Food trends: bubble tea

Have you ever had bubble tea? That milk tea refreshment with weird bubbles inside? It looks like this:

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It tastes very sweet and the black balls are tapioca balls, which are chewy gummy things. Even though it looks strange, I recommend it! The original bubble tea is Earl Grey tea with milk and tapioca balls. But now you can also choose different flavors, like taro, chocolate, other tea leafs and even fruity drinks. You can also choose from different toppings (something else than black balls). They have jelly things and popping bubbles which explode liquid if you bite on them. I don’t recommend the popping bubbles in milk tea, because they will ruin the flavour.

Bubble tea comes from Taiwan, but you can get it anywhere in the rest of the world. Gong Cha is a famous milk tea brand in Asia.

gongcha

WHAT?! I did some more research about the history of bubble tea and apparently the Dutch people started pouring milk in their tea to make it less bitter and they added maple sugar. The Dutch colonised Taiwan for a while and during that time the Taiwanese learned about milk tea.

Interesting… It’s funny that there aren’t a lot of milk tea shops in the Netherlands. There are a few franchises in the big cities. Like YoYoFresh in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Den Haag. They also have some shops in South-Korea.

Bubble tea isn’t very popular in the smaller cities. Eindhoven had two bubble tea stores, one called BoBoQ, but they closed. Probably during the lack of enthusiasm. There is a Chinese grocery store which sells bubble tea drinks, but it didn’t taste very good. Only drink at franchises, my friends.

Now let’s watch Mr.Bubble Tea convince you to try him:

bubbleTEA