It also has tapioca pearls inside!
If you think you’re done with your list of quarantreats to try, you may want to spare a little room for this dessert.
Foodies Jed Gamir and his wife chef Bekah Cuneta managed to bring Filipinos’ craving for boba or bubble milk tea to another level by turning it into a donut creation.
“I love donuts and my wife loves milk tea, why not combine them together? With that, we came up with boba donuts,” Jed tells Manila Bulletin Lifestyle. “At first, my wife was having second thoughts, asking me if it was weird to eat a donut with tapioca pearls inside. But I said, ‘If we do not try, we will never know.’”
And with the boba-filled donuts come their success. After two months since the establishment of their brand Bobba Donuts MNL, people couldn’t get enough of their sweet offering.
“We have been receiving random messages from everyone telling us their appreciation for our donut creation, that they can see great opportunities and a big future for our small business,” he says. “There are a lot of people asking if they can resell and be a distributor of our donuts. Many local celebrities and bloggers/vloggers are also asking us if we can collaborate with them.
We are just overwhelmed by the crowd’s reaction on boba donuts since we are just starting.”
Prior to the boba milk tea craze, Pinoy’s love for tea blossomed due to tea’s herbal benefits. There’s the popular ginger tea or salabat that is used to aid sore throats and stomach aches. For individuals looking to lower their blood sugar, the juice of boiled ampalaya leaves is the one to take.
Today, Filipinos prefer to have their tea served chilled, with milk, and with added texture, either coming from pudding, nata de coco, and the popular boba, locally recognized as sago.
Though it came to the country more than a decade ago, milk tea, thanks to the growing Filipino fans of Korean pop culture, became the go-to beverage among Millennials and Gen-Zers in recent years.
That is why when the pandemic hit the country, many milk tea lovers missed the simple luxury of ordering their favorite drink due quarantine protocols. Jed and Bekah saw it as an opportunity to pursue their dream of owning a food business, championing a product they claim to be the first of its kind in the country.
“Before all of this, we are planning on putting up an enterprise and thought of opening up a food business online but we haven’t got any ideas on what to sell yet,” he says. “We thought that if we are going to enter the food business again, we should sell something unique for everyone to love and, of course, they can buy at an affordable price. In these trying times, money is very hard to earn.”
In a report by food delivery service Grabfood, the Philippines ranks second in the list of top consumers of milk tea in Southeast Asia, with Thailand on the top spot. It also states that a Filipino consumer drinks five cups of milk tea per month. No wonder their boba donut became an instant hit.
Just like a crème brûlée, the donut plays with texture and flavor. It has a crisp burnt caramel exterior because of the torched sugar that contrasts with the fluffy donut. Inside it is where heaven lies in the form of cloud-like, milk tea-flavored cream with tapioca pearls. More than enough, the filling oozes out even before you have a bite of it.
“The boba donuts are made and prepared in our home in the morning so that people can enjoy them fresh, that’s how we like to eat ours,” Jed says. “People can order from our Instagram and our Facebook accounts. We do deliver them around Metro Manila but at the expense of the customer.”
Apart from the classic milk tea, Bobba Donuts MNL also features special flavors that change every month like strawberry ’n cream and its take on Dalgona coffee.
“As we always claim, we are the first ever boba donuts here in the Philippines,” Jed says. “We want everyone to experience this new kind of donut that we know they will surely love and enjoy as much as we do.”
A Bobba Donut MNL's box of four pieces costs P180. To order, visit @bobbadonutsmnl_ on Instagram and @bobbadonutsmnl on Facebook.