Condensed milk is an extremely common ingredient bubble tea, but some recipes will also call for creamers or fresh milk. Milk and Substitutesĭairy additives are the other major concern for vegans. When making bubble tea at home, simply choose whichever vegan sweetener you would use for ordinary tea.Īlmost all of them will work, but they will taste slightly different from each other, so it's reasonable to experiment to find the one that best suits your tastes. In most cases, some of them will be vegan and some of them will not.īe sure to look up a list of vegan sweeteners before visiting any tea shop to make sure that you know which ones are safe and which are not. Some shops will also offer a list of sweetener options. If there are no special requests, they usually err on the side of honey, so vegan need to be sure to ask every time. Some tea shops will only offer honey, but many of them will offer vegan substitutes, such as agave, by request. The single most common choice is honey, which is not vegan. Sweeteners are one of the big problems areas for bubble tea. If you want to be especially safe, you can always make your own tapioca pearls without too much work. The pearls are white in their natural state, so a white pearl is a sign that nothing has been added to it. When in doubt, opt for white tapioca pearls instead of dark ones. The most common addition is sugar, which is normally safe, but there are exceptions. That having been said, many manufacturers add in sweeteners or flavorings, and there's no guarantee that those additives are vegan. That's a reasonable concern, but vegans rarely need to worry about them.Ī tapioca ball is just a sphere of starch that comes from the cassava root. That means that many people are unfamiliar with them, and worry that they might not be vegan. The tapioca pearls, sometimes called tapioca balls, are generally rare outside of a few Eastern cuisines. Fortunately, there are only a few ingredients that might be a cause for concern, so it's fairly easy to check a recipe to see if there are any animal products in it. The vegan forms also tend to be much cheaper, so they can be a good tool for encouraging non-vegan friends to cut some animal products out of their diets. There are plenty of people that have found ways to do it, and they usually make much better drinks than non-vegan providers.

That ingredient list may make it look like it is impossible to get a vegan boba drink, but substitutions make it very possible. Any type of tea can be used, and the variety will have a huge impact on the flavor of the drink. Finally, all of those components will be mixed into tea. Most varieties will also include either milk or fruit, or occasionally both. Most of them also include some sort of sweetener, which is most often honey.

The tapioca pearls are the most distinctive feature, and they can be found in every type. There are a lot of different types of Boba out there, but they all have a few things in common. New version of the drink began to appear as it became more popular, and it soon spread all over the world. The tapioca pearls also resembled bubbles, and those two features gave the drink its name. Since the tea had to be shaken to mix the flavorings properly, it was filled with bubbles. The drink only dates back to 1983, when street vendor in Taiwan named Liu Han-Chieh added tapioca pearls to chilled and flavored tea. What Is Bubble Tea?īubble tea is a recent invention with a fairly short history. If you want to be confident that you can drink your bubble tea, you're going to have to learn a little bit about the ingredients and either check labels thoroughly or produce your own. However, there are also recipes that do use animal products, and manufacturers don't always bother with clear labeling. That's more than enough to make sure that vegan options are available. It is very easy to make bubble tea without including anything that comes from an animal, and doing so if often cheaper than using animal products. Naturally, that has left plenty of people wondering if vegan Boba is available. Bubble tea, also called Boba tea, is one of the most popular drinks to come out of Taiwan in the last few decades.

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