Tapioca vs Sago vs Boba
Some people find comfort in food that is crisp, like chips. My own comfort food texture is, hands down, chewy—chewy cookies, chewy chocolate centers, chewy nougat, to name a few. Gooey is not far behind.
Maybe it’s a throwback to my childhood when the ultimate comfort food for me and my siblings was tapioca pudding, the kind made from a red box under the Kraft label. Their “Minute” tapioca was a kind of instant tapioca where you had to blend a beaten egg, milk, sugar, and a couple of tablespoons of tapioca in a saucepan.
There was nothing instant or “minute” about this to me because you had to let it sit a bit before cooking, then bring to a full boil, then allow to cool completely. I always put a bit more tapioca than the recipe called for. After what seemed like an interminably long time, we would have tapioca pudding heaven.
I also like it when the same “minute” tapioca is used to thicken the juices in apple pie because then you would have those same yummy little chewy balls mixed in with the cinnamon-y apples.
But what is tapioca, anyway, or sago, for that matter? Are they the same thing? And what about the darling of milk tea, the only reason I ever order that drink—those unctuous boba pearls?
Recently, one of my students boasted that he made his own boba pearls. Then another student requested to learn it in class. After some quick research, I found tapioca starch in my pantry (easily bought in the supermarket), which is made from cassava, the tuber we call kamoteng kahoy. You bring 2/3 cup water and 2 Tbsps. brown sugar to a boil, take it off the heat and quickly mix in 1 1/4 cups tapioca starch.
While hot you knead this till it becomes smooth. You then shape the dough into pencil-like cylinders, cut them into 2 cm pieces, and roll into balls. Dust with tapioca starch to keep them from sticking.
At this point you can freeze them for future use, but if you want to use them right away drop the balls into boiling water. They are done when they rise to the surface. Remove from the water and add two tablespoons of brown sugar.
This makes enough for two servings of milk tea, which, by the way, you make by blending a strong black tea (Lipton is an example) with milk and sugar.
For taro milk tea boil peeled gabi cubes (cut them about an inch in size) until tender and process a cube in the blender with your milk tea. So simple! So yummy! Yet we spend so much on the store-bought drink!
So we now have established that boba pearls are made of tapioca, so essentially boba and tapioca pearls are the same and are made from the starch derived from the cassava tuber.
Sago, on the other hand, comes from the pith of the sago palm tree. It is generally softer and you know this from the mango sago pudding dessert in Chinese restaurants or from the sweet Pinoy stew known as guinataan.
It can get confusing because I bought something called tapioca pearls (Polar Bear brand) and tried to make tapioca pudding out of them, which didn’t quite work because they were much more like sago.
And if sago is what you actually need, like for mango sago, how do you cook them? You must add the sago to rapidly boiling water, or else it will disintegrate. Ready-cooked sago that they sell in the market is to me beneath contempt.
If you like that quintessential, super old-fashioned instant tapioca pudding, you can buy the Kraft Minute red boxes online or from S&R. They’re not easy to find in regular groceries.
Should you want to try a true American tapioca pudding made with tapioca that’s not instant, buy Bob’s Red Hill small tapioca pearls from Healthy Options. Follow the recipe on the package, though I will tell you that I’ve done it many times and the cooking time is never as long as the package says it will be. It cooks in about 15 minutes and for tapioca fans, that is long enough.
The result? An utterly sublime tapioca pudding that will almost—almost, I say—push that instant minute tapioca out of my mind.
It may push it off my mind for a bit, but never off my heart. Like any true comfort food predilection acquired in childhood, we will never cease craving that chewy taste of sheer bliss.