Boba tea

Craving boba tea in San Francisco yesterday and unable to make it to my boba tea stand on Stockton street in Chinatown because of the New year’s parade and all of a sudden  : BANG ! I see a sign on a street off Valencia , in the Mission district : BOBA GUYS …….what a perfect place.  It is an artisanal boba shop where everything is  healthy and organic, the menu is fantastic , their artwork and shop design too and the milky tea and boba is not in fluorescent colors like in my Chinatown stand , which is also fun since I can’t read chinese so I do not know what I am drinking …pink bubble, yellow bubble , green bubble more or less : peach, lime, mango, coconut etc

There is a thing about the large straw and the jelly balls and how you get them from the bottom of the container that when I try to write about it it sounds obscene….so forget it….

This is the blurb on the Boba Guys  website :

For our milk teas, we use only the finest: Straus Family Creamery organic milk accompanied with home-brewed heirloom organic tea from the world’s finest tea purveyors. Our syrup is homemade which means you’ll see no signs of powders and artificial syrups. We also use Grade A balls. (We just like saying that.)     Our almond jelly and grass jelly is made from scratch if you prefer jelly over balls.

and here is a simple recipe on how to make it from scratch :

This is a drink that originated in Taiwan in the 1980’s and spread throughout Southeast Asia before finding its way to the US. Most of us think of bubble tea as being synonymous with boba tapioca pearls, but bubble tea was originally just a cold milk tea that was shaken until frothy. Sometimes boba were added, but basil seeds or cubes of jelly were also used.

You can find boba at almost any Asian grocery store or online. These marble-sized spheres are made from tapioca, just like the smaller pearls we use for tapioca pudding. They come in a range of colors, but all boba have a fairly neutral flavor. Once cooked, it’s best to mix them with some sugar syrup—this gives them some sweetness and also helps preserve any pearls you’re not using right away.