Short Stuff: Boba Tea

Boba tea is bubble tea. But what are the bubbles? Tapioca pearls! Listen in today to learn about the disputed history of this trendy beverage.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, Dave's here and spirit
Way to go, Dave, and this is short stuff.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
I think I said that's right, and hey, we want
to wish Dave well he recovers from back surgery.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Yeah, yep, he made it out on the other side,
and we're very happy for him. That's why I said,
way to go, Dave.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
That's right. I thought I didn't know if he wanted
to leave it unsaid either way.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
I think Dave's happy with it, and he's like, you
guys can keep talking about me the whole episode.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
All right, Well, where his nickname is Dave Boba TI, Well,
I'm not going to say his last name because I
don't want people to bother him. See, we just call
him the boba t guy.

Speaker 1 (00:44):
Right.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
I've never had boba t oh no no, and I
need to sure.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
I think everybody needs to have it, at least once.
I had it once. I decided immediately I didn't like it.
Oh okay, I like everything about it except for the boba.
That's what I do like. I don't like that the
gelatinous gouey chewiness of it I'm not crazy for and
I can totally see how somebody would go nuts for it,
but I also see how somebody like me just is

(01:13):
turned off by it immediately.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Well, I don't want to try it as much because
gelatinous is never a word I seek out for my mouth.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
So you can get boba tea without the boba, and
I'm sure the purists will be like, shut up, you
can't call it boba tea. You still can't. Everybody, settle down.
You just asked for it without the boba, and you
will love it. Chuck is very sweet and tasty, and
there's all sorts of neat flavors that they can put
into it, and it won't have gelatinous spears going down

(01:40):
your gullet because you accidentally forgot to chew.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
They're gonna say, all right, we'll make you one, but
you're not getting one of those big fat straws they do.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
They give you the big fat straw anyway, so you
go through it really quick.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
All right, So we're talking about boba tea or bubble tea,
and that is something that you know, I'm kind of
a dummy the first time I say all that I
was like, what in the world is going on in
that cup? Because you know, you see what looks like
a regular drink, but then you see all these little
round pearls inside of a cup. And I didn't know

(02:14):
what it was until I looked into it more back then,
and now I know because of this that that is
a Taiwanese tea and it is. There are a couple
of different competing stories on how this came about, because
there are two rival tea shops in Taiwan from the
nineteen eighties that each say, no, my person is the

(02:35):
one who did this first.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
Yeah, each one claims creation of Boba T initially. And
what's weird is there the stories are separated by just
a year. So the first one is Handling Tea Room
in Tainan, Taiwan and their founder Two Sung Ho. The
story goes that in nineteen eighty six, two found tepioca

(02:59):
balls on sale at the market and said, I'm going
to add these to my milk tea, like just had
this thought, random thought, and from that Boba T was born,
because basically Boba Ti is just tapioca balls added to
milk tea.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
Right. The other story is remarkably similar. This is the
tea house that is a rival of the other called
Chun Shu Tang. I'm not sure if that's correct or not.
I'm doing my best, and they said no. In nineteen
eighty seven, we had a twenty year old woman working
here named Lynn su Hu who had this tapioca pudding

(03:37):
it's called Finnon in Taiwan, and she just dumped it
in her tea and drank it, and that's where it started.

Speaker 1 (03:46):
Yeah, what's weird is everybody separated themselves from miss Lynn
immediately because they thought she was super weird. And yet
she may have invented boba t.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
Right, So either way, we'll probably never know who's the
actual first person the first tea shop. But it was
a big hit in Taiwan. Eventually came over to the
United States in the nineties, starting where else on the
West Coast in California, mainly generally in Taiwanese communities at
the time, and then you know kind of started becoming mainstream,

(04:17):
and I feel like in the two thousands it really
really broke out as like kind of the hot thing
for hipsters to do.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
Yeah, I was gonna say there's one hundred percent chance
that it was proto emo kids who brought it out
of the Taiwanese communities into American culture. Look at this, everybody,
So the you can't really talk about boba ta unless
you talk about milk tea, because that's kind of the
basis of it, and boba t's really new from the eighties.

(04:45):
Milk tea's not that old, considering how old Taiwan is.
It was just in the nineteen forties that a bartender
named Chang fan Chu got out of the bartending game
but still could not get the cocktail shaker out of
his hand and started mixing up teas handshaken milk teas
that would kind of froth and have bubbles, so it

(05:06):
became bubble tea milk tea, and that this went along
for several decades. People went crazy for milk tea, and
then eventually somebody thought, either to song Ho or Linceu Hui,
thought to add tapioca pudding balls.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
That's right. So you've got milk, you've got the ice,
you've got black tea, and you've got those tapioca pearls.
There are all kinds of variations now, different kinds of tea,
different kinds of milks, non milks, you know, things like
you know, cashew milk and stuff like that, almond milk.
And then if you go to one of these, you know,
boba tea places in some large urban center, you're gonna

(05:46):
have all kinds of fun and crazy variations and flavors
and toppings and things like that.

