Iced Matcha Latte with Grass Jelly Recipe

My fiancé, Joanna, and I started going on all-day walks on the weekend to keep our sense of adventure and stay healthy during the pandemic. We are blessed to be living in San Francisco, a city which allows us to step outside of our apartment and head any direction and find something interesting.

To fuel these jaunts, we’ve sampled nearby milk tea shops. Joanna’s favorite drink is a lightly sweetened Hong Kong milk tea, while mine is an unsweetened matcha latte. We both enjoy grass jelly as a topping (vs. boba). We started noticing that we were spending $5-6 each on these milk tea drinks, not to mention the waste of single-use plastic cups and straws, and we rarely got the drink exactly the way we wanted it.

After a few subpar excursions, we decided to make our own milk tea drinks. We purchased reusable drink glasses with metal straws on Amazon, and picked up some grass jelly powder at a nearby Chinese grocery store (you can also get grass jelly powder on Amazon but the only brand we found is pre-sweetened). Below is the recipe we came up with:

Grass Jelly Recipe

Ingredients

1 tsp Unsweetened Grass Jelly Powder

1 cup Water

1 tsp Honey (optional)

Steps

1. Mix 1 tsp grass jelly powder with 1 cup of cold water
2. Bring the mixture up to a boil
3. Mix in 1 tsp of honey
4. Pour mixture into a glass container and let cool, then refrigerate
5. When it has solidified, cut into cubes

Iced Matcha Latte Recipe

Ingredients

Steps

1. Add all the ingredients to a shaker (we use a cocktail shaker)
2. Shake until ingredients are mixed well
3. In your milk tea cup, add the grass jelly cubes first
4. Finally, pour the finished product into the cup

Note: This iced matcha latte recipe works well for any kind of tea, not just matcha! We’ve had great results with making a strong oolong tea, and using this in place of the ½ cup water in the recipe above (and omitting the matcha).

We’re so happy to be making our own delicious milk tea drinks now, and of course saving money and the environment as side benefits. We hope you enjoy this recipe as much as we do 🙂