#i'm not turning into a food blog i swear 😆

[lori0018]

I'm about to try making my own bubble tea 🧋 from scratch.

(I would like everyone to acknowledge that this is @staykimchay's fault. If you haven't yet, go read the insanely good "my bubble tea brings all the boys to the yard". And then all her other insanely good stories.)

I couldn't find any tapioca starch in stores so I ordered it on Amazon. (Went with "Cock brand" because it makes me laugh.)

That's a 400g bag so it should get me through 4 attempts if this goes horribly wrong. The recipe looks simple so I should be fine 😸

Ingredients:

100g tapioca starch

50g brown sugar

80ml water 💧

Let's go! 💪🏻

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Just water and brown sugar but it looks yummy 🤤

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1st attempt is going in the trash 😅

Started with not enough water (dough was too crumbly) then added too much (too sticky, half of it stayed on my hands when I started kneading it) and it was all lumpy 😿

It's also likely that the heat instructions aren't good for the type of stovetop I'm using. So I'm going to adjust that on the next try too.

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The 2nd attempt looks (and feels) a lot better so I'm going to go ahead with the next steps. I used barely a 3rd of the tapioca in it though… we'll have to see what happens.

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My haul:

Some notes:

The recipe asks for 80ml of water in the ingredients but 30ml in the cooking steps. One of these is not like the others 😆. Given what happened to both of my attempts I'm going to say 80ml is the right one. (I used about 50ml in the second but not all the tapioca.)

Making a lot at one time is not a good idea. The dough becomes increasingly harder to shape as it cools down. Some of my tapioca pearls are not pearl shaped at all 😆.

I used maybe 60/70g of tapioca for the dough but used a lot while shaping the pearls to make sure it didn't stick so I had about 15g left.

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Alright, the pearls are cooked and taking a brown sugar syrup bath for added flavor. (Note: don't forget the ice bath between cooking and flavoring or the pearls stick together.)

While that's going on, I'll prepare the tea 🍵.

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I'm going to test one with Green Sencha tea 🍵 and one with Earl Grey tea ☕. I'm letting them both steep for a while because I want a strong tea flavor.

I'm going to let the green tea and half the pearls cool down to drink cold later.

The Earl Grey is getting the other half of the pearls and some (warmed) milk to drink now.

I need to adjust the water/milk ratio but otherwise it's a success 🎉

...

Further notes:

It's a lot of work for 2 servings of bubble tea. I need to see if the uncooked pearls can be frozen (or conserved in some way) for later use.

It's really nice to sit down and write this post from my "in-action" notes with a cup of bubble tea in hand.

EDIT:

It's "later" 😁

The green tea has taken a lovely brown color from the tapioca pearls. I added about a teaspoon worth of honey to sweeten it and some ice cubes to make it really refreshing.

Overall, I'm quite happy with the results for a 1st try ☺️