Homemade Boba (Tapioca Pearls)

Name: Homemade Boba (Tapioca Pearls)
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 15 min
Total time: 1 h
Yield: 4
Ingredients: 90-100 g tapioca starch (3.5 oz, cca. ¾ cup + 4 tbsp) + extra for dusting; 8 g coconut sugar (0.3 oz, 1 tbsp); 5 g cacao powder (0.18 oz, 1 tbsp) - optional, for colour; 75 ml water (5 tbsp); For the syrup - ½ cup water and ½ cup coconut sugar

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Homemade boba pearls for bubble tea have always been at the top of my sweet treats list. They’re just perfectly gooey, satisfying, and so much better than the store-bought! And the best thing – when you make tapioca pearls from scratch, you can adjust the sweetness, softness and flavours by choosing ingredients that fit your taste.

homemade tapioca pearls boba — Homemade boba pearls.

This homemade boba recipe gives you the perfect tapioca pearls – chewy and soft, made with natural ingredients and adjustable to your taste. The whole recipe is easy to follow and can even be a fun family activity to do with kids.

You can use these delicious homemade tapioca pearls for making your own bubble tea at home – check out this easy recipe to learn more.

Ingredients for homemade boba pearls

To make tapioca pearls (boba) at home from scratch, you will need the following ingredients:

Tapioca starch
Coconut blossom sugar or dark muscovado sugar – both have delicious caramel notes that will give you the best boba pearls.
Cacao powder – optional, but great for getting a natural dark colour of boba pearls. You can skip the cacao powder if you don’t like cacao or want to make translucent boba instead. I will also share a few ideas for boba in different colours later in the text.
Water

homemade tapioca pearls boba ingredients

How to make tapioca pearls from scratch

Tapioca pearls are easier to make than it seems! Once you get the feeling, you’ll be able to make them even without a recipe. These easy steps will give you the best homemade boba:

1. Making the boba dough

Combine a few tablespoons of tapioca starch, some cacao powder, coconut sugar and water in a pan. Tapioca starch absorbs a lot of water when cooked, so make sure you add enough (check the recipe card below for the detailed measures).
Cook over low heat and whisk or mix constantly. Within a minute, your mixture will thicken and start looking sticky, gooey and darker (more translucent).
Turn off the heat, add the rest of the tapioca starch to the pot and mix it in with a spatula or a wooden spoon.
When the dough is no longer super sticky, take it with your hands and knead it to combine well. If it’s still very sticky, you can add some more tapioca starch – little by little – and knead it in well. The dough should still be soft and easy to work with, so don’t add too much extra starch. Don’t make it too soft either because it can result in boba pearls that fall apart when cooking. Smooth and workable dough that is neither too soft nor too crumbly is the sweet spot. It might sound tricky now, but I promise it’s easy! You can follow the exact measurements in the recipe card below.

To make the boba dough, combine tapioca starch, sugar, cacao (optionally) and water in a pot. When heated, it will thicken and look gooey and stretchy like in the first picture. When it looks like this, turn off the heat and gradually add the rest of the tapioca starch.

The dough should be smooth and kneadable – not too soft and not too dry. Before making the tapioca pearls, dust it with tapioca starch to make the surface less sticky.

2. Rolling the tapioca pearls

Rolling the boba pearls is the most time-consuming part of this recipe – not because it’s difficult or anything, but because it simply takes time to roll so many tiny tapioca pearls by hand. Doing it with a group of friends or with kids can be a cool idea. Anyway, the reward is delicious homemade bubble tea, so it’s well worth the time and effort! Here is how to do it:

Form a dough ball and dust it with some tapioca starch if needed. Wash your hands from any tapioca dough leftovers after kneading, so you can make the pearls easily. This is important because the remaining tapioca dough on your hands will dry very quickly and crumble, making the whole process more difficult and messier.
Put the dough ball into a bowl and pinch small portions of it to roll the boba with your fingers. Make sure the balls are small enough to fit through a boba straw. Tiny imperfections or cracks are completely fine – they won’t be visible once you cook the boba. If you are making the boba pearls slowly, cover the dough ball with cling film, wax wrap or a damp cloth to avoid drying. If the dough does get too dry, just sprinkle a few drops of water over its surface and tap it gently with your hand.
Have a flat surface such as a wooden board or a large plate ready to put the finished boba. Their surface will dry quite quickly in the air – that is normal and actually makes it easier to handle them later when transferring them to the cooking pot without sticking to each other.

