So hop off the box ok? And to complain about how words change depending on regional use is to blindly misunderstand how dialects naturally form over time and by extension new languages. Mike here even so graciously suggested the Taiwanese refer to it as bubble tea when using English and they invented it so maybe the correct way to go about it is to call it bubble tea or bo ba nai cha but not a butchering of both. Hi Jason, thanks for your comment. I can see how being from LA will make you feel so strongly about calling it Boba!
Your email address will not be published. Boba or Bubble Tea? Is it called Boba Tea or Bubble Tea? Are Bubble Tea and Boba Tea the same thing?
Why is it called Pearl Milk Tea? How to Open a Bubble Tea Shop:. First Name. Today, the U. But who on earth came up with the idea of putting tapioca balls in tea? Boba culture started in the late '80s, and its origins are debated.
Milk tea was already well-known in Taiwan, as tea drinking was a robust practice in East Asia. Both shaved ice and tapioca balls were considered common desserts at the time. At some point, someone thought to combine three popular elements into one beverage—tapioca balls on the bottom, followed by a layer of shaved ice, and milk tea to fill out the rest of the drink. The tea became known as boba because the term is slang for breasts in Chinese a reference the spherical shape of the tapioca balls.
Boba evolved over time as it grew more widespread throughout Taiwan: stall owners started introducing fruit boba, using fruit powders and syrups in lieu of actual fruit which was too expensive and went bad quickly. The topping choices expanded beyond tapioca balls to include elements like grass jelly, almond jelly, egg pudding, and red beans. Even in classic boba, the milk in the milk tea was swapped out for non-dairy creamer, and as a result, the drink became known for its incredibly sweet, creamy taste.
Making boba is quite simple—the hardest and most important part is preparing the tapioca balls. They are sold dry, and then have to be boiled for 30 minutes, and cooled for 30 minutes. Your tapioca balls can't be too squishy, or all of them will stick together in the cup.
To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. How bubble tea became far more than just a drink to young Asian Americans. If you buy something from an Eater link, Vox Media may earn a commission.
See our ethics policy. Bubble tea has been around in the U. The shop where I took my first sip, a place called Bubble Island just off of campus, soon became a centerpiece of my college life. We would spend hours playing board games and chatting at Bubble Island. A couple years in, I could enter the store and, more often than not, spot someone I knew among the customers or working behind the counter.
It felt like a kind of secret language for which only my Asian-American friends and I held the Rosetta Stone, a currency of exchange in a foreign landscape in which I otherwise felt lost and alone. With the explosive growth of online communities like Subtle Asian Traits — the Asian diaspora-centric Facebook group that has accrued more than 1. These online communities are border-transcending virtual bubble tea shops filled with an endless stream of memes, jokes, and confessions about boba, strict parents, and other markers of what is often imagined as the universal experience of children of Asian immigrants in the West.
Here, bubble tea, as in the material world of boba shops, is more than just a drink. And that, of course, comes with its own complications. The story of bubble tea is one of disparate parts coming together, a collision of cultural products and practices in one drink. Its origins date back much further than the last few decades, with historical roots in Middle-period China, according to Miranda Brown, a professor of Chinese studies at the University of Michigan.
Europeans took home the idea that tea had to be drunk with milk and salt or sugar, while the practice of adding dairy to tea eventually fell out of favor in China. When the colonial British returned to the country in the 19th century, they reintroduced milk tea back into the Chinese diet, as can be seen most clearly in former British colonies like Hong Kong, which has a tradition of milk tea made with condensed milk.
By the time tapioca starch, derived from the South American cassava plant, came to Taiwan via Southeast Asia during the colonial period, there was already a longstanding Chinese and Southeast Asian tradition of eating jelly-like starch desserts, such as sago pearls, in sweet soups. The fusion of those two traditions — milk tea and chewy, gelatinous pearls — eventually gave rise to bubble tea. From there, bubble tea made its way to the U. After Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of , which abolished the immigration policy that restricted the entry of Asians, Southern and Eastern Europeans, and members of other ethnic groups, waves of Taiwanese immigrants came to the U.
Many of those immigrants settled in and had families in California — around LA, in particular — giving the state the largest number of Taiwanese immigrants in the U. It was about the physical space and what it facilitated — friendship, familiarity, the feeling of belonging — more than the drink itself, Wei says. After all, the ingredients for the drinks in those early years all largely came from the same distributors, she notes in her LA Weekly story.
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