Strawberry Popping Boba Recipe – How to make popping boba

How to make strawberry popping boba that bursts juice in your mouth?

Making popping boba at home is not a difficult process. With all the ingredients and a little practice, you will master it in no time.

With this recipe, you can make popping boba with freshly blended strawberry juice, coffee, soda, and whatever drink you like.

What is Popping Boba?

Originated in Taiwan, popping boba is a fruit-flavor, colorful, beautiful, tasty, healthy, and fun-to-eat topping for bubble tea, ice cream, frozen yogurt, and a variety of desserts and beverages. Its gel-like skin will burst in your mouth when bitten. Then you will be able to taste the fruit juice center of the popping boba.

Popping boba is made from fruit juice plus sodium alginate and calcium chloride. These two food additives are necessary ingredients for the spherification process.

Popping Boba vs Tapioca Boba

Both popping boba and tapioca boba are popular toppings to bubble tea and desserts. However, their tastes, textures, ingredients, and making processes are quite different.

Made from tapioca flour and brown sugar, tapioca boba is chewier but with less flavor than popping boba. See my classic brown sugar boba recipe here.

Popping boba can be made from all kinds of flavored drinks. The sodium alginate will form a thin and delicate skin to hold the juice. The bursting of popping boba will release an extra flavor to every sip of your drink.

How to Make Popping Boba?

To make popping boba, the fruit juice is mixed with sodium alginate which will then be dropped into calcium chloride solution. Each droplet will form into a small ball in the calcium setting bath, causing the formation of a thin gel-like skin that can burst when squeezed.

Sodium alginate is a salt derived from brown algae. It is a very common vegan ingredient used for making ice cream, sauces, custard, and more.

Calcium Chloride is a food additive that can make foods taste saltier, keep color, and stay firm. For example, calcium chloride in pickle brine can provide a yummy salty flavor while keeping the pickles stay green and firm like fresh cucumbers.

• Although calcium chloride is a perfectly food additive, you should avoid eating or touching straight calcium chloride. Because pure calcium chloride can create burns when it reacts with moisture.

In this strawberry popping boba recipe, we will dissolve 5g calcium chloride with 1 liter of water. This diluted calcium chloride solution is safe to touch. Lastly, we will also use clean drinking water to rinse off any residual calcium chloride on the surface of popping boba. So our strawberry popping boba is perfectly safe to consume.

Use fruit juice for making popping boba

In most cases, bubble tea shops won’t use real fruit juice for making popping boba.

One of the reasons why boba tea shops use artificial fruit flavors and food colorings to make popping boba is that the cost of fresh juice is too high and it is not easy to preserve.

Another important reason is that fresh fruits usually contain calcium, which will react with the sodium alginate and turn hard and rubbery immediately.

For instance, each cup of fresh strawberries contains 27mg calcium. When I added sodium alginate directly into the strawberry juice, it turned into this Greek yogurt like texture. ⬇️

To solve this problem, we can mix a few grams of sodium citrate into the strawberry juice before adding the alginate. The sodium citrate will trap the calcium ions in strawberry juice and prevent them from reacting with the alginate.

With the help of sodium citrate, the strawberry alginate mixture turned out to be a smooth liquid. ⬇️

Some tips for making strawberry popping boba:

1. Use a blender to mix sodium alginate

Sodium alginate is hard to be dissolved into the strawberry juice if you stir the mixture with a whisk. A simple method is adding the sodium alginate directly into the blender. Blend the sodium alginate together with strawberry juice for 1 minute, you will be able to get a well-combined mixture.

If you don’t have a blender or just want to use store bought fruit juice to make the popping boba, make sure you whisk the mixture for 5 to 10 minutes until the sodium alginate is fully dissolved.

2. Use a kitchen scale with at least 1/10th of a gram precision

Small variations in the quantities can drastically change your results. The process of making popping boba is like a chemical experiment. Eyeballing it or using a measuring teaspoon will not work.

3. Refridgerate the alginate mixture overnight

The blending or whisking step will produce a lot of tiny bubbles in the alginate mixture. Placing the mixture in the fridge for at least 2 hours to overnight will allow the bubbles to dissipate.

I tried to skip the refrigerating step with my strawberry popping bobas. There were many tiny bubbles in my strawberry popping bobas, which caused them to float in my drink. 

I made the coffee mixture the night before, and set it in the fridge overnight. As we can see, there is no tiny bubble in the coffee popping boba. The color turned out to be clearer. And they sank to the bottom of the drink. 

