Here are the pitfalls of making boba pearls and tips to DIY great chewy brown sugar boba pearls to create your bubble milk tea at home. This cup shown is from Tiger Sugar. Learn how to make your own at home during this period using only 3 ingredients.
There are 3 ingredients for boba pearls – 50 grams brown sugar, 100 grams tapioca flour/ starch and 65grams water. Additional of 30 grams of flour for dusting and 80 grams brown sugar for mixing the cooked boba.
Pitfall: buying brown sugar instead of black sugar. Although commonly known as brown sugar boba, the sugar that is being used is really black sugar. Make sure you get black sugar instead of brown sugar. The brown sugar that is referred to below is actually black sugar you get from the supermarket or store.
Combine 65 g of water, 50 g of brown sugar and heat it up on low heat till sugar fully dissolves. Now you have created a mixture of brown sugar syrup.
Pitfall: Turn off the heat now, if you do not turn off the heat, you will get lumpy bits of flour when you mix in the flour.
Tip: Turn off the heat, and add 2 Tbsp of Tapioca starch/ flour to the brown sugar mixture, mix and combine the flour. Once the flour is fully mixed in, turn on low heat again and mix till the mixture thickens.
This helps to create a “cooked” dough which makes the boba chewier.
Remove the mixture from heat, add in the remaining Tapioca starch/ flour and mix with spatula till a soft dough forms.
Next, either uses a dough hook with a table top mixer or hand knead the dough on your table top. If you are going to hand knead the dough, do dust the table top with more tapioca flour to prevent the dough from sticking.
Tip: Word of caution, the dough is relatively hot now, so dust your hand with a layer of tapioca flour before kneading. The flour kind of help to ease the direct contact of your skin to the hot dough.
Knead the dough till the surface is smooth, supple and a nice light brown hue.
Now make some skinny “snakes” with the dough about the thickness of your pinky.
Cut them with a dough scraper to about a 1cm width.
Now roll them all into boba.
Tip: make the boba slightly smaller as the boba pearls will expand when cooked.
Tip: Dust all the boba with a layer of tapioca starch again to prevent them from sticking to each other when boiling.
Prepare a pot of boiling water, and add all the boba pearls to the boiling water.
Pitfall: if you use too shallow a pot, the boba pearls will risk sticking to one another in the process of boiling and spill over while boiling.
Tips: use a deep pot that is at least 18 cm to cook the boba so that they have enough “rooms” to move around during cooking.
Swirl the boba around constantly with a spatula when boiling to prevent them from sticking to one another or worse get stuck and burnt to the pot base.
Once the boba float to the surface, you need to cover the pot and cook for another 15 mins on high heat, to fully cook it.
After that, turn off the heat, cover the pot and let the boba cook in the residue heat for another 10mins.
After that bring the boba to a boil again, strain and transfer to an ice water bath.
Next prepare the brown sugar syrup, warm up a saucer pot and add 40grams of brown sugar to the pan and add the cooled boba pearls back into the warm pan with brown sugar.
Mix them till the sugar is all melted and until a caramelised aroma is released.
Now the boba pearls are ready to be assembled! For those who are lacto intolerant, you can make some tea to go with your boba, otherwise make a brown sugar boba milk.
Roll the boba sugar along the walls of your glass to make the “tiger” stripes.
Tip: Let the “tiger stripes” sit for a while before adding your milk, the tiger stripes will be more defined and not washed out when you add the milk.
Enjoy the homemade boba milk tea with “Tiger Stripes”.