SPEAKER_05: Hey and welcome to The Short Stuff, I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. Dave's here in spirit. Way to go Dave. And this is Short Stuff I think I said.
SPEAKER_06: That's right. And hey, we want to wish Dave well as he recovers from back surgery.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. Yep. He made it out on the other side and we're very happy for him. That's why I said way to go Dave.
SPEAKER_06: That's right. I thought, I didn't know if you wanted to leave it unsaid. Either way, I think Dave's happy with it.
SPEAKER_05: He's like, you guys can keep talking about me the whole episode. Alright, well his nickname is Dave Bobaty.
SPEAKER_06: Well, I'm not going to say his last name because I don't want people to bother him. C. We just call him the Bobaty guy. Right.
SPEAKER_06: I've never had Bobaty. Oh no? No, and I need to.
SPEAKER_05: Sure, I think everybody needs to have it at least once. I had it once, I decided immediately I didn't like it. Oh, okay. I like everything about it except for the boba. That's what I didn't like. I don't like that. The gelatinous gooey chewiness of it, I'm not crazy for. And I can totally see how somebody would go nuts for it, but I also see how somebody like me is turned off by it immediately. Well, I don't want to try it as much because gelatinous is never a word I seek out for
SPEAKER_06: my mouth.
SPEAKER_05: So you can get Bobaty without the boba and I'm sure the purists will be like, shut up, you can't call it Bobaty. You still can, everybody, settle down. You just ask for it without the boba and you will love it, Chuck. It's very sweet and tasty and there's all sorts of neat flavors that they can put into it. And it won't have gelatinous spheres going down your gullet because you accidentally forgot to chew.
SPEAKER_06: They're going to say, all right, well I'll make you one, but you're not getting one of those big fat straws.
SPEAKER_05: They do, they give you the big fat straw anyway, so you go through it really quick.
SPEAKER_06: All right, so we're talking about Bobaty or bubble tea and that is something that the, you know, I'm kind of a dummy. The first time I saw that, I was like, what in the world is going on in that cup? Because you know, you see what looks like a regular drink, but then you see all these little round pearls inside of a cup and I didn't know what it was until I looked into it more back then. And now I know because of this that that is a Taiwanese tea and it is, there are a couple of different competing stories on how this came about because there are two rival tea shops in Taiwan from the 1980s that each say, no, my person is the one who did this first.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, each one claims creation of Bobaty initially and what's weird is the stories are separated by just a year. So the first one is Hanlin Tea Room in Tainan, Taiwan and their founder Tu Sung Ho, the story goes that in 1986 Tu found tapioca balls on sale at the market and said, I'm going to add these to my milk tea. Like just had this thought, random thought and from that Bobaty was born because basically Bobaty is just tapioca balls added to milk tea.
SPEAKER_06: Right. The other story is remarkably similar. This is the tea house that is a rival of the other called Chun Shu Tang. I'm not sure if that's correct or not. I'm doing my best. And they said, no, in 1987 we had a 20-year-old woman working here named Lin Su Hu who had this tapioca pudding. It's called Fen Yan in Taiwan and she just dumped it in her tea and drank it and that's where it started.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. What's weird is everybody separated themselves from Ms. Lin immediately because they thought she was super weird and yet she may have invented Bobaty. Right.
SPEAKER_06: So either way, we'll probably never know who's the actual first person or the first tea shop but it was a big hit in Taiwan, eventually came over to the United States in the 90s starting where else? On the West Coast in California mainly. Generally in Taiwanese communities at the time and then kind of started becoming mainstream and I feel like in the 2000s it really, really broke out as like kind of the hot thing for hipsters to do. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: I was going to say there's a 100 percent chance that it was proto emo kids who brought it out of the Taiwanese communities into American culture. Look at this everybody. So you can't really talk about Bobaty unless you talk about milk tea because that's kind of the basis of it and Bobaty is really new from the 80s. Milk tea is not that old considering how old Taiwan is. It was just in the 1940s that a bartender named Chang Fan Shu got out of the bartending game but still could not get the cocktail shaker out of his hand and started mixing up teas, handshaken milk teas that would kind of froth and have bubbles so it became bubble tea, milk tea. And this went along for several decades. People went crazy for milk tea and then eventually somebody thought either Tu Song Ho or Lin Tzu Hui thought to add tapioca pudding balls.
