I love bubble tea, aka boba. If you haven’t had it… where have you been? It’s sweetened tea, sometimes with fruit or other flavors and/or milk mixed in, with tapioca balls in the drink. They give you a big fat straw, and you suck the balls up while you’re drinking the sweet tea.
I first had it my senior year of high school. I think I had some kind of coffee-flavored drink, which isn’t what the majority of bubble tea drinks are. But then I got to college, where there were multiple boba shops within walking distance of campus. I was in heaven. I went crazy during my freshman year. I think I had one almost every day. It was so bad for my health. And yet so delicious.
But you have to wonder how the practice of dropping tapioca balls into sweetened tea came about. Who would’ve thought to drop balls of starch into a drink? I can only imagine that somewhere in a tea house in Taiwan in the 1980s…
Mr. Lin walked into his tea house one morning, exhausted from the events of last night. Who knew that such a small woman could be such a powerhouse in bed? Asian women are so deceptive sometimes. He slumped down in his big overstuffed chair, dreaming about Ms. Wang’s ample bosom, rubbed all over his face. And those legs! They went on forever. They writhed together, bodies intertwined in the hot tropical climate of their native country, while forgetting about the worries of the modern world. Mr. Lin with his struggling tea house, Ms. Wang and her library. How were they supposed to make a decent living, with the economy the way it was?
Not to mention the young people they had to stare at every day. The tea house would inevitably attract some young, tall Asian man with a petite Asian girl clinging to his arm. The young man would take the hot tea and playfully splash it on the girl’s face. That’s so hot, she would exclaim, while he licked the hot tea straight off of her face. But Ms. Wang had it worse, in the library. These kids weren’t there to study, no. Oftentimes when she was putting books back on the shelves, she would go into a corner of the stacks that was rarely used. Like the small shelf in the back with a few books mentioning something about the homosexual undercurrents of ancient Roman literature. And there she would find a young couple with their pants down, trying to be as quiet as possible. They had more privacy in the forgotten corners of her library than in their homes! She would admonish the couple for having public sex, since the fluids could just fly all over the place, ruining her precious books. But secretly, she longed for a man’s touch. The books just weren’t doing it for her.
So one evening, when Mr. Lin was in Ms. Wang’s library, looking for some books about tea, they started chatting. They both realized that they were lonely people, and they felt the attraction between them. It was something instinctual. Almost animalistic. Before long, Mr. Lin found himself being led to the back of the library by Ms. Wang, where she opened a door. It led to the outside of the library, where there was a small garden, hidden from view. Nobody knew about this small garden Ms. Wang had been taking care of for years. It was her secret. But this wasn’t the time to admire the peonies; she wanted Mr. Lin’s clothes off, now. They soon found themselves completely naked in Ms. Wang’s garden, with the sun setting. “Let me take you back to my place,” Ms. Wang said. Soon they found themselves in her studio apartment, recreating the same positions they had done in the garden. There was an urgency to their lovemaking. As if the world was ending the next day.
As Mr. Lin’s thoughts of last night lingered in his mind, he realized that he really needed some energy. Some simple tea just wouldn’t do. It was too hot, anyway. How could he get the energy he needed? Well, he did have a bag of tapioca balls in the cupboard at his tea house. Why did he have balls of starch? He wasn’t sure; maybe it was from another steamy encounter he had before, that time with a farmer’s daughter. This would be a good source of carbohydrates, he told himself, as he threw them into a pot of boiling water. Even though Mr. Lin loved tea on its own, this morning he was craving something sweet. When he was a child, his mother would sometimes put milk and sugar into a cup of tea for him, as a sweet treat. Couldn’t he do the same now, and add some ice to get a nice cold drink? He grabbed a cocktail shaker from the cupboard and threw some ice cubes into it. He poured some freshly-brewed black tea into the shaker, along with some milk and some sugar syrup. The tapioca balls seemed plump and ready to eat, so he drained them and rinsed them with cold water. Mr. Lin threw the balls into a cup, along with the frothy milk tea he had just made. He took a spoon and scooped up some tapioca balls while taking a sip of the cold, sweet tea. He was in heaven. It was almost as good as Ms. Wang last night. Mr. Lin could die happy now.
OK, so maybe it didn’t go quite like that. I mean, how could you keep a garden behind a library secret like that? Ridiculous.
But I happened upon a bag of tapioca pearls at 99 Ranch, so I decided to give making some bubble tea at home a try.
Here’s the bag. It even has Japanese writing on it, to entice me to buy it. I fell for it.
I took about 1/4 cup of it, threw it in some boiling water, and let them plump up. I then covered the pot for five minutes and let it simmer, as per the instructions.
Here they are in the bottom of my glass. They’ve taken on that familiar black color.
You’re probably supposed to brew your own tea, but I was lazy, and I took this bottle of jasmine tea. I love these bottles of tea, they’re so good. To make the milk tea, I mixed
3/4 cup jasmine tea
1/2 cup milk
2 ounces simple syrup
and then shook these with ice in a cocktail shaker until it was frothy.
Here’s the milk tea over the pearls in a glass. Sadly, I didn’t have a fat straw to suck the balls up with, so I rather pathetically used a spoon to get the pearls.
The milk tea was quite good, even though the recipe is so simple. The pearls were kind of bland in contrast, though. I probably should have soaked them in syrup or something, because I think that’s what the boba cafes do. But it was definitely not bad for my first time. And of course I’ll make some again, since I have that whole bag of pearls to get through.