Honey Boba Recipe: Make Honey Milk Tea At Home

Honey milk tea is boba milk tea sweetened using honey instead of sugar and topped with tapioca pearls or honey boba pearls. With the addition of the sweet natural syrup, the bubble tea drink tastes milky with a delicately floral aftertaste. 

In our recipe, we'll show you how to make honey milk tea and honey boba pearls from scratch.

Jump to:

• Honey Milk Tea Ingredients
• How To Make Honey Boba Pearls 
• Honey Boba Recipe (Honey Milk Tea)
• Honey Milk Tea Benefits
• How Boba Tea Started: Invention And Popularity 

Honey Milk Tea Ingredients

To make this sweet milk tea, you'll need the following ingredients.

• tea blend of your choice or bags
• honey
• milk
• cooked instant tapioca pearls or honey tapioca pearls
• Ice

Tea blend

While you can use any loose-leaf blend, we recommend using Assam black tea. It's the main loose-leaf blend used in the majority of boba drinks. Its strong malty base perfectly contrasts with the sweet nectar syrup. Some green tea blends, like oolong and jasmine, also go well in this drink.

Milk

For our recipe, we use full-fat or whole milk to get a creamy taste. However, you can also use any plant-based alternative that has a neutral taste. As the sweet syrup is the star of this recipe, we would avoid plant-based milks that have a strong taste.

Tapioca pearls

The easiest way to prepare the drink is to use instant tapioca pearls. They take less than 5 minutes to cook, so you can make bubble tea anytime you want. However, you won't be able to customise the firmness, taste, or colour of these.

If you want to make them from scratch, you can check out our recipe to make homemade tapioca pearls.

However, if you want honey boba pearls, you will need to make them from scratch. To our knowledge, we've not seen instant tapioca balls infused with sweet syrup that you can buy.

An intermediate solution is to coat instant tapioca pearls with honey, but we don't think the taste is as nice. Instead, we recommend coating instant tapioca balls with brown sugar to make brown sugar boba pearls.

How To Make Honey Boba Pearls 

Here are the ingredients you'll need to make 1 cup of honey boba pearls.

• 100 g tapioca starch
• 30 g light brown sugar
• 3 tablespoon honey
• 90 ml water

We add a little bit of brown sugar to our recipe to give our honey boba pearls a golden yellow colour. Without brown sugar, your honey boba pearls will turn out white rather than golden.

Make honey boba dough

1. Add water, brown sugar and honey to a pot under medium heat. Dissolve all the sugar and bring the mixture to a boil.
2. Once the mixture has combined well with the water and is bubbling, turn the heat off. 
3. Add 2 tablespoons of the tapioca starch and mix until a sticky paste forms. While the mixture is hot, add tapioca starch in 1 tablespoon increments and mix well again. Over time, the paste will become a tacky dough. 
4. Sprinkle a flat surface with some tapioca starch. Then, transfer the tacky dough to a flat surface while still warm. Knead the dough until it becomes smooth. 
5. Roll the dough into a 1-1.5cm-thick stick. Using a knife or dough cutter, cut the dough stick into 1cm by 1cm square pillows.
6. Roll the small pillows into spherical spheres. Once the entire dough has been rolled into tiny balls, cover them with dry tapioca starch to prevent them from sticking to each other. Allow them to dry out in the air for at least 30 minutes.

How to cook honey boba

1. For 1 cup of boba pearls, boil 8 cups of water in a pot to cook them. 
2. Once the water is boiling, add the dry honey boba pearls. Then, reduce the heat slightly to allow the water to continue simmering gently. Allow the dough balls to cook for 8 to 10 minutes to make chewy balls. If you prefer a softer texture, then simmer for 10 to 15 minutes.
3. Then, reduce the heat to a low level and allow them to cook for another 5 minutes.
4. Then, remove the boba balls from the pot and add them to an ice bath to cool for 1 minute. After 1 minute, you can remove them from the ice bath, and they are ready for use.
5. If you want to make even sweeter boba pearls, you can also soak them in more sweet syrup before adding them to your boba drink. After removing them from the ice bath, pour the natural sweetener over the pearls and gently mix it to coat each pearl. We recommend adding 2 tbsps of honey for 1 cup of pearls.

Coated with this natural sweetener, these are chewy and sweet and make a perfect dessert topping for shaved ice. You can also have these with plain cold milk.

Honey Milk Tea Benefits

Nutritionists widely acknowledge that the natural sweetener is one of the healthiest foods today. The polyphenols and phenols in the tea can also fight against medical issues such as heart disease. Unfortunately, it doesn't make boba a remarkably healthy drink. 

You can use raw, unfiltered natural sweetener containing bee pollen, which gives the natural sweetener massive health benefits when making boba. Even still, that will not help.

Tapioca pearls are not healthy because they are high in carbohydrates and calories. Unfortunately, tapioca balls have very little nutritional value. 

If you prepare your beverage with whole milk, it adds fat and calories. In other words, boba has no real health benefits, but only its taste. Adding honey will not give you the health benefits you want. 

How Boba Tea Started: Invention And Popularity 

Milk tea was already in East Asia or Taiwan before boba was invented. It has been popular in the country for many centuries. The Dutch and British introduced the beverage when they came to India. When the Dutch colonised Taiwan in the early 17th century, milk tea got into Taiwan. 

Before this beverage snack was invented, flavoured shaved ice and tapioca pearls (or balls) were common desserts served by street vendors in Taiwan. As the story tells, one of them had a genius idea to serve both desserts with milk tea. The flavoured shaved ice was combined with the tapioca pearls, and milk tea was used to fill the rest of the cup. 

The combination became an instant hit. It was initially called bubble tea, but it was later renamed "boba," meaning breast in Chinese slang. The people gave it that name due to the tapioca balls' shape that floats in the drink. The tapioca is prepared from cassava starch, also called yuca, which is similar to yam.

Boba Gains Popularity 

As time passed, more shops started serving their versions of this drink, fruit syrups, fruits, powders, and natural sweeteners. They replaced these ingredients with the flavoured shaved ice. 

Boba shops and street vendors started experimenting with ingredients other than tapioca. Instead of tapioca pearls, they used almond jelly, egg pudding, red beans, or taro balls. Others also replaced the milk with non-dairy creamer. That way, the concoction would maintain its stability until served. The replacement made this beverage highly sweet and creamy. 

Some of the most popular drink flavours include honey boba, rose, taro fresh milk and brown sugar.

However, regardless of the many variations, this Taiwanese beverage snack is still referred to as bubble or boba. Its popularity has caused almost everyone to go to the Taiwan street markets to get one for themselves. 

The popularity gained a foothold in Japan, Hong Kong, and China in the mid-1990s, then moved to Oahu. It moved to Japanese, Taiwanese, and Chinese neighbourhoods in the United States and Canada. These neighbourhoods have local Asian tea shops that started selling boba, and people enjoyed their chew, delicious beverages. 

Honey milk tea is a delicious treat that most people in the United States enjoy yearly. You can enjoy it now and then, but moderation is key. With moderation in mind, it is the best and most delicious way to consume any drink.

Next up learn more about boba calories.