i've never had this particular variety before but in the asiantown neighborhood of houston there was a bitchin' bubble tea place which served basically this exact beverage, so i THINK i know what i'm in for. those have also been famous last words. we'll see.
if you don't feel like browsing the wikipedia article i linked to above (lazy ass!) basically what you have here is a soy drink with little tapioca balls in it, kind of like the ones in tapioca pudding, except usually darker. you can make any number of drinks with these things: mochas, teas, even alcoholic cocktails i suppose although the mixture of booze with something you have to chew before you can swallow it is usually a formula for disaster. they vary in size - the place we used to go to in houston had (lord this is impossible to type with a straight face) absolutely ENORMOUS balls and they would serve their drinks in plastic cups with shrinkwrap over the top that you would puncture with these specially designed straws that were like a quarter inch around, just so the tapioca balls would fit through them. it's an interesting experience to be sure, and one that you can assuredly have yourself at at least one of the numerous asian restaurants in this great city of ours. anyway, on to the specimen at hand.
hrm. smells like cardboard. let's see what we have here.
tastes... kind of like cardboard. pretty dry and earthy and planty, with some fake sweetness. ingredients (by percent): water 74.65, sugar 10.6, tapioca ball 7.8, soybean 5, mung bean 1.3, non dairy creamer (non dairy creamer?) .65 so what you're tasting here is basically the ingredients of a cup of shitty gas station coffee (sugar/non dairy creamer) without the coffee and with soy and mung bean juice instead. with tapioca balls, which i did not get any of in my actual mouth on the first swig. let's take another whack at these balls, shall we?
ugh! aaagh! god! i basically had to chug the rest of the can before any of the tapioca ended up coming out. i suppose this is why they normally serve this stuff with a straw. maybe some of these illegible chinese characters on the side of the can say "CONSUME ONLY WITH STRAW STUPID WHITE PERSON" or some equivalent. oh well, i don't happen to have any quarter inch diameter straws lying around the apartment currently, so that would be kind of a wash anyway.
so what's the verdict on the mong lee shan pearl soybean drink with tapioca ball? not so great. it's not torture or anything, but it really doesn't have much flavor aside from the flatness of the soy and mung beans and the fake sweetness of the added sugar along with the fake creaminess of the non dairy creamer. all in all, a pretty crap reproduction of what can actually be a really awesome drink. the tapioca balls had no consistency and i had to slam basically about 3/4 of the can in one go just to taste any. i suppose a drink like bubble tea is pretty hard to reproduce in canned form with any shelf life, but if this is the best that ol' mong lee shang can do then they needn't have bothered. could have been worse, but still not what i'd call "good," by any stretch of the imagination.
okay, two down, far too many to go. catch up with you next time
love
d
