I’m looking for a recipe (and, on preview, a name) for this dessert that I see a lot, either made by my Chinese friends or served at the more authentic Chinese restaurants. The better versions of it are made with coconut milk, coconut shavings, and something that resembles tapioca, but could be some type of rice, or barley seed, or something else. (If it helps, it seems to be second in popularity only to red bean soup.)
The final product is milky white with small, glutenous semi-clear spheres in it, has a soupy consistency and is generally served warm; at a church party I went to it was ladled in to styrofoam cups from a large cauldron.
And since I’m asking, does anyone know how to make ‘bubble tea’? I’m under the impression that you can just cook large-style tapioca and add them to juice or tea or milk beverages, but I don’t want to waste my tapioca if I’m wrong.
Usually, for Bubble Tea (it was in the rage in Singapore some years ago), the ‘pearls’ are specially prepared and sold at shops. I’m not sure if there’s anyway to make your own, though.
I’ve never made bubble tea at home (there are plenty of stores around here that make it), but I’ve seen web pages that describe how to do it. So you might just want to start off by Googling it. The Wikipedia article on bubble tea has a number of links, for example.
I’m not familiar with the specific dessert you mention, but it sounds kind of similar to Thai rice pudding. I’ve had a couple of different versions of it. One is a soupy mix of long-grain rice, either white or black, in sweetened coconut milk. The other is a much thicker concoction of sweetened short-grain glutinous rice (aka sticky rice) served with any of a number of toppings (mango, small roasted beans, or a mix of coconut shavings and fish flakes).
There is a restaurant here in Seattle that occaisonally serves that wonderful dessert. It is sort of a soupy, coconutty, ricey, sweet soup. It looks like congealed snot, and I was very skeptical when it was proudly brought out by the manager to us, but it is one of the most heavenly tasting dessert I’ve ever had.