(For the uninitiated, the “bubbles” in bubble tea are made from a starchy substance called tapioca, which is derived from the roots of the cassava plant. On a trip to H Mart in Koreatown, I stumbled across an enticing-looking package that promised ready-to-eat bubbles in five minutes. Partly as an act of defiance and partly of necessity, I began frequenting Asian grocery stores around the city to stock up on ingredients I had previously relied on restaurant takeout to experience: things like fresh okra and cellophane noodles and hot-pot mix. But there was also the rampant xenophobia - think back to the beginning of the pandemic and the conversation around wet markets in Wuhan - plus an uptick in hate crimes, and suddenly, the foods I had grown up consuming and the habits I never thought to question took on new meaning. Of course, if the worst thing to happen to me during the pandemic was that I was slightly inconvenienced by my inability to access a drink, I would have been 1) extremely fortunate and 2) probably not still be talking about it right now. When the pandemic forced New York and the rest of the country to go into lockdown, many of my favorite bubble-tea shops around the city began to shutter (some of them permanently, others for the monthslong stretch between spring 2020 and the first murmurs of a widely available vaccine). Two things happened simultaneously to change all of that. Bubble tea was something I took for granted, and I certainly never thought of it as the complex cultural product that it is. It always sort of hovered on the periphery of my social life, serving as an occasion to catch up with a friend or a treat to myself. To this day, I still drink bubble tea the way other people drink coffee or beer - sometimes with a meal, usually on its own. During high school in suburban Maryland, my friends and I would take advantage of the open-lunch policy and race to get in line at the Kung Fu Tea a few blocks away, where the lunch-hour rush was so intense that we always risked being late to fifth period (but it was worth it for the adrenaline rush alone). Go on, treat yourself.My earliest memory of bubble tea is trying it for the first time on a family trip to Shanghai I was 7 or 8, and I was so obsessed with my new discovery that I couldn’t stop prattling on and on, bending my mom’s ear about how the Oriental Pearl Tower resembled the similarly shaped orbs in my drink. All kits come with bubble tea supplies, which means you get the full bubble tea experience from boba ball to jumbo straw. Thankfully for you bubble tea lovers, we've put together a list of the best bubble tea kits you can buy for your home, from stores like Amazon and Etsy. However, most bubble tea kits come with their tapioca already pre-cooked, so don't worry about it too much. You have to get the consistency just right, not too chewy, not too squish a Chinese expression calls this perfect texture "QQ". From that, you get your classic boba ball and its texture. They must be boiled and then cooled for 30 minutes. Tapioca balls, or pearls, come sealed dry in a packet. What's the difference between tapioca and boba?īasically, tapioca turns into boba balls. However, you can also drink it hot - you do you. Normally, you heat your bubble tea up to stew the flavour and then let it cool with ice. You can also get different toppings in your bubble tea, like grass jelly or egg pudding. Now known as bubble tea in the western world, the modern cup is usually made up of a scoop of flavoured tapioca, milk or fruit tea, ice and syrup. The tapioca pearls actually came later, and it became known as boba tea (which is what the tapioca balls are also referred to as) because it's a Chinese slang term for breasts. He wanted to change the way people drank tea, so he experimented with putting tea over ice, and bubble tea was born. The inventor of the drink generally accepted as being true is Liu Han-Chieh of the Chun Shui Tang teahouse in Taichung, Taiwan. It was created from a mixture of milk tea (which was already super popular at the time) and tapioca balls/pearls (a common dessert). Bubble tea, or boba tea, was invented in Taiwan in the '80s.
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