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How To Easily Make Tapioca Pearls For Boba Tea

Boba pearls are not a particularly new innovation. You can find them at your nearest Starbucks, and big cities like San Francisco are bubble tea havens. In the last decade, brightly colored boba pearls have even popped up at frozen yogurt places. The problem is, boba pearls are pretty spendy — which is a racket because they're dirt cheap to make on your own.

Also known as tapioca pearls, boba pearls — or, colloquially, boba balls — are surprisingly simple to craft at home, if a bit of a pain. This recipe does take patience, though. If you feel you don't have two hours to spend making roughly one cup of tiny, sweet balls, nobody blames you. But a little sweat equity can save you serious money, and there's a meditative component to it that shouldn't be overlooked.

Moreover, your standard boba ball accommodates tons of variations: chocolate, black, matcha, butterfly pea powder, strawberry, and more. Once you learn the basic recipe and how to update it for various flavors and approaches, you'll find it pretty painless ... and very delicious.

Tools you'll need

Making boba pearls is a several-step process, which means you need an array of equipment. Happily, most people have these items in the home kitchen. You'll need small and medium-sized saucepans, a medium-sized bowl, a sturdy rubber spatula, a sharp paring knife, a slotted spoon and a regular spoon, a sifter, a ramekin, a glass for making your tea, and a scale.

If you do not have a scale, that's okay; you can use an online conversion chart. However, a simple kitchen scale is worth its weight in ... well, boba. It's a small investment for a large payoff when it comes to cooking. You may optionally choose to use a whisk, rolling pin, or cookie sheet at some point in the process, but they are not necessary.

Ingredients you'll need

The star of this recipe is tapioca starch, a versatile ingredient amenable to many types of cooking. Note that tapioca starch and tapioca flour are the same thing. You may optionally add a bit of potato starch to the recipe, and in that case, please note that potato starch and flour are *not* the same thing. (See more about potato starch in Troubleshooting.)

To make the chocolate black boba pearls pictured in this recipe, you will need 50 grams of dark brown sugar, 60 grams of water, 5 grams of cocoa powder, and 95 grams of tapioca starch. You will also need a cup and a half of almond milk, give or take, plus a teaspoon or two of butterfly pea powder, to taste. The final ingredient gives your boba tea (or in this case, sweet boba milk) a blue effect and a slightly earthy flavor that is truly delightful.

If you'd prefer clear boba balls, skip the cocoa powder and instead use 100 grams of tapioca flour. If you want blue balls, swap the cocoa out for butterfly pea powder in the same amount, or do the same with matcha powder for green balls.

Make the dough

To make boba dough, you'll start by making a simple syrup. First, place your scale on the counter and make sure it reads in grams, not ounces. Put the small saucepan on it and press the tare button to zero out the scale (i.e. cancel the weight of the pot and return the scale to zero). Weigh out 50 grams of sugar.

Add 60 grams of water to the pot on the scale, for a total of 110 grams.

Mix the two ingredients together using your rubber spatula. Then, place the pot on the stove, turn the burner to medium, and cook until the ingredients are dissolved.

Monitor the syrup as it comes to a boil. It needs to come to a full boil so the sugar is completely dissolved.

While you're waiting for your syrup to boil, mix 5 grams of cocoa powder and 95 grams of tapioca flour, also using the scale.

Once the syrup is boiling, remove it from the heat and add three spoonfuls of your dry ingredients to boiling simple syrup. This is not an exacting process; it's fine to use a soup spoon for this.

However, it's important to do this part really quickly, immediately after removing the pot from the stove. Tapioca and water mixed together at room temperature will form ooblek, that strange non-Newtonian fluid we all played with as kids (usually made from cornstarch). While non-Newtonian fluids are scientifically very cool — they behave as liquids until you apply force, when they suddenly take on the characteristics of solids — they aren't delicious.

Boiling water helps to ensure that tapioca gelatinizes rather than just mixing with the simple syrup, enabling the starch to absorb water, swell, and become clear. Mix quickly using your rubber spatula (or optional whisk if that feels better).

Return the pot to the stove to continue the gelatinization process. Cook until it coats your spatula thickly.

Remove the pot from the stove and add the rest of the dry ingredients. Mix it all together with a rubber spatula, working quickly, as it will start cooling immediately and will become less workable within minutes. Mix until it becomes a shaggy dough, adding drops of water as necessary to hold it together.

