On balls in the mouth

[beetiger]

I’m having a minor obsession with bubble tea, right now. Sweet and chewy and creamy and complicated and silly-looking, requiring inexpensive but clearly specialized equipment to do it right. I haven’t been able to find someone in Westchester making it, though, and I feel silly taking a trip into Manhattan for, well, a soft drink. I liked Orbitz too, in its day. Somewhere in my files I have a food-scientisty formulation sheet for making roughly that.

However, I don’t like caviar at all. I especially don’t like salmon roe, which to a first approximation looks quite a bit like the tapioca bits in bubble tea. But it’s not chewy, it’s squirty. And you don’t eat it with a straw.

Personal taste is a quirky thing.

Comments

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

Orbitz was interesting, and I really wanted it to succeed, and I really wanted to like it, but it didn't taste very good at all.

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

I hate salmon roe too, for the same reasons, but I love flying fish roe. They're tiny and crunchy and bubbly and so orange, and don't forget the look on your friends' faces when you tell them what the stuff is on the California-maki they just ate.

I like tapioca products in general -- I think I developed a taste when I thought I was gluten-intolerant and went on a wheat-free diet -- but I haven't quite been able to get into bubble tea, somehow. I love it on principle. I would've liked Orbitz if the flavors weren't so darned weird. What I really want to find is a place that does some of the more authentic Thai desserts, like the pink tapioca-and-agar jellies our campus Thai association used to serve at events. I don't know what possesses restaurants to serve mango sticky rice and ginger ice cream, when Thai desserts are traditional, simple, and so good...

[beetiger.livejournal.com]

Well, okay, it's true, the flavor systems were really hideous, and I could actually drink very much of it. But I loved the matrix!

[perlandria.livejournal.com]

Boba tea good! (You'de never guess that from the bubble tea community on LJ I belong to, woulcha?).
Tea Ren has decent mail order supplies and I've had all their flavors. They are, except for ones I don't like the taste of anyhow like green bean, good. I am tempted to get the green apple and peach drink powders just to drink without boba.
The local asian supermarket has freezer section individual boba tea kits, and HYOOG! 8 inch square blocks of (it looks like precooked) tapioca balls that are shelf stable. The HYOOG! block isn't very practical, but if you ever want one for a party - let Paka and I know and we can ship one out to ya.

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

I would've liked Orbitz if the flavors weren't so darned weird.

*blink*

*blink*

This, coming from a person whose most famous form is a lava lamp shaped like a vixen?

I never thought that we'd find the end of your range of 'weird', hon. Do I dare take you to 'The Sweet Booth' in Oakland, where they serve things like 'Jar Jar Supreme' and about a hundred different kinds of tapioca drinks?

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

I adore bubble tea!

I inflict it on all my friends!

It's a Good Thing about being on the West Coast: Bubble Tea everywhere, in hundreds of flavors. At least one place makes ice cream blends with bubbles. Not just American flavors -- sesame-flavored, taro-flavored, and durian-flavored. (I don't care for the last one.) A Very Good Thing.

[tygermoonfoxx.livejournal.com]

Oooohhhh....*sighs in rapture* I have GOT to either make me some of this or find a place that distributes it. It sounds absolutely heavenly.

[perlandria.livejournal.com]

It CAN be heavenly. It can be bland and overly sweet. It is a commestible and subject to the whims of assembly. Good bobba is a dark medium brown, with a firm bite that gets almost chewy in the center and in no way slimey or crunchy. The tapioca is very permeable (as I accidently found out when diluting my drink with apple soda, carbonation hurts!), so it soaks up the flavors.
My personal opinion is that green tea with taro is a good first bubble drink. Exotic but approachable, the marshmallowy sweet taro flavor combines well with the caramelish tapioca balls, balanced by the delicate astringency of the green tea. And it is (at least it should be) a pretty lavender color, which makes the bubbles look black in contrast.

umm not that I am opinionated or anything.
*blushes*

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, this is exactly how I feel too -- well, about fish roes. Salmon roe has just never done it for me, but the flying fish is... well, 'murr' is the best word I have for it. The taste is just salty enough, and the texture is absolutely perfect. I'm a big bubble tea fan myself, too, although I tend to like the slightly less tea-heavy versions.

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

The wonderful old eastern-european secretary at the company I used to work at described the taste, when I brought some back from the Pike Place Market, as being like 'drinking tiny little frogs'.

Whether this is encouraging or not is left up to you. :-)

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

There was one flavor -- in keeping with classic junk food tradition, I think it was "Red" -- that tasted less like ass. I quite enjoyed it, although a drink you had to chew up was slightly unsettling.
I'm stunned that I'm not the only one in the Western Hemisphere that wasn't repulsed by Orbitz. It was in the stores for, what, about half an hour? Hell, I even went to their lame/cool website and downloaded the Orbitz screensaver. Unfortunately that was about ten hard drive crashes ago...

[neillparatzo.livejournal.com]

I have a half-drunk bottle of Orbitz in the fridge.

From 1996.

Written on the side of the bottle are all the fridge cleanings it has survived.

[orb2069.livejournal.com]

You know, on a purely philosophical level, I really want to love tapioca drinks. It's got round stuff in it, and I like round stuff. I like Tapioca pudding.

But I had an oriental drink with 'dragon pearls' in it one time when I was in California, and I just coulden't stop thinking about boogers.

(PS - I forgot to add your name to my 'frequent viewing' filter. And I miss stuff like this! Sigh.)