BOBA TEA KIT FREE
You’re free to drink your bubble tea while it’s hot, though I find that it’s much more satisfying to drink cold, so I like to pour it all into a cocktail shaker, add a few ice cubes, and give it a good shake. After scooping them out of the saucepan, they’re ready to be added into the milk-tea mixture. While the kettle is on, I use a small saucepan to bring about two cups of water to a boil, and I throw in the bubbles until they’re translucent. The whole thing is very simple, even for someone like me who’s otherwise pretty culinarily challenged: I put on my electric kettle to boil tea, then I use two bags of (decaf, because I like having the option of drinking it before bed without getting jittery) Lipton black tea, a splash of half-and-half - bubble-tea purists will tell you to use lactose-free milk or milk powder, but I prefer my tea a little more rich - and a teaspoon or two of table sugar.
I’ve since gotten the chance to refine my bubble-tea-making process, even as my favorite boba spots have largely reopened (and stayed open).
Left to its own devices, tapioca is flavorless and pretty much nutritionless, but it makes for a very satisfying, chewy addition to tea-based drinks.) Intrigued, I threw it into my shopping cart and took it home, and to my pleasant surprise, it did, in fact, live up to its promise. (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.
BOBA TEA KIT PLUS
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). 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.
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