My take on a clone of a good HK milk tea, for which the recipe is usually a secret.
Boil for 2 minutes in a pot with fresh, cold water. Add sugar and evaporated milk to taste. Strain out the leaves; Enjoy hot or iced.
Add a bit of Keemun to your blend if you like it bolder, like the HK restaurants usually have.
“ Either I received a misblend, or this is unfortunately not the kind of blend I wanted.
This blend comes with much bigger leaves than HK milk tea blends I've seen. Those traditionally mix Ceylon leaves of a few different sizes, roughly BOP, BOPF, and dust, which is supposed to impart different quality to the resulting tea base. The leaves of this blend are basically all large, which results in a flat profile and very weak character once mixed with evaporated milk. It might be better drunk as is without milk.
I tried the recommended 2-minute boil, but as expected it's not nearly enough to extract the astringency from the leaves. It varies but the HK milk tea bases I've seen are continuously boiled for tens of minutes. They're stirred or back-and-forth 'aerated' to have flavor beat out of them as much as possible. At the same time, the tea base should be using a ridiculous tea:water ratio by normal tea standards - upwards of 12g per 240 ml. Some of this is historical - it has a tradition going back to HK's colony days as a working-class caffeine boost that's cheap, using only broken, low quality leaves compared to higher class English tea. But that also gives them a unique and powerful flavor after mixing with evaporated milk.
But unfortunately, whether boiled long or short, with small or large proportion of tea leaves, I haven't been able to make a cup of HK milk tea I'm satisfied with using this blend. ”
“ i lived in Hong Kong for a few years after college and after some getting used to, i started to drink this daily. after business trips, i would come back to HK and the milk tea would make me feel the comfort of coming home (second home). you need a creamy milk or straight cream to match the strength of this tea. I love it both hot and cold.
Thanks Andres Lam for creating and sharing this! ”
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