How to Make Bubble Tea At Home
Making bubble tea at home can be super easy and can take between 5 minutes to an hour depending on how complicated you want it to be. If you want bubble tea in less than 15 minutes, we highly recommend purchasing a DIY kit. It comes with everything you need to make a quick and delicious cup of bubble tea!
If you’re going to make it at home by yourself, make sure you have these three key ingredients: tea of choice, sweetener, and creamer. Let’s get into it!
Tea
Since your tea may get watered down after adding ice, we recommend using ones with a stronger flavour such as black or jasmine tea. Using any tea works, however. Just so long as you have tea at the core of your drink!
Sweetener
When making bubble tea at home, you can use any sweetener you have lying around. This could be brown sugar, honey, or condensed milk. Most bubble tea shops will use brown sugar, fructose, or a simple syrup. If you are making a fruit bubble tea, you can add in your fruit-flavoured syrup here as well!
Creamer
For milk teas, this added creamer gives that characteristic silkiness that bubble tea has. Most boba shops will put in a lactose-free creamer but you can put in your own creamer of choice. It can come in liquid or powdered form. If you’re making a fruit tea or green tea, you may want to leave out the creamer since the creaminess is unnecessary to the recipe.
Tapioca
Although it’s not one of the key ingredients, we think tapioca is pretty essential in achieving authentic bubble tea at home. You can easily find premade packs in stores now; all you have to do is boil some water! With Retea tapioca, once your water is boiled, you can put in your uncooked pearls and let them sit in the boiling water for 2-3 minutes or until you get your desired chewiness. Then, turn the heat off and let the pearls simmer for another 2-3 minutes.
Once your tapioca is finished cooking, rinse it under cold water for 20 seconds. We recommend using a strainer so you don’t lose any! You can also just rest them in a bowl of water. Scoop them out and mix with brown sugar or honey in a bowl. To maximize the sweetener, let it sit for 5 minutes.
Now your bubble tea is ready to serve! Of course, this may be a quick method, but we still think the quickest method is a kit so you can have all the ingredients right at your fingertips.