Here we will cover why it can be cheaper to make your own bubble tea, and why it wouldn’t be from certain aspects. Buying bubble tea from a boba shop can get pretty expensive if you are drinking it regularly. Plus, it is a lot less healthy than if you did it yourself.
There are some basic things that are needed to begin making bubble tea at home, but most of the stuff you may already have at home. Two things that you will need to buy is a tea pot with an infuser, and a mesh strainer. Both are fairly cheap, and are needed for cooking the tapioca pearls and steeping the tea leaves.
Both of these items along with a stove top and a pot, will make making bubble tea really easy to do at home. There is also an online store that has all of the materials needed (flavored powders, syrups, boba straws, cups, and more) to make bubble tea at home.
Price
For the price of making bubble tea drinks, is it cheaper to make your own?
The price for buying all of the ingredients and equipment for making the bubble tea yourself, will pay for itself if you regularly drink boba. A bag of boba pearls is actually not that expensive, and a lot of boba can come in the bag. If you consumed bubble tea daily, the bag will still last a very long time.
The powders and syrups used to make bubble tea drinks is what has to be bought the most, as these are the main ingredient for making the bubble tea drink. One bag of flavored powder does ok on how long it lasts, but if you only drink the same flavor everyday, then it will run out faster.
The price for one bag of the powder to make the specific flavor of bubble tea you want can be up to 3 times the cost of one bubble drink from a boba store. The bag has enough powder to make atleast 10 drinks. This means that the bag is worth getting, and it will save you money over buying boba drinks regularly from a boba shop.
One bag can last over a week and a half when compared to making one bubble tea flavor (one serving of the powder mix from the bag) to buying a boba drink everyday at a boba shop. It could save you 50 dollars or more.
The other cheap alternative is using syrups, however not every flavor of bubble tea is sold via syrup flavors, so some of them have to be bought as the powder in order to mix and make the drink. If you find the right syrup flavors, they can have almost 2 liters worth, and be a little cheaper than the powders. These could last for months when making a single boba flavor that you like to drink.
The other things that would have to be purchased is the milk from the local grocery store, and the tea leaves for making the tea. Tea leaves are always the cheapest for the ingredients, and they also can last fairly long.
Some powders are already made with everything in them (milk, tea, sugar, and the boba flavor), so all that has to be done is mixing the powder into water or milk. Powders like this can save a lot of money and make making bubble tea and milk tea really easy. The powders will run out faster, but the only thing to replenish after you have everything is the milk used and the tapioca pearls.
Also, if you wanted to try the other types of boba (like boba jellies and popping pearls), they come in batches too like the tapioca pearls, and can last quite awhile too.
Time
The time it takes to make the bubble tea drinks is what can really get expensive. It really depends on how cheap money wise that you are willing to go when making your own bubble tea drinks. It can get more expensive time wise if you want to save the utmost amount of money and make everything from scratch for your bubble tea drinks.
It can take hours to prepare the boba pearls from scratch, especially if you are making a lot of boba pearls. The boba has to start as a dough, and then be cooked before it can be rolled into boba pearls. Rolling the boba pearls when forming them from the dough will be the most time consuming part.
It can take 15 minutes to hours, depending on how many boba pearls you are rolling into balls for the drink.
This isn’t counting cooking the boba pearls after they have been made. Cooking the tapioca pearls can take a long time (1 hour) for good quality ones that are chewy. Boba shops use these instead of the quick cooking boba pearls, that many individuals use to make their boba drinks at home, decide to get.
Making crystal boba, popping boba, and other forms of boba from scratch, will also be time consuming and possibly tedious.
For the least investment in time, individuals go with the easiest way to make boba drinks, which can take less than 12 minutes. This involves using a syrup or powder with the quick cooking boba pearls. The downside is that the quality of the boba pearls will suffer and will not be as good as the ones bought from the boba shops.
Labor
For the labor there really isn’t much expense here. It really isn’t strenuous to do any of the parts for making bubble tea, even if the bubble tea is being made completely from scratch. The only sweat that you will break will be from the heat of the pot that is cooking the boba pearls while you watch them cook.
Everything with making the boba drink you want will be a fun and relaxing experience, as long as you aren’t trying to make one hundred boba pearls from scratch all at one time.
As mentioned, all of the equipment is cheap to do it, but of course, you can pay more to get it done faster. Most of these options will save you a lot of money in the long run, instead of buying expensive bubble tea drinks everyday at a boba shop.
Altogether you can save hundreds of dollars a month making your own boba at home, making it a cheaper option.
