If you’ve visited a frozen yogurt shop, Boba is the edible gel beads you kids go crazy for or the beads in drinks like “Bubble Tea” and we are going to show you how to make popping boba at home.
You can make Boba at home with simple ingredients and call it a fun science experiment.
The cooking technique in cooking is actually called molecular gastronomy.
It’s food science that investigates the chemical and physical transformation of ingredients that occur in cooking.
Typically, Boba is made with a mixture of fruit juice (without calcium) mixed with powdered sodium alginate, then dripped in a cold mixture of calcium chloride.
For this recipe, we are going to use ingredients that you can find easily at a grocery store: vegetable oil, Gatorade, and agar powder (found in the Asian food section).
Bursting Boba Beads
Ingredients:
1 cup vegetable oil
1 cup Gatorade
1/2 teaspoon Agar Powder
Directions:
Pour 1 cup vegetable oil into a glass and place in freezer for 40-minutes
IN a medium saucepan, combine Gatorade and agar powder.
Over medium-high heat, bring Gatorade and agar powder mixture to a boil, while stirring.
Pour Gatorade mixtures into a heatproof bowl and cool for 20-minutes.
Take the oil out of the freezer.
Fill a dropper with the Gatorade mixture and squirt into the oil.
As soon as the juice hits, it will form a ball and sink.
Using a slotted spoon, transfer the beads to a bowl of cold water to rinse.
Drain beans in a mesh strainer.
Eat the beads or use as an ice cream topping or stir into iced tea.
How Does It work?
The formation of the beads uses agar, a natural gelling agent made from algae, that is dissolved into the warm liquid.
This makes the altar molecules form a web that solidifies as it cools.
When the mixture hits the old oil, the molecules on the outside of the drop chill so quickly that they trap the liquid remaining inside.
Oil and Gatorade cannot combine so the drops form spheres instead of dispersing into the oil.
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