Cooking....an art or a science?

This was our lunch today. A big bowl of salad and a tall glass of that mysterious beverage!

No, this is not for you all to get a feel for what we eat, but for you to take a good look at that beverage in the tall glass. That - is bubble tea! Also known as pearl tea or boba tea. An Asian drink, it is very popular in the US, especially in cities that have a high Asian population like Seattle, San Jose, DC. My husband and I got addicted to this while in Seattle and have been on the hunt for this in India - any city in India - since we got back. But no luck! So we had given up any hope of ever finding it....TILL, we chanced upon Asian grocery stores in Melbourne and Sydney that had all the necessary ingredients to make your own homemade bubble tea! And so the husband went berserk.....75% of our baggage coming home had to do with this craze.....black tapioca, white tapioca, green tea flavor, taro flavor, mango flavor, milk tea powder and so on.

For those of you who have not had this drink - here's the scoop (ha ha) on it. When you walk into a Boba Tea shop this is what happens.....the person serving will take a huge scoop of giant tapioca pearls - which have been previously cooked and soaked in sugar syrup - and plonk it into a glass. Then into a blender goes a whopping scoop of pre-made tea concentrate, another scoop of your choice of flavor (mango, taro, honeydew, cantaloupe, coconut, pineapple, green tea etc etc) in powder form, and then milk and ice and then its all blended furiously in a machine. This is then poured over the pearls, sealed with a lid and given to you with a fat straw which you jab into the sealed top and slurp away! And as you are drinking it, suddenly the fat black juicy pearls will come up the straw and punch the roof of your mouth! It will either freak you out completely or take you to tapioca heaven!

via

So where was I? Oh yes, the hubby today decided we should try out making it at home. Or should I say "HE". So in true engineer style he youtubed videos, he researched the ingredients, he calculated, calibrated and converted between metric and Imperial, he took notes, and then satisfied, he headed on to the kitchen, so far a taboo place for him. My kitchen scales were not good enough, so the precision scales came down from his workshop, all utensils lined up in order of the recipe, timers set, thermometers close at hand. I tried to sabotage this scientific approach by telling him to just wing it, but it didn't work! And when he insisted on measuring 1/8 ounce of sticky, gooey honey, I gave up and played the role of photographer!

Here then are pics of the scientific approach to cooking as opposed to my very casual, "a pinch here a pinch there" approach!

So how was it? In one word - delicious and darned close to the real thing. Unfortunately we don't have any fat straws but that would have nailed it I think. But I still believe cooking is more art than science. And this is what my husband says cooking is...."It's an exercise in precision-How much of what ingredient at what temperature for how much time". My mouth is too full of chewy tapioca bubbles to respond to that!