Taro Tapioca

Asian desserts are very different from American/European/Western desserts. The traditional ones do not have chocolates or cream and they are unlikely to be in cake, tart or pie form. My favorite types of Asian desserts usually involve beans or rice flour and are not too sweet.

Tapioca in the form of little pearls is one of the most popular Asian dessert ingredients. These little balls easily go with coconut milk and any sort of sweet soup made of beans, starchy roots or fruits. In the past two decades a gigantic form of tapioca pearls has been used in non-carbonated beverages called the Bubble Tea, Pearl Tea or Boba Tea. It is extremely time consuming to make these huge tapioca balls well. Too much cooking will turn these chewy delights into slime, and too little cooking will leave an unpleasant chalky center. The proper way of cooking these gigantic pearls is to cook and wait and repeat.

I live only 7 minutes away from a fantastic boba tea shop, so I have absolutely no motivation to make gigantic tapioca pearls in my own kitchen. For this post here, I am talking about the little ones that show up in delightful sweet soups.

Since I have no reliable source of recipes for Asian food (such as a Cooks Illustrated for Asian Food), I looked at several websites and cookbooks. There was one recipe in Joy of Cooking that recommended soaking the pearls in milk overnight. Other Asian sources suggested to soak for some amount of time, cook, wait and dunk in iced water. These pearls definitely should be cooked independently from the "sweet part" of the dessert preparation.

So far this is what worked for me: I soaked the small tapioca pearls in cold water for an hour. Then I drained and dropped them into boiling water and cooked them until they were semi-transparent, about 5 minutes with lots of stirring. After the heat was turned off, I kept the hot tapioca covered and sitting in the pot for 10 minutes or until all the tapioca pearls turned clear.

For the taro soup, I simply cooked 1-inch taro chunks in boiling water until they turned soft, about 5-8 minutes. Then I sweetened the soup with plain granulated sugar and pureed everything. Pearls were then added to the pureed soup and were served warm or cold. The taro tapioca soup is very tasty the way it is, but coconut milk can be added. I don't see the point for additional fat calories though.