On today’s TribLive Taste Test (Special Social Distancing Edition!), we try out the latest viral drink craze: Dalgona coffee, or whipped instant coffee.
“Dalgona” refers to a type of South Korean toffee candy. The coffee is so named because once it is whipped, it has a similar appearance to the airy candy confection.
It’s made using instant coffee, sugar, your choice of milk and ice. The general recipe is 2 parts instant coffee and sugar to 1 part water. Our recipe was 2 tablespoons of coffee, 2 tablespoons of sugar and 1 tablespoon of milk. That gets whipped together using a whisk until it’s extremely airy, almost a meringue-like consistency.
Fill a glass about half-full with ice and milk, spoon the whipped mixture over the top, take a moment to enjoy how it just sort of floats on the top, and then mix them together.
The final product should look like chocolate milk, and will be both very strong in its coffee flavor and very sweet due to the sugar. Several recipes say to mix it before drinking “if desired,” but unless you want to look like you’ve been making out with a muddy truck tire, we highly recommend mixing it up.
For anyone who’s eaten at a Thai restaurant and ordered Thai iced tea — made with a heaping helping of sweetened condensed milk — this is basically the coffee version!
It’s also a distant cousin to another of our favorite caffeinated beverages, the Cuban coffee. With Cuban coffee, you whisk a tablespoon of your espresso with a couple tablespoons of sugar to create “espuma,” the frothy sugar mixture that floats to the top.
What drinks and dishes are you whipping up to satisfy your culinary cravings while we’re all stuck inside? Email pvarine@triblive.com and let us know!