Once everything is mixed together, begin to knead, just as you would a bread dough. This dough is done when it is smooth, pliable, and slightly tacky. If it's sticking to your board or counter too much, add a dusting of tapioca flour.

Place dough in a medium-sized bowl and cover it with a damp towel. If it dries out, it will become unworkable. You can also wrap it in plastic if you're not going to work on this step for a few minutes.

Form the boba pearls

Fill a medium-sized bowl with a bit of tapioca starch. You can start small, around ¼ cup, and then add more if needed.

Tear enough dough off your main ball to create a roughly 1-inch ball.

Divide the ball into tiny pieces. You can roll out the dough ¼ inch thick using a rolling pin and cut it into 1-centimeter strips in both directions, creating small squares, which is more taxing but more exact. Or roll the ball into a 1-centimeter snake, which is easier. 

Cut off 1-centimeter pieces, which will become roughly 1-centimeter balls. This step avoids a rolling pin and doesn't stick to your counter as much, so it's recommended.

Continue until you have cut all your pieces from the first snake.

Pick up each piece and work it into a ball in your hand. (Try to ignore the fact that it looks like you're making deer poo. It is much more delicious than deer poo.) You might want to put on an audiobook because it's a truly mind-numbing task. 

If you enjoy bigger boba pearls, congratulations: You can do less work. If you must have the tiny perfect kind, well, you chose this. Either way, don't expect them all to be the same size. That way lies madness.

As you finish rolling each pearl, pop it into the bowl with the tapioca starch. This will keep them from sticking to one another. Continue the process until all the dough has been made into pearls. This recipe makes about a cup of boba when finished.

When done rolling all your balls, shake the starch free using a metal strainer. They may have deformed a little bit while resting in the bowl, taking on a shape reminiscent of kibbles. If that bothers you, place them on a flat surface and roll them gently with your hand to get them to resume a round shape.

At this step, you can choose to dry your pearls. Lay them all out on a flat, protected surface like a cookie sheet, not touching one another, and wait four hours. If you care about them being perfectly round, you can occasionally run your hand over them on the cookie sheet to roll them into a neater shape and keep them from settling. (Certain cooks find this too finicky and never even bother to dry them, but you do you.) They are then suitable for storage in an airtight jar at room temperature. The truth is, though, dried tapioca pearls are pretty affordable, and the freshness of the pearls is part of the delicious toothsomeness of this recipe. Ideally, you will move straight on to cooking them.

Cook the boba in water and then (more) syrup

Fill a pot of water at a ratio of 4:1 water to boba. As this recipe is a cup, fill the pot with at least four cups of water. More will not hurt anything, but less won't be enough and won't be enough for boba to suck up and become clear. Bring the pot to a boil.

When it comes to a rolling boil (remember: gelatinization requires a full boil), add all your boba at once. Stir with a slotted spoon.

Wait for the boba to come to the surface, then turn them down to a simmer.

Cook for 30-40 minutes, stirring occasionally. If your boba are large, like the ones in this recipe, you may need to cook for 60 minutes.

While the boba cook, make another simple syrup. Yes, more syrup. No one promised this was a health food. Combine 150 grams of brown sugar with 240 grams of water in the small saucepan on the scale, for a total of 390 grams.

Place syrup on the stove and bring it to a boil.

Stir boiling syrup until it thickens enough to coat your spatula with a glaze. Turn it off.

Fill the medium-sized bowl with cold water from the tap.

When your boba are done cooking, they should look shiny and wet. If you've used the cocoa as in this recipe, they will also be blackish brown. You can pluck one out and eat it to make sure it's to the desired doneness. Boba pearls should be soft but al dente at this stage. Let them rest in the pot for 20 minutes or so, then pull them out with a slotted spoon and put them in the bowl of cold water. They may get a bit smaller in the cold water, but that's okay.

Bring your syrup back to a boil and transfer the boba back to the syrup. Stir to make sure nothing sticks.

Boil for a few minutes. This will ensure soft, fully cooked, sweet boba and thicker syrup. Again, you can taste them while cooking to ascertain the desired doneness. When done, turn off the pot and let the boba cool.

