Make Bubble Tea at Home!

A prepared cup of lovely bubble tea.

For the longest time, I thought bubble tea was something too fancy or complicated to ever make myself, limiting my enjoyment to restaraunts and cafes. Often expensive and hard to find in small towns like mine, and some vendors not having any without caffeine, I barely got to drink the stuff. I've always really liked it, and one day I punched in a couple questions into a search engine and realized it doesn't have to be that way. Enter: home brewed bubble tea!

The process is a bit more involved than brewing regular tea. The most important ingredient are the "bubbles" themselves, called tapioca pearls! You won't find them on their own at many grocers, not even Wal-Mart. Unless you have a nice health or herbal or whatever store in your town that caters to these needs, you may have to order them online like I do. In addition to the bubbles, you will also need straws large enough to drink them through. Thankfully both of these items can be found at a reasonble price on Amazon. If you live somewhere that Amazon can't ship these, just look up tapioca pearls and boba straws on your local service sites and see what you can find. Amazon links here:

The straws are very cheap and can be reused and washed. The tapioca pearls need to be put in the fridge after opening them! A reccomended measurement of pearls per tea is 1/3 of a cup, or 50 grams, before cooking them. Each bag linked above has about 5 such portions, making the total cost of each homemade bubble tea only about $0.79! Thats WAY cheaper than a cafe for sure.

The Process

You will need the following:

Firstly, start brewing your tea of choice. My favorites are chamomile, rooibos, ginger tumeric, and vanilla chai. Trying many different types of tea is encouraged. For my 24oz serving glass, I brew 12oz of hot tea. You will want to make it more concentrated than if you were drinking just the tea, as you will also be adding milk and ice (if you want). I use two or three tea bags. I reccomend steeping it as long as you're willing to wait for it, however this doesn't work with all teas because some get bitter if you over steep them. If you like iced bubble tea, an alternative approach is to use a large pitcher to brew large amounts of tea in, and then put that into the fridge. That way the tea will already be cold and ice will not be needed, as ice waters down the flavor and requires a more concentrated brew to make up for it.

Next, the amount of water you need to boil for the pearls will depend on the size of your pot. Make sure the water is high enough that it completely covers the pearls and gives them some space to float to the top. The packaging of the pearls suggests to use 10 cups of water per 1 cup of pearls, but that seems like too much to me! So I use 2 cups.

Once the water is at a rolling boil, lower the heat to medium and slowly pour the pearls in. Set a timer for 5 minutes. Before walking away from the pot, wait for the pearls to start floating up to the top of the water and when they do, cover the pot.

After the 5 minutes have passed, remove the pot from the heat, leave the pot covered, and let it stand for 5 minutes. The whole process from boiling through steeping takes 10 minutes. When done, strain or scoop the pearls out.

The packaging for the pearls suggests pouring the pearls into a cold bath before serving. I always make iced bubble tea, so to do this I pour the 1 cup of ice into the serving cup and pour in some coconut milk, then pour the pearls into that, and then pour the tea. If you prefer hot bubble tea, you can use cool tap water or maybe just skip this step entirely.

Lastly, once the tea and pearls are mixed in the serving cup, top off the cup with your choice of milk or milk alternative, and stir. For a few minutes of work and some time waiting for steeping and boiling, you have a bubble tea! Congrats!