— sometimes with a meal, usually on its own. It always sort of hovered on the periphery of my social life, serving as an occasion to catch up with a friend or a treat to myself. Bubble tea was something I took for granted, and I certainly never thought of it as the complexTwo things happened simultaneously to change all of that. When the pandemic forced New York and the rest of the country to go into lockdown, many of my favorite bubble tea shops around the city began to shutter .
, and suddenly, the foods I had grown up consuming and the habits I never thought to question took on new meaning.Partly as an act of defiance and partly of necessity, I began frequenting Asian grocery stores around the city to stock up on ingredients I had previously relied on restaurant takeout to experience: things like fresh okra and cellophane noodles and hot pot mix.
I’ve since gotten the chance to refine my bubble-tea-making process, even as my favorite boba spots have largely reopened . The whole thing is very simple, even for someone like me who’s otherwise pretty culinarily challenged: I put on myto boil tea, then I use two bags of Lipton black tea, a splash of half-and-half — bubble tea purists will tell you to use lactose-free milk or milk powder, but I prefer my tea a little more rich — and a teaspoon or two of table sugar.
I don’t mean to suggest that bubble tea has spurred some sort of cultural reawakening, or even that my identity and sense of self revolve around this one thing — in fact, if I’ve learned anything in the last twelve months, it’s that it’s dangerous to boil an entire population down to a few easily definable traits, and one of the most insidious ways of doing so is by reducing people to the things they consume.
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