3. Cooking homemade tapioca pearls

Bring water to a boil – use 4-5 cups of water per cup of boba pearls. It sounds like a lot of water, but there will sometimes be a bit of starch that gets dissolved in the water (especially when cooking dried pearls), so they will cook better with more water.
Add your tapioca pearls to the water, let the water come to a boil again, then reduce the heat and let it simmer.
Fresh boba pearls will float to the top within the first few minutes, but continue cooking them over low heat for ten to fifteen minutes for the best texture. After ten minutes, you can take one out to taste it and see if the texture is right for your taste. They should be chewy, gooey and soft at the same time.
When you like the texture, immediately drain the water and transfer the boba pearls into a pot filled with ice-cold water. The best is to prepare water with ice cubes in advance, but it will work without ice too. You can also just rinse them in a strainer under running cold water. Keeping them in cold water will prevent sticking.

4. Homemade dark sugar syrup for tapioca pearls

Boiling the homemade boba pearls in coconut sugar or muscovado sugar syrup will give them the perfect, slightly sweet and caramel-like flavour. You can skip this step if you want, but I highly recommend it because it makes the boba extra tasty.

It also improves their texture, making them softer while still preserving the perfectly chewy consistency.

Add four to five tablespoons of coconut sugar or dark muscovado sugar and four to five tablespoons of water to a pan and bring it to a boil. Lower the heat and add your cooked, cooled and strained tapioca pearls.
Boil the boba pearls in the syrup for up to a minute, while lightly stirring.
Turn off the heat and transfer your boba into a glass container. They are now ready to be used in bubble tea recipes.

Adjust the amounts of sugar and water if you want to make less or more syrup – just keep the 1:1 ratio.

If you want to make light sugar syrup (a great option for translucent or fruity boba that will be combined with fruity milk tea), use equal volumes of light muscovado sugar and water, or 5 tbsp agave syrup per 3-4 tablespoons of water.

I also tried “cheating” on the syrup step and just adding freshly boiled boba pearls to a bowl with a few tablespoons of coconut sugar, mixing it and adding some ice on top to cool them down. This does work, but it doesn’t give the tapioca pearls that final touch of caramel sweetness.

So, for the best result, make sure you include the final step of boiling the boba pearls in sugar syrup and making them extra tasty.

How long can cooked tapioca pearls last in the fridge?

After cooking and cooling tapioca pearls, they should be used the same day for the best result. The longer they stay in the fridge, the more dry and starchy and less chewy they get. Still, there is a way to save the cooked and stored leftover boba pearls if you do end up having some.

First, make sure you store them in the fridge, in the sugar syrup that you made. They will be good for 2-3 days for sure, possibly even longer. To make them nice, soft and chewy again, boil them in the syrup they were stored in, in a small pot over medium heat.

If they are not fully submerged in syrup (or at least half-submerged if the pot is wider), add some water. Bring it to a boil, lower the heat and let the boba pearls simmer for a minute or two, stirring constantly. Let the extra water evaporate and turn off the heat. Heating them this way brings the cool gooey texture back.

While this is a great way to revive the refrigerated cooked tapioca pearls, the only real “hack” for the perfect homemade boba texture is to use them as freshly cooked as possible.

How to store the boba dough

If you have some remaining tapioca pearl dough and want to store it for later (which might happen if you are rolling them alone… Been there many times), you can put it into a small container, cover it with a lid and keep it in the fridge. It will be good for a few days.

When you want to roll boba pearls from the stored dough, first let it warm up to room temperature to become softer and more workable. If its surface dried out too much, just add some water to it by covering it with a damp clean cloth or simply sprinkle it and tap with your hand.

The whole dough will rehydrate quite quickly after adding some water to the surface, so don’t worry if it dries out a bit – you can still make good tapioca pearls from it.

How to store homemade boba pearls

Homemade tapioca pearls can be stored in two ways – by freezing them or by drying them. This works only for uncooked tapioca pearls. I find dried boba more practical for storing than frozen ones, so I mostly use that option.

Drying homemade tapioca pearls

To dry your homemade boba pearls, simply lay them on a flat surface such as a cutting board or a large plate, and let them dry at room temperature in a spot with good airflow.

When making boba pearls, make sure to roll them as tightly as possible and avoid any bigger cracks. Dried tapioca pearls are not as forgiving as the fresh ones – the dried pearls with visible cracks will break in two once you start cooking them. These broken boba pearls are still totally fine to use in your milk tea, but they won’t look as cool as the round ones.

dried homemade boba pearls — Dried homemade boba pearls. This was one of my first attempts drying them, and a few of them had bigger cracks (like the one in the lower left part of the bowl) because I didn’t press them tightly enough. Those cracked ones ended up splitting in the cooking. I decided to include exactly this picture, so you don’t repeat my mistakes. It was still tasty though!

