Bukubuku Tea: Bubble Tea, Taken Literally

Nobody knows exactly how old bukubuku tea is; the same agency guesses at the Edo period, between 1603 and 1868, when Okinawa was still the Ryukyu Kingdom. The trail is clearer in Naha in the decades before the Second World War, when the tea was drunk at home, especially by women, on birthdays and to celebrate departures. It was a lucky drink for seeing people off on a voyage.

The war destroyed the bowls and whisks, and the tea disappeared with them. After some of the old utensils turned up in 1960, people began trying to bring it back, and in 1992 it was restored. One of the people who made that possible, Junko Ashitomi, collected old records and re-examined the water of different areas.

Even the revival came down to the water.

I whisked for about five minutes. It was more of a workout than the board by the steps had let on. The traditional recipe allows about ten; at five, I decided my foam was ready.

I piled it onto my tea until it stood well above the rim, then added brown sugar and peanuts from the little cup on the tray. When the foam sank, topping it up was my job too. I picked up the whisk again.

By tradition, bukubuku tea is drunk without chopsticks or spoons. One guide suggests opening your mouth wide, as if biting into the foam.

It tasted exactly like tea with bubbles in it. The sign had not been exaggerating.

The star fruit, easily the most exotic-looking thing on the plate, tasted like a pear. Its star is not the work of a cookie cutter: the fruit grows with ridges, and every slice comes out that shape.

The acerola was ferociously sour. Passion fruit I already liked, and the mango, melon, grapes and citrus were old acquaintances. The white piece at the bottom right was not. I never found out what it was.

My favourite was the yellow, egg-shaped fruit at the front with a large brown seed in the middle: canistel. One of its English names is eggfruit, because its flesh looks and feels like the yolk of a hard-boiled egg.

It was dense and slightly powdery, somewhere between a Japanese roasted sweet potato and pumpkin, with just the texture its name suggests.

Canistel is native to southern Mexico and Central America, and is grown in Okinawa now too. Plants travel. So does the other bubble tea: tapioca pearls can be shipped anywhere, and the drink has spread around the world in plastic cups. The bubbles on this tray needed hard well water, and a well stays where it is.

If the right wells had been easier to find, the world’s bubble tea craze might have involved a great deal more whisking.