In conclusion, the refrigerating step is unnecessary if you don’t mind your popping bobas floating on the surface of your drink. If you’d like your popping bobas to look more transparent, you can refrigerate the mixture overnight to get rid of the bubbles. 

4. Add sugar to the setting bath

We will drop the alginate mixture into a calcium chloride setting bath to help the caviar droplets from their skin.

Dissolving sugar into the setting bath can increase its density and help the caviar droplets maintain their shape. You don’t need to be scared of this huge amount of sugar. You won’t drink it. And it’s okay to skip the sugar. You will just get some not-so-round popping bobas. 

5. How to make larger popping boba

With the syringe method, you can only get tiny pea-size popping bobas.

To make larger popping boba, you will need a small ladle and a teaspoon.

First fill half a ladle of calcium chloride water, fill the teaspoon with alginate mixture. Then carefully pour the alginate mixture into the ladle, gently shake the ladle to form a sphere. Lastly, gently pour the alginate sphere with the calcium chloride water into the large bowl filled with calcium chloride setting bath. Allow the popping boba soaking in the setting bath for about 5 minutes, then strain it out to rinse under clean water.

Or you can use the reverse spherification I introduced in this giant popping boba recipe to make extra large size popping bobas.

6. Control the soaking time

The longer the droplets soaking in the setting bath, the thicker the skin will be.

Larger droplets will take longer to form the skin. If you leave the small droplets in the setting bath for more than 3 minutes, they will turn into solid spheres with no liquid in the center. 

You can test it by popping a boba between your thumb and index finger. Once the boba can hold its shape in your hand and burst out liquid when you pop it, it is good to be removed from the setting bath.

* 7. Make popping boba with coke or other drinks

If you want to make other flavors, you can simply substitute the strawberry juice with any other drink.

If you use coffee, soda, or other drinks that don’t contain calcium to make the popping boba, you can skip the sodium citrate.

As we have mentioned above, fresh fruits usually contain calcium, which will react with the sodium alginate and turn hard and rubbery immediately. Each cup of fresh strawberries contains 27mg calcium. That’s why we need to mix a few grams of sodium citrate into the strawberry juice before adding the alginate. The sodium citrate will trap the calcium ions in strawberry juice and prevent them from reacting with the alginate.

EQUIPMENT you will need:

• Kitchen scale (with at least 1/10th of a gram precision)
• Blender
• Glass bowl
• Syringe (The popping boba kit I bought from Amazon came with the syringe. You can also use a dropper or drop the liquid with a spoon.)

INGREDIENTS List

I bought this popping boba kit at about $20. The kit came with 50g Sodium Alginate, 50g Calcium Chloride, 50g Sodium Citrate, a syringe, and an  instruction sheet. These ingredients are enough to make 17 cups of popping boba. 

• 200 g strawberry (Rinsed and destemed)
• 280 g coconut water (Or water)
• 40 g sugar
• 5 g sodium citrate (If you use coffee, soda, or other drinks that don’t contain calcium to make the popping boba, you can skip the sodium citrate.)
• 5 g sodium alginate
• 1 liter clean water
• 5 g calcium chloride
• 200 g sugar (optional)

Step-by-step INSTRUCTIONS 

1. Add 200g strawberries, 280g coconut water (or water), 40g sugar, and 5g sodium citrate to a blender. Blend on high speed until smooth.

2. Open the lid of the blender, add 5g sodium alginate to the strawberry puree. Blend on medium speed for 1 minute until the sodium alginate is fully dissolved.

3. Pour the mixture to a bowl. Optionally, cover the bowl with food wrap and keep it in the fridge for 2 hours to overnight to allow any bubbles in the mixture to dissipate. (See Note 1)

4. Add 5g calcium chloride and 200g sugar (sugar is optional, See Note 2) to 1 liter of cold water, whisk until fully dissolved (the water should turn transparent then).

5. Dip the tip of a syringe (or a dropper) in the strawberry liquid, draw back the plunger to fill the syringe.

6. Drop the strawberry liquid into the calcium chloride sugar solution, one drop by one drop. Let the droplets soak in the setting bath for 1 to 3 minutes. (See Note 3)

7. Remove the strawberry popping boba from the setting bath with a strainer. Rinse them with clean drinking water to remove any residual calcium chloride and stop the setting process.

8. Serve the strawberry popping boba with iced fruit tea or over ice cream or frozen yogurt.

My other boba recipes you will also like: