Frogspawn for the new millennium
So anyway, there I was yesterday afternoon, having got home from work and aimlessed around for a bit. I then recalled the intriguing pack of semolina pearls that I’d picked up from my favourite supermarket in Chinatown a few weeks ago.
Now, I didn’t experience that much of this famous British school cuisine because I spent a lot of my childhood abroad and thus never got put off semolina as a kid. Furthermore, I loved the can of milky sweet bubble tea (I know every hipster went through this phase years ago, but I don’t care as it’s new to me) that I tried recently, so was interested in having a go at making my own.
First off, I emptied a paltry amount of the tiny unpromising beads into a heavy-based saucepan and added a good whack of boiling water. Standing over the merrily chortling and increasingly gluey pan for 20 minutes and stirring every so often wasn’t really a chore, as I was talking to my flatmate, who was constructing avocado salad and refused to even look at the substance I had produced.
I rinsed the pearls in a bit of cold water and bunged them in a bowl with some sugar syrup to keep them nicely separated while they cooled, as advised by my cooking instructions (from the interweb not the packet: my ideographic interpretation skills start and end with musical annotation). So far so good, and it really does look like frogspawn!
A while later, I mixed up a concoction from coconut milk powder and a packet of instant ginger tea and cooled it down with a lot of milk straight from the fridge. Adding the reserved semolina and stirring it all together in a large chunky wine glass, I congratulated myself on the creation of a fine-looking beverage and then swigged the lot. One of those fancy super-wide straws would have aided the experience somewhat, but overall it was satisfyingly chewy and tasty.
Verdict: time-consuming but not onerous, and jolly good fun for the amateur kitchen chemist.
p.s. I placed a small portion of the pearls in their syrup in a jar in the fridge to see how they keep. Results to follow via comments.