We have developed deformable and durable optical tissue phantoms with a simple and well-defined microstructure including a novel combination of scatterers and a matrix material. These were developed for speckle and elastography investigations in optical coherence tomography, but should prove useful in many other fields. We present in detail the fabrication process which involves embedding silica microspheres in a silicone matrix. We also characterize the resulting phantoms with scanning electron microscopy and optical measurements. To our knowledge, no such phantoms were proposed in the literature before. Our technique has a wide range of applicability and could also be adapted to fabricate phantoms with various optical and mechanical properties.