wet your fingertips and it’ll get more moist (be careful about how much water you add. It’s easy to overdo it and you’ll have to wait awhile for it to dry out).

Put the piece of dough down on a plate and pinch off a tiny piece of it. Roll it between the palms of your hands to make a ball. It needs to be a small ball. Small. Aim for slightly less than half an inch in diameter (about half the length of the top section of your index finger). Once the ball is the right size, make all the following balls about the same size in comparison. Sit each tapioca ball on the plate, spacing them out just a bit. You can push them together (or put them on top of each other) after a few minutes, but if you do it too soon they’ll stick together. (They’re also a little fragile. If you try pulling two apart or adjusting the shape of one after a few minutes, it’ll probably crumble because it’s dried out too much to remold. Unless you add a tiny bit of water and start over.) You might be able to roll multiple pieces between your palms at once, but you have to keep them pretty far apart from each other or they’ll gravitate together and form one big ball. (Or… maybe, if you’re using a clean counter instead of a plate, you can roll them against the counter instead of your other palm. It would be easier to do multiple ones that way.) Try your best not to make them over half an inch big. Even a boba straw will have trouble with boba larger than half an inch. Plus, even if you plan to eat them with a spoon, you’ll have trouble getting them to cook all the way through.

If you’ve done that first initial heating step correctly, rolling the tapioca into balls will be pretty easy (although a bit time consuming). Otherwise… The first time I’d tried making boba, I’d looked up recipes and watched videos, and none of them had said much about the initial heating step! If they even mentioned it at all. So, rather than dirty up my pan, I’d just dissolved the brown sugar in the microwave and then added the tapioca powder. It was… panic-inducing. I had imagined the tapioca flour to be like all-purpose flour. Instead, it was solid and slightly crumbly, but also runny. The balls would look fine at first, and then melt into puddles. So, I’d added extra tapioca powder to thicken them enough to keep their shape (…somewhat). But then they were so dense that it took pretty much all day to get them to cook all the way through! So, if your tapioca balls turn into puddles, then you need to warm up the dough some more. It’s like normal flour when it’s heated correctly.

On the other hand, it’s also possible to accidentally cook the dough. Which isn’t as bad a problem. You just won’t get perfectly round boba. One time I’d decided to see if it were possible to make boba using a microwave instead of the stove. (It was a single-serve portion, using tablespoons instead of 1/4 cup measures.) I’d felt bad that day and had wanted something simple as a treat.) It turns out that you can do the initial heating phase in the microwave, but you cannot get the boba to cook the rest of the way in the microwave. If you would like to try doing the initial heating in the microwave, then stir the tapioca mixture every fifteen seconds, or any time it starts to boil, until the dough will stop melting in your hand. If it instead ends up as a transparent sheet, then you can pinch it or cut it into cubes. It’s basically pre-cooked when this happens, but you should probably still boil the boba on the stove for awhile to be sure it’s completely cooked. (The problem with boiling boba in the microwave seems to be uneven cooking. Even though I’d had them submerged in a bowl of water, the boba had ended up with a mix of transparent spots and opaque spots. And continuing to microwave them doesn’t fix this problem. It instead starts burning some spots and makes little dark brown crunchy places. So, no boiling boba in the microwave.)

Okay, you should have your little beige balls of dough ready by now. Clean the saucepan with some warm soapy water. The remains of the tapioca dough should come off pretty easily. (But avoid getting any unheated tapioca down the drain, because it might mess up the sink. Wipe up any spilled powder with a paper towel and throw in the trashcan.)

Fill the saucepan about halfway with water (or however much water will boil on your stove. It’s hard to get large quantities of water to a boil). And turn the stove on high heat. Once the water is boiling, push the tapioca into the pan and stir immediately. If the tapioca falls to the bottom of the pan before it has time to cook a little bit, then it’ll stick. So, just give it a few stirs, and the boba should form a protective layer.

Boil the tapioca for 30 minutes. After about the first five minutes, the boba will float to the top. You might want to check on them a few times, just to make sure they’re doing okay and that there’s still enough water in the pan. You might want to add a little more water. Also, it’s normal for a jelly-like substance to form in the water. (You might even want to fish out this jelly stuff and use it for something later. Tapioca is supposed to be a good thickener for cooking, so maybe you can think of something. You might even want to taste it as-is, although I don’t find it too appealing myself. It’s basically just runny boba.)

When that thirty minutes is over, turn down the heat and cover and simmer for another 30 minutes. Check on it after a few minutes to make sure the water’s still boiling. If it’s completely still, then turn up the heat a little (it may not cook properly if it’s not hot enough). If it’s boiling too much, then turn down the heat (you don’t want it to boil over).