Speaker 1 (05:52):
Yep. So I say, we take a break and we'll
come back and tell everybody a little bit more about
boba tea. So, Chuck, I feel like you should take

(06:16):
the fact of the podcast. What boba means in the
first place.

Speaker 2 (06:22):
Is it something to do with Dolly Parton?

Speaker 1 (06:24):
Kind of?

Speaker 2 (06:25):
Wasn't it about boobs?

Speaker 1 (06:27):
Yeah? Boba is Taiwanese slang for boob, So they're basically saying,
this tea has a bunch of little boobs floating around
in it.

Speaker 2 (06:35):
And that stuck.

Speaker 1 (06:36):
Still yeah, still, because most people don't know what boba means.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
I guess, so well, we should talk about those bobas.
Which is the tapioca And I wasn't even sure. I mean,
maybe I've had tapioca pudding, but it's a word I
had heard, and I don't think I ever fully knew
what even tapioca was, right, but tapioca or boba is tapioca.
That's it's a starch apparently extracted from cassava root, but

(07:06):
it can also be extracted from other things.

Speaker 1 (07:08):
Right, Yeah, so kassava rus from South America, but it
grows really well in Asia to Southeast Asia, and in
particular the maritime Southeast Asia Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore,
and East Timor. Poor West Timor gets left out of everything.

Speaker 2 (07:25):
Is there a West Timor?

Speaker 1 (07:26):
I don't think so. Okay, I hope not now that
I said that. But they were making these pearls, these
tapioca pearls, not out of tapioca, but out of rice
or palm hearts. But the point is you're using a starch.
It's a ball of starch. Essentially. It's almost nutrient free,
heavy in calories. But if you prepare them just right,

(07:49):
when you add them to the bubble tea, if you
like that consistency, you're in heaven. Because they're chewy, they're mushy,
they're weird, and they're gelatinous.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
Chewy like compare to like a gummy bear or as
they say in Germany, Goomi Bellin.

Speaker 1 (08:06):
Is it really what they call it in Germany. Yeah, okay,
it's less chewy, but it's it's in a different way.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
Can you com bear to anything?

Speaker 1 (08:17):
Have you had bubble tea?

Speaker 2 (08:22):
You got me, because for about a half a beat,
I was like, I don't think I have.

Speaker 1 (08:27):
I can't, I can't, I can't. Okay, okay, no, no,
I can't imagine taking a ball of really sticky wet
rice and mashing it until there's no space between the
individual grains of rice and then chewing that. M Okay,
that's the kind of the closest I can come up with.
It's very starchy and sticky, and it can stick to

(08:49):
your teeth a little bit. It's it's nothing good if
you ask me. But again, I'm not. I'm not yucking
anybody's jum. I don't care if you like it or not.
It's fine, Yeah, it's it's just.

Speaker 2 (09:00):
Not for me, all right, Well, I just have to
try it for myself. I guess if you're making tapioca
pearls yourself, you buy them dry. Apparently you boil them
for thirty minutes and then cool them for thirty minutes,
And it sounds like to really get that disgusting consistency
just right right that you hate. It's fairly specific, like

(09:20):
if you boil them too long, it's going to be
too squishy and maybe too sticky. And if you don't
do it enough there you can't chew them. They're too hard.
So it sounds like you gotta kind of hit that
sweet spot.

Speaker 1 (09:32):
Yes, exactly, So there you can make your own boba
t now, right, that's all it takes.

Speaker 2 (09:39):
I guess so. And then you know, you make your
your shake up your drink, and then you add your
tapioka pearls and you've got your own boba tea.

Speaker 1 (09:47):
Yeah. And I think there's a Food and Wine article
about bobat and they said that there's a word in
Chinese for the perfect consistency of boba qq, like the
letter que. The letter q it means chewy. So wow,
we just came up with two Chinese slang words, Taiwanese
and a Chinese slang word. And now you know what

(10:10):
boba t is all about. And if you haven't tried it,
go out and try it. It's definitely worth trying. It's
not so disgusting that you're you're gonna just throw up
or anything like that. Although they have come up with
some that are really dancing right there on the edge. Yeah,
the one that got me. It was mentioned in a
Seattle Times post about Boba te that there's a salted

(10:33):
cheese topping that essentially has the consistency of like a
really flimsy cheesecake, but it's very salty. It's made from powdered.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
Cheese that sounds good to me on its own.

Speaker 1 (10:44):
On its own. Yes, this is floating on top of
a very sweet, milky tea drink. That's a weird combo
for me.

Speaker 2 (10:56):
That is a weird combo. I do like a milk
in my hot tea, so like in my black tea
or my breakfast tea. So you know, I could see
me liking the tea for sure.

Speaker 1 (11:05):
Yeah. If you ever go to one of these places
and they have a tarro or a dirty torro, get that,
just tell them to hold the boba or get two,
get one without the bobas so you can enjoy that
one and get one with the boba, so you can
try it at least once.

Speaker 2 (11:19):
All right, I'll try it out.

Speaker 1 (11:20):
Okay, Well, since Chuck said he's going to try it
out everybody, I means short stuff is Stuff You Should
Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
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