Make bubble tea

When you buy boba tea out in the world, you don't always have the option to control whether or not it's vegan, but at home you do. This vegan bubble tea uses almond milk, but you can sub it out for any milk of your choice. It's made with the herb butterfly pea powder, which is an adaptogen — helping our bodies reregulate in the face of stress. Studies indicate it also has the potential to aid in cardiovascular health. Plus, it's pretty, and it has a nice, earthy, tea-like flavor.

Pull out your choice of milk, the butterfly pea flower, a ramekin or two (depending on the number of flavors you want to make; see below), and a spoon or two.

Get out your choice of glass. A mason jar or highball does nicely.

Add several spoonfuls of cooked boba to the glass, along with the syrup they were cooked in.

Add your choice of milk nearly to the top of the glass. It will be about a cup and a half.

Add about a teaspoon of butterfly pea flower to the ramekin and mix with a small amount of boiling water until it's blended. There may be some small lumps; that's okay. (If you prefer, you can buy whole butterfly pea flowers and steep them exactly like tea, which will avoid the problem. However, it won't create a thick, paint-like liquid, and you can't bake with it.) You can add more powder if you want a stronger flavor.

Have your cat inspect the mixture to make sure it's right. She knows.

Add the butterfly pea powder liquid to the top of your glass and let it swirl into the milk. You can give it a gentle stir to encourage blending if necessary. Et voilà: delicious, impressive, homemade bubble tea with perfectly chewy boba!

Making the actual bubble tea is a very flexible step of the process, so be creative. You can replace the butterfly pea powder with matcha or cocoa powder, mixed with boiling water and milk in the same rough ratios, serving hot or cold. Just make sure to add the boba warm, not straight from the fridge. Heat them up in the syrup, in the microwave, or on the stove before adding them to your drink to avoid toughness.

Troubleshooting boba pearls

There are a number of things that can go wrong when making boba, mostly to do with tapioca starch being a flighty mistress. For the most part, they're fixable. First, if you find after making this recipe once that your pearls came out a little gummier than you like, some sources say you can swap out 20 grams of the tapioca starch for potato starch. That should make them a bit more chewy and less sticky. This home cook, however, has never had a problem with it.

Tapioca not gelatinizing? That probably means your water isn't hot enough. Temperature is crucial for proper gelatinization, and the necessary temperature to gelatinize tapioca is higher than for some other starches, so make sure your liquids really are boiling.

If your boba pearls are sticking to the counter while you form them, dust them lightly with tapioca powder while you work. If your pearls keep falling apart while you form them, wet your fingers with a little bit of water as you work. This will heal the cracks and keep them together. Lastly, if your syrup is too thin at the end, boil your boba in it longer. The starch will thicken your syrup, while the syrup sweetens your balls further. It's a win-win.

Storing unused cooked boba

If you have leftover boba, you must know something I don't, because I cannot stop eating them. However, storing unused cooked boba is pretty easy. Submerge the balls in syrup in an airtight container and put them in the fridge, where they'll keep for up to a week. You can also put the container in the freezer, where boba will last up to six months, but will definitely be better if you eat them by the one-month mark.

If you've already made your boba into a drink, you can put it into the fridge for up to 24 hours and it will be fine, though the boba may be a little hard. Put it on the top shelf to avoid it getting contaminated by other items moving around above it. If you have dried your boba pearls, they will last six to 12 months.

Boba tea recipes

Being sweet, chewy, and delicious, tapioca pearls lend themselves well to a wide variety of recipes. If you want to go the more traditional route with a twist, you can cook old-fashioned tapioca pudding, but with giant pearls. Continuing in the dessert vein, you can add boba bubbles to cookies. Or, if you just want to feed your sweet tooth, you can top coffee ice cream with black boba.

Vis-à-vis drinks, the easiest alternative to a powder-based latte is steeped tea. At-home boba tea recipes require little more than black tea bags, hot water, sugar, and boba pearls. You can make the tea as strong as you want without it turning bitter, as long as you know the secret: always make black tea with truly boiling water, and don't let it steep for more than five minutes. Add milk for milk tea if you desire.

To zhuzh up libations further, you can make a range of expert-approved beginner boba drinks, such as iced latte or lemonade. Seriously, sub liquids out with wild abandon. Strawberry quik? Go for it. Hibiscus tea? Yes ... the sky's the limit. And if you're feeling extra saucy, you can spike your boba tea or even turn up the volume on your boba pearls with leftover wine.

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