Salmon roe boba tea
can you replace popping boba with caviar?
Clowns. *nods to the left*
Clowns. *nods to the right*
Dickholes. *stares straight into the camera*
If you’re wondering where last week’s post was, well — it was a subscribers only post! I figured out what to do with the remainder of that nasty-ass turkey dinner-flavored candy corn. I turned it into something absolutely delectable (abhorrent). Just ask Davida, who almost spit it out right away.
[Paid subscribers get full access to the locked archives, in case you have no idea what I’m talking about. Substack can be a little confusing.]
Now that summer is dwindling, I can feel the frantic energy of everyone trying to soak up every precious ounce of sun and lounging-about. This includes a lot of grilling and strolling around proudly with ice cream while posting insufferable pictures of it on Instagram.
I hate the Internet sometimes.
If this was an ordinary summer, we’d have made a few visits to Chinatown for a big-ass meal and some popping bubble tea afterwards. Walking around with a cup filled with bubble tea instantly makes everyone around you shout, “Boba!!! Let’s go get some!” Then suddenly, everyone around you is holding a cup.
If you post an overly color saturated photo of it on social media, then you’ve become the most powerful influencer on the face of the planet. Bask in sheer power, ask restaurants for free food, and find yourself in a steep existential crisis when you are inevitably rejected because you have two followers, one of which is your cousin who’s only posted once four years ago.
This has nothing to do with anything. I needed another meandering intro. Basically what I’m saying is that one day, out of nowhere, Davida looked at me from her side of the couch and whispered, “Salmon egg boba tea.”
I frantically scribbled it down, and said to myself, “Dannis, as the greatest food writer in all of history, just listen to Davida because most of the time her ideas are way funnier than yours. Besides, this sounds like one of the worst ideas ever.”
I’ve never made boba tea before.
Is this something people do at home often? I’ve seen uncooked tapioca pearls at the store, but aside from boiling them off and shooting them out my ass at people throwing massive COVID-19 infested house parties, I haven’t found a reason to purchase them.
I decided to do the least amount of work possible and only purchased three ingredients for my at-home version: Strawberry Nesquik, black tea, and salmon caviar.
A 2 oz. jar of this shit cost $20 in the nearby fancy fish market.
I do not understand why salmon roe costs so much considering a lot of fishermen throw it out or use it as chum, the most appetizing word on the planet.
I specifically chose strawberry-flavored Nesquik because it is pink.
Salmon flesh is pink, so I thought the salmon eggs would naturally taste at home in pink liquid. This is sort of like that often-used logic to pair different wines with certain types of food, say, red wine with red meat, white wine with fish, and brown wine with a steaming hot bowl of manure.
I took a sip of this strawberry milk and it reminded me of chewing on a scented toy from childhood.
Ah, the old classic ancient traditional boba tea base, Lipton’s.
Americans generally do not drink much tea, mainly because we hate anything that might actually be healthy for us. Oh, wait. I hear one of you in the back, shouting, “I do, I do!”
Sit down, nerd. Drink knockoff Red Bull like a normal miserable person.
In order to respect this tea, I used the traditional method of brewing it, using hot water from the microwave.
I hear you shouting again, nerd. Simmer down.
Pepper’s fine with this tea. She kept sneaking sips.
I brewed it a little strong so that the final product would be a good simulation of the restaurant version, because nothing says authentic bubble tea like Nesquik, Lipton’s, and fish eggs.
Once the tea cooled off, I mixed it with the Nesquik over ice.
The resulting color was a wonderful, thirst quenching, pinkish brown.
And now for the luxury ingredient, nature’s original popping boba, fish eggs.
Salmon roe is delicious over rice. It’s the mushiest version of caviar, and if you’ve never had it, it’s basically like lumpy membranous water balloons filled with thick salty fluid that deflate in your mouth. Man. I’m really selling this stuff.
The eggs clung to the spoon in desperation before I dumped them into the milk tea.
They knew something was wrong. They sensed it.
One of the fun things about drinking bubble tea is puncturing the sealed plastic on top with that giant straw they give you.
My version was a shitty plastic wrap job. When I stabbed the top, the flaccid wrap nearly sank into the glass, which would have been an absolute disaster.
I’ve made a terrible mistake.
Or not. I’m sitting here, writing this edition of the newsletter, cackling to myself while looking at this picture. This is real innovation in food writing. Doing things nobody asked for.
Look at my tired face, about to suck down some salmon eggs with strawberry milk tea.
So innocent. So pure. So stupid.
Surprise! There’s salted fish eggs in your beverage, Dannis! The ones that you put there!
Salmon roe bubble tea is about as strange as you’d expect, but also, not the worst thing in the world.
There’s that weird plastic fake strawberry flavor that hits you immediately, and from the moment you pop the first egg in your mouth, the sugar is completely eradicated by a thick, salty, briny fluid that completely erases the milk tea on its way down. It’s like a drink that has its own terrible chaser built in. The possibilities are endless. How about a shot of whiskey with pickleback pearls? Or Pepto-Bismol with Miralax bubbles?
After claiming she didn’t want anything to do with her own idea, Davida finally came over and took a sip.
“It’s got the same metallic flavor like fake orange drinks. Like Tang,” she said, after making a face.
If this is what our summer tasted like, then I’m willing to let this one go.
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Get your flu shot, everyone!
Convinced my sister that boba is really fish eggs with this 😂. And honestly I might try this sometime….big “might”.