Freezing the tapioca pearls

If you decide to freeze your homemade tapioca pearls, simply put them on a flat surface with some space between them so they don’t stick, and put them in the freezer. Leave them for a couple of hours or overnight, and then transfer them into a bag or a container and keep them in the freezer for up to three months.

Cooking dried or frozen boba pearls

Dried and frozen boba pearls are cooked the same way as the fresh ones, just require more time to cook. Bring water to a boil and add your dried or frozen boba. The frozen ones don’t need to be defrosted, they can be cooked directly from the freezer.

Cook boba pearls for around thirty minutes, or until the texture is right. Then strain, cool down with cold water, and cook for a minute in homemade sugar syrup.

It usually takes thirty minutes to cook dried or frozen tapioca pearls, but you can keep an eye on them and start checking and tasting at twenty minutes already. They are done when they look almost translucent and are pleasantly chewy and soft (not too chewy and not falling apart). This is also a matter of taste, so when you like the texture, feel free to remove them from the heat.

Homemade boba pearls in different colours

Even though these dark brown tapioca pearls are my favourite – both for their colour and the mild cacao flavour, the cool thing about homemade boba is that you can make them in almost any colour you like. Here are some cool suggestions (that also have a cool flavour):

Green boba – use matcha powder instead of cacao powder. The amount in the recipe can be replaced with half the amount of matcha or less if you want a lighter green colour.
Blue boba – blue spirulina powder and butterfly pea powder will be great for getting blue-coloured tapioca pearls. The amount can be half a teaspoon, or up to taste.
Pink boba – use a teaspoon of dried beetroot powder, or dried raspberry or strawberry powder instead of the cacao in the original recipe. If you can’t get any of those powders, making strawberry puree and adding it instead of water when making the dough will do the job. You can also use some red fruit juice instead of water.
Yellow boba – to get the yellow colour, you can use a bit of turmeric. Don’t add too much because of its strong flavour (unless that’s what you are going for) – half a teaspoon will be more than enough. To make the flavour nicer, you can make the dough using mango juice or mango puree instead of water (or with some water). The combination of mango and turmeric will give your boba pearls a nice colour and flavour.
Purple boba – Boil some purple sweet potatoes, peel them and add some of the cooking water to them. Mash them well to get a soft, watery puree. Add that puree instead of water (a bit more than the amount of water in the original recipe) to make the dough, and you will get some beautiful, purple-coloured tapioca pearls.

These are some ideas for naturally coloured homemade tapioca pearls. Feel free to experiment with any other colourful natural ingredients that you like.

When experimenting with my original cacao boba recipe, I never measure the alternative ingredients (such as fruit purees) precisely. The reason is – it simply doesn’t have to be that accurate. After making the cooked tapioca dough base, you will add the rest of the tapioca starch by feeling, and knead it in until you get a soft and workable dough.

When swapping the water in the recipe for fruit juice, simply use the same volume. When using matcha or other powders instead of cacao powder, I like to see how strong the colour and flavour are, and then decide according to the result that I want. This is all fun to experiment with, so feel free to adjust the measures to your taste.

If not sure, you can follow the original recipe when you make boba pearls for the first time, just to get the feeling and see how it should look. Then, you can experiment with the alternative ingredients and aim to get a similar consistency.

Homemade bubble tea

Check out my homemade bubble tea recipe to learn the detailed steps to making the best bubble tea from scratch.

In short, it goes like this: add your boba with some sweet syrup to a glass, pour the tea of your choice and top up with the milk of your choice. My favourite ratio is ⅓ cup boba, ⅓ cup tea and ⅓ cup milk.

You can add more or less of any ingredient: assembling your perfect cup of homemade bubble tea is really up to your taste and is almost impossible to mess up.

I do still recommend checking more details and ideas for homemade bubble tea, including which types of tea to use and what are the best milk alternatives. Find it in this homemade bubble tea post.

Equipment for making homemade boba

Kitchen scale
Measuring cup
Small pot for making the dough
Whisk, wooden spoon or silicone spatula
Small containers or wax wraps for storing the fresh dough
Larger pot for cooking boba
Metal strainer
Non-stick pan for cooking boba in syrup
Boba straws – actually equipment for bubble tea, but don’t forget about it! Also useful to have one on hand to measure the boba pearls’ size while you make them.

Yield: 4-6 portions