In a small bowl, or even a mug, add some brown sugar and a little water (I’ve never measured the amounts. Just add more brown sugar than you do water. Not too much of either, though.) Microwave it until it dissolves. This will be a brown sugar syrup to soak the boba in (and to add flavoring for your future boba tea). (You could probably also use maple syrup or something else if you want. It just depends on what kind of flavoring you prefer.)

After simmering the boba for thirty minutes, check to see if the boba are done. If they’re completely transparent, then they’re done. But if they‘re kind of light beige and opaque, there’s a chance they just have some air bubbles making them look opaque. Get a few of the boba out of the pan and drop them into some cold water. If they turn transparent after a few seconds, then they’re done and you can turn off the heat. If they’re still opaque in the center, then bite or cut one or two in half and see what happens. Sometimes that’s enough to get rid of the remaining air bubbles and it’ll instantly turn transparent. If you bite it in half and it feels a little harder in the center, or else the center is powdery, then it’s not done, and you should let them boil or simmer for ten more minutes and check again. If they’re not completely transparent, but they taste okay to you as is, then go ahead and turn off the heat.

Sometimes slightly underdone boba will cook the rest of the way in the microwave later. Other times they’ll just keep the light center. Large boba are hard to cook all the way through, and are more likely to have that light colored center.

The boba have probably sunk back toward the bottom of the pan after simmering, so you can drain off about half the water if you’re careful. Then add some cold water to the pan. Cycle through half-draining and filling a few times, until the boba have cooled down and there’s no more of that jelly substance. If they were light colored earlier from air bubbles (instead of from being underdone), then they will turn transparent from cooling them down.

Get out the boba and put them in the brown sugar syrup. Cover the bowl or cup with something (like plastic wrap or a lid), and put it in the refrigerator.

I like leaving the boba in the refrigerator overnight before I start using them. They’re very soft when they’ve just finished cooking and it takes time for them to settle. But if you like them this way, you can make some boba tea immediately.

Making boba tea:

You can probably make any kind of tea into boba tea. Although different types of teas and different brands will be different strengths, so you might need to experiment a bit to find the right balance. If you have a type of tea that is particularly strong, you might want to try steeping it for a shorter period of time, or adding more water to it, or using only half of the tea at a time.

I’ve made two brands of Chai tea, blueberry herbal tea, bottled cherry herbal tea, cold-brew raspberry black tea, blackberry herbal tea, and have experimented a few times with trying to make coconut flavored tea out of black tea and literal coconut (it’s a little hard to get coconut flavoring from shredded coconut, plus the black tea is very, very strong).

Most of the flavors I’ve made, I’ll start with half a cup of water and one tea bag, or else 3/4 a cup of water and two tea bags and then use half of it and save the other half. Whichever you do, you’ll need to chill it in the refrigerator for maybe half an hour or so. When it’s cool enough, you can go ahead and transfer it to a clear glass. You can also use cold brew tea or a bottled tea, and skip the chilling step. If you use a strong bottled tea, then don’t add much to the glass at first, and add more to taste along with the milk.

If you’re wanting to use freshly cooked boba, then you can also skip a reheating step and put it straight into the glass (along with a little of that brown sugar syrup).

If you’ve had the boba in the refrigerator, then put a handful of boba in a mug, with some of the brown sugar syrup (don’t put it in the tea yet. But you can use the same mug if you’ve transferred the tea to a glass), and microwave it until the boba are transparent (they’ve probably turned opaque in the refrigerator). It’ll probably take around 30 seconds. If you see little air bubbles inside the boba, then they’re definitely ready, and you’d gotten them hot enough to start boiling their insides. This is okay, though. Overheating the boba a little won’t hurt them, and sometimes undercooked centers will get cooked if you do this. Put the boba and syrup into the glass with the tea.

Add milk to make a cup (or 8oz, or… well… leave a bit of room at the top of the glass). Add a little vanilla ice cream to the top, and then a little Cool-Whip or generic frozen whipped topping on top of that. (Whipped cream might also be good, if you don’t have or don't want to use Cool-Whip.) Put a special boba straw or a spoon into the glass for the boba. (I had started out using a spoon, before buying some thick plastic boba straws, with straw cleaners, from Amazon. If I had thought of it earlier, I could’ve saved some disposable boba straws from a restaurant to reuse.)

#boba tea #bubble tea #milk tea #recipes #tapioca #food #asj post #Before I'd ever heard of boba tea I'd wished there was such a thing as large tapioca pearls - so... this is pretty awesome.#One time I'd tried making some instant tapioca pearls as a kid but even though they said they were 'giant sized' or something they weren't.#I mean they'd looked small but I'd thought they would expand on cooking them? Instead they just... didn't. They did flake though.

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