Tapioca Pearls / 珍珠粉圓

One of my favourite drinks is bubble tea (珍珠奶茶), but slowly the bubble tea places I've been going to have been closing down. It's not a trend anymore and the only franchise nearby is Gong Cha and I don't like the tapioca pearls they use. Recently, I visited a mall which had Ten Ren bubble tea... But there were around 20 people waiting for their orders. Unbelievable, it was 2pm on a weekday... Don't people have to work?!  ;-P  I didn't feel like joining the queue, but it occurred to me... what if I were to make bubble tea myself??

My original idea was to buy pre-made tapioca pearls then cook and serve them in milk tea. But as I started doing a little research, I came across recipes on how to make the tapioca pearls themselves! It didn't seem that difficult and the ingredients that were required were minimal. Plus, it seemed like the healthier option as there's all this news about pre-made tapioca pearls containing carcinogens... Dunno if it's true but I have cut down on my bubble tea consumption a lot!

Anyway since tapioca pearls originated from Taiwan, I thought the best thing would be to find a Taiwanese recipe and work from there. Yes, this required me to do some translation and perhaps I may have translated wrong or used the incorrect ingredients. Why do I say this? Well first off, as you can see from the picture, the tapioca pearls I made look NOTHING like the ones that you get commercially. They are a pale tan colour instead of dark coffee brown. Also, the soft dough was just impossible to work with... It was this weird matter that was liquid one second and then solid when I touched it. So it was so tough to make the little tapioca pearls in a round shape. And when I did make them, they must have been too big coz I cooked them for triple the time required and they were still not fully cooked. The middle part of the tapioca pearls was still floury. What a mess...

Well I'm not exactly sure what went wrong... Maybe a combination of things... But I have given up on this for now. I may just buy a pack of the pre-made tapioca pearls instead of putting myself through this experiment again. =( My translated recipe is below just in case you're interested.

Ingredients (makes around 2 servings):
20g dark brown sugar
50g water
90g potato starch/flour (and a handful more for sprinkling)

Method:

1. Dissolve dark brown sugar in the water.
2. Add potato starch to the sugar water and mix well until a soft dough forms.
3. Roll into tiny balls and drop them into potato starch to keep them from sticking to each other.
4. Put the starch covered balls through a sieve to remove the excess flour.
5. Boil a pot of water and cook the dough balls for 10 minutes or more (until they are almost transparent).
6. Remove from water and serve in a bowl with a sprinkle of dark brown sugar (or use it for bubble tea).