SPEAKER_06: That's right. So you've got milk, you've got the ice, you've got black tea and you've got those tapioca pearls. So there are all kinds of variations now, different kinds of tea, different kinds of milks, non-milks, things like cashew milk and stuff like that, almond milk. And then if you go to one of these Bobaty places in some large urban center, you're going to have all kinds of fun and crazy variations and flavors and toppings and things like that.
SPEAKER_05: Yep. So I say we take a break and we'll come back and tell everybody a little more about Bobaty.
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SPEAKER_06: Is it something to do with Dolly Parton?
SPEAKER_05: Kinda.
SPEAKER_06: Wasn't it about boobs?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, boba is Taiwanese slang for boob. So they're basically saying this tea has a bunch of little boobs floating around in it.
SPEAKER_06: And that stuck still.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, still, because most people don't know what boba means.
SPEAKER_06: I guess so. Well, we should talk about those bobas, which is the tapioca. And I wasn't even sure, I mean, maybe I've had tapioca pudding, but it's a word I had heard and I don't think I ever fully knew what even tapioca was. But tapioca or boba is tapioca that's, it's a starch, apparently, extracted from cassava root. But it can also be extracted from other things, right?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so cassava root is from South America, but it grows really well in Asia too, Southeast Asia, and in particular, the maritime Southeast Asia, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and East Timor. Poor West Timor gets left out of everything. Is there a West Timor? I don't think so. Okay. I hope not, now that I said that. But they were making these pearls, these tapioca pearls, not out of tapioca, but out of rice or palm hearts. The point is you're using a starch. It's a ball of starch, essentially. It's almost nutrient-free, heavy in calories, but if you prepare them just right and you add them to the bubble tea, if you like that consistency, you're in heaven, because they're chewy, they're mushy, they're weird, and they're gelatinous.
SPEAKER_06: Chewy like, compare it to like a gummy bear, or as they say in Germany, gummybaren.
SPEAKER_05: Is that really what they call it in Germany? Oh yeah. Okay. It's less chewy, but it's in a different way.
SPEAKER_06: Can you compare it to anything?
SPEAKER_05: Have you had bubble tea?
SPEAKER_06: You got me, because for about a half a beat, I was like, I don't think I have.
SPEAKER_05: I can't, I can't, I can't. Okay. No, no, I can't. Imagine taking a ball of really sticky wet rice and mashing it until there's no space between the individual grains of rice, and then chewing that. That's kind of the closest I can come up with. It's very starchy and sticky, and it can stick to your teeth a little bit. It's nothing good, if you ask me, but again, I'm not yucking anybody's yum. I don't care if you like it or not. It's fine. Yeah, yeah. It's just not for me.
SPEAKER_06: All right, well, I just have to try it for myself, I guess. If you're making tapioca pearls yourself, you buy them dry, apparently you boil them for 30 minutes and then cool them for 30 minutes, and it sounds like to really get that disgusting consistency just right that you hate, it's fairly specific. If you boil them too long, it's going to be too squishy and maybe too sticky, and if you don't do it enough, you can't chew them. They're too hard. So it sounds like you got to kind of hit that sweet spot.
SPEAKER_05: Yes, exactly. So there, you can make your own boba tea now, right? That's all it takes?
SPEAKER_06: I guess so. And then you make your—shake up your drink, and then you add your tapioca pearls, and you've got your own boba tea.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and I think there was a Food and Wine article about boba tea, and they said that there's a word in Chinese for the perfect consistency of boba. It's qq, like the letter q, the letter q, and it means chewy. So wow, we just came up with two Chinese slang words, Taiwanese and a Chinese slang word. And now you know what boba tea is all about, and if you haven't tried it, go out and try it. It's definitely worth trying. It's so disgusting that you're going to just throw up or anything like that, although they have come up with some that are really dancing right there on the edge.
SPEAKER_06: What, like the flavors?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. The one that got me, it was mentioned in a Seattle Times post about boba tea, that there's a salted cheese topping that essentially has the consistency of like a really flimsy cheesecake, but it's very salty, and it's made from powdered cheese. That sounds good to me on its own.
SPEAKER_05: On its own, yes. This is floating on top of a very sweet, milky tea drink. That's a weird combo for me.
SPEAKER_06: That is a weird combo. I do like milk in my hot tea, like in my black tea or my breakfast tea, so I could see me liking the tea for sure. Yeah, if you ever go to one of these places and they have a taro or a dirty taro, get
SPEAKER_05: that. Just tell them to hold the boba. Or get two. Get one without the boba so you can enjoy that one, and get one with the boba so you can try it at least once. All right, I'll try it out. Okay. Well, since Chuck said he's going to try it out, everybody, that means short stuff is out.
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