Chippy Cakes

Homemade Taho + Bubble Tea

Saturday 10 March 2012

Hey guys!!! A couple of weeks ago, I attempted to make Taho. Taho is a well-known street food in the Philippines made out of soft tofu, sugar syrup and tapioca balls. Every morning, the vendor would walk around the neighbourhood, shouting 'Tahooooooo' on the top of his lungs, as the kids gather round and queue up to buy some. The vendor carries Taho in a containter that looks like this...

(Image stolen from Google)

Every bit of it reminds me of my childhood so I attempted to make it at home. As obviously, you would get absolutely none of this in England. Note the 'attempt' there... I didn't recreate it exactly as how I remembered it. But nonetheless, it tasted good! All you need are tapioca pearls, brown sugar syrup and soft silken tofu!

To cook the tapioca, just boil 4 cups of water for 1 cup of tapioca pearls. It should take around 40 minutes to 1 hour to make sure that it is properly cooked through. You can tell that it's cooked when it turns completely transparent. Once its cooked, just sieve the water out and let it sit into room temperature. Then, to make the brown sugar syrup.. Just cook 1 cup of brown sugar in 1 cup of water, until it turns into a thick syrup-like consistency. Make sure to NEVER leave the pan while it's cooking and to mix it continuously as it may crystallize and turn hard if you don't do so. As for the soft silken tofu, I just moved it into a bowl, blast it in the microwave for 1 minute in full power.

To assemble the dish, or shall we say, the glass... Just plop them all in to your desired proportions! That's what I do though, honestly. Then mix it thoroughly and eat away with your spoon! When I made this, it was really nice and refreshing. Plus, I considered it to be such an accomplishment to even make this myself from scratch! (Maybe not quite from scratch...) The only problem I had with it though was that it was not sweet enough for my sweet tooth... Just gotta add more sugar...

Now the next half of this long post is about Bubble Tea! It is the name given to the new drink craze going on recently, which is typically made out of tea, milk, sugar and tapioca pearls. In the bubble tea cafes, there's usually a wide variety of flavours to choose from and they come in fascinating different colours! So I decided to make it at home and give it a shot!

It's quite simple really. Just cook the tapioca pearls in boiling water. I bought the packet above from an Oriental shop in Chinatown London. It comes with clear instructions: to boil 10 cups of water for 1 cup of tapioca, wait for the pearls to rise to the top then cover with the lid and simmer for 15 minutes! Once it's cooked, it should look nice and plump like below...

Then just make the brown sugar syrup, as written in my Taho recipe above. Wait until it cools down to room temperature then mix with cold milk! In a glass, place a handful of ice, tapioca pearls then pour in the milk! It's as simple as that! And it tastes just like how they do in the cafes! Yummy!

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