Engineering the Ultimate Boba Milk Tea, Part 4: Sweetener
This series is a deep dive into the details and thought process behind our boba milk tea at Camellia Rd Tea Bar.
Here in Part 4, we're going to talk about sweetener. Expect to learn about how we perceive sweetness, basic sugar chemistry, and about the sweetener we use for our milk tea at Camellia Rd Tea Bar.
Taste perception
When we enjoy a sweet drink, our tongues have receptors that detect sugar and signal to our brain. We perceive and define this signal as sweetness, one of the basic tastes. [1] Sweetness is generally considered a positive, pleasurable taste (in contrast to other basic tastes, like bitterness) and is associated with rewards like desserts and treats.
The more sugar we add to a drink, the more we can activate sugar taste receptors, and the more we increase sweetness signals to our brain. While just about everyone has taste buds that detect sweetness, our perception and enjoyment of the sweetness signals is subjective and varies. Put simply, some people prefer less sweetness and some people prefer more sweetness.
Additionally, sweetness signals interplay with other taste signals and can affect our overall perception of a dish or a drink. A spoonful of honey in your morning tea makes it taste smoother and less astringent, but put that same spoonful of honey directly into your mouth and it can be overwhelmingly sweet.
Parks and Recreation - S05E02 "Soda Tax"
Sugar chemistry
Sugars are carbohydrates, compounds made up of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. The different orientation and size of sugars molecules will have different levels of sweetness and digestibility. Some examples of sugars:
- Glucose is a simple sugar with the molecular formula of C6H12O6; it's water soluble, easily digested, and tastes sweet.
- Sucrose is a larger molecule than glucose, with the molecular formula C12H22O11. It is essentially a glucose bonded to a fructose; it tastes sweeter than glucose does. [2]
- Cellulose is a long chain carbohydrate with the chemical formula (C6H10O5)n; it's not water soluble and doesn't taste sweet (imagine chewing plain celery).
Sucrose = a bonded glucose + fructose
Glucose, fructose, and sucrose are sweet tasting sugars that are commonly found in fruits and vegetables. Let's consider a raw, golden delicious apple; it contains 6.1g of fructose, 1.87g of glucose and 2.07g of sucrose per 100g of apple.[3] When we eat an apple we're not just getting the sweet tasting sugar - we're also getting the other components and flavor of the apple. Some sweeteners are sought after because they add both sweetness and unique flavors, such as honey or maple syrup.
However, sweeteners like pure white cane sugar and high fructose corn syrup have almost all other components and flavors stripped away leaving almost entirely pure sugar. This results in a much higher concentration of glucose, fructose, and/or sucrose.
Organic cane sugar simple syrup
High fructose corn syrup is found at a lot of boba tea chains and restaurants; it's widely available, very sweet, and very cheap. White cane sugar is also widely available, sweet tasting, and cost-effective in the U.S. but it does cost a little more than high fructose corn syrup.
For example, Mexican Coca-Cola is often preferred over U.S. Coca-Cola in SoCal, as Mexican Coca-Cola is made with cane sugar as opposed to high fructose corn syrup in the U.S. version. [4]
Coca-cola bottle.
At Camellia Rd Tea Bar, we take this concept one step further by using a house made, organic cane sugar simple syrup to sweeten our milk tea drinks. Organic cane sugar has even more of floral, caramel, and molasses notes that come naturally from sugarcane; but it's not as forward as the floral notes from honey, or the molasses flavor from brown sugar. Organic cane sugar is versatile enough to pair with our range of tea bases we use in our milk teas. We also like that organic cane sugar is less processed than alternatives like high fructose corn syrup.
Application of simple syrup
Preparation
At Tea Bar, we a prepare rich simple syrup in big batches in advance so that our sweetener is readily mixable for our drinks for fast production. Conventional simple syrups are 1 part sugar to 1 part water, but we make a rich simple syrup, which is 2 parts sugar and 1 part water, to reduce the amount of water and dilution that impacts our final drink. We also add a small amount of salt to help enhance the sweetness (in the same way that sugar helps reduce our perception of bitterness, salt improves sweetness).
Customization
As mentioned earlier, sweetness is subjective. so we decided that our milk teas would be made to order and not presweetened. We offer 25% increments (0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%, 125%) for ease of ordering and control over individual drinks.
Calculated
Different teas will have different natural flavor profiles - some will be a bit stronger or more astringent so we tailored our individual drink recipes to have different levels of sweetness. For example, our Thai milk tea at 100% will have more simple syrup than our Hojicha milk tea at 100%, because we felt that the Thai milk tea needed more sweetness to taste perfect.
Conclusion
At Camellia Rd Tea Bar, we use organic cane sugar simple syrup to sweeten our ultimate boba milk tea. It's adds a layer of flavor that enhances the taste of our teas. We offer full customization by using a house made, rich simple syrup and not pre-sweetening our tea bases. We've calibrated our recipes so that certain teas that can benefit from more sweetness, will have more sugar for the same "100%" order specification.
Thank you for reading! Part 5 will be about tea.
-Ricky
P.S. Personally, I love sugar - I started a boba shop, after all. Occasionally I'll drink a plain, 0% sweet puer, oolong or green tea for something lighter but generally I'll always get 75% - 125% sweetness, depending on the tea.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taste#Basic_tastes
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