Secret Sucré

Visited the bubble tea shop close to my apartment again; this time I was smart and I figured out what I was going to order (using their online menu and google translate) BEFORE I got to the shop; made the language barrier a little bit easier to work around…

I did add boba to my drink though, because I love those funky little tapioca pearls.

Taste wise this was nice; I enjoyed that it’s not as sweet/sugary as most “matcha bubble tea” I’ve tried from other bubble tea shops – more focus on the matcha itself, with lots of creaminess. I didn’t enjoy the salted milk cap on this flavour though; while it added a lot to the rose flavoured bubble tea I tried this time, with this tea I thought it was almost TOO MUCH umami/savory elements and not enough contrasting sweetness.

Photo: https://www.instagram.com/p/BxS3agKHPLo/

Ok, so I live literally less than a minute away by foot from a bubble tea place and until last weekend I had never gone to check it out. Which seems like a travesty since it’s literally so fucking close to my house. So, I finally went and grabbed a bubble tea!

There was a slight hiccup; their menu is only in Mandarin and French and I don’t speak either of those languages. Usually I’d just ask the barista to translate for me – I’ve gotten pretty used to doing that here in Montreal. His English was really broken though and it because clear pretty quickly that neither of us were understanding the other all that well. So I just blind picked something off the menu by pointing to it. I chose something where I recognized most of the words, and then later Google Translated the menu description when I got home.

What I ordered was a “Black Bubble Tea w/ Rose Salted Milk Cap”.

It was actually amazing and maybe one of the best bubble teas that I’ve ever had!? Like, for starters it actually tasted distinctly like black tea with roses which was pretty impressive. The “Salted Milk Cap” was also pretty incredible though; more tangy and savory than actually salty, like cream cheese or cheesecake? And very thick. More than any other milk cap bubble tea I’ve ever had…

I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe I had actually inadvertently ordered a cheese tea? I know cheese tea is a trend and from what I’m aware of it’s basically a milk tea with cream cheese blended into it and topped with sea salt? I’ve never (definitively) had one so I don’t really have anything to directly compare my experience of this bubble tea with. I did talk to several people on the Tea Friends Slack Group about it though, and all said that I was basically describing cheese tea…

It get even more confusing when you try to Google it from clarification because I could clearly find records that Milk Caps/Tops are a thing on bubble tea and Cheese Caps/Tops are also a thing but I couldn’t really find much information on “Salted Milk Caps/Tops” apart from someone’s blog/pinterest recipe for sea salted caramel milk caps from a few years ago. Plus, a lot of what pops up when you try to search salted milk caps are actually recipes and news articles about cheese tea. So maybe the two terms are synonyms? I’m not really sure.

Regardless of what this was exactly, it was frankly still incredible.