I love coffee, I can barely go a day without drinking it. Not only do I enjoy a simple cup of warm black coffee, I also like to experiment with its preparation. That’s why when I saw the coffee drink that has recently been going viral on social media, most notably TikTok, I had to try it. Three ingredients, simple instructions, the results must be good, right?
This coffee is made with a whipped coffee topping made with simply equal parts by volume of instant coffee, granulated sugar, and hot water. The meringue-like topping can then be served over cold or hot milk or hot water. Super simple!
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There are two ways of making the whipped coffee topping, by hand and with a mixer. I tried both, just to see if there was any difference. First, I mixed the ingredients with a mixer, which only took about a minute and was very easy. The finished texture was stiff, which made for a topping that sat on my chilled almond milk nicely, although it was a little difficult to mix in. Whipping the topping by hand took about four minutes and left me with a bit of a tired arm. I didn’t get the mixture to be quite as stiff, but I found that whipping it to a ribbon stage was much easier to mix into the milk.
Okay, so how does it taste? It’s actually a pretty good cup of iced coffee. I found that you could adjust the sweetness of the mixture a little bit, so if you want it to be sweeter than it already is, you could add more sugar, but I found that it was fine with the original recipe. It tastes a bit like coffee ice cream that has melted, and the texture is slightly thickened because of the air from the cream once the drink is fully mixed.
After making this coffee, I was curious about its origins and why the whipping results in something that so closely resembles meringue. This coffee preparation was made popular in Korea, called dalgona coffee. It also has origins from India, Pakistan, and Macau. The actual science behind the drink is interesting too. It does not work with regular coffee grounds because the stabilizers needed to give the frothy topping its body are found in instant coffee, not from the beans themselves.
Although dalgona coffee is pretty good, drinking it every day could be a lot. James Hoffman, a barista who is well versed in coffee science, explains in his video about dalgona coffee on YouTube that the serving size includes more caffeine than the average person would normally consume in a day. For example, the serving size for one regular serving of the instant coffee I used was one teaspoon, I used two tablespoons. Because of this, the drink was loaded with caffeine and I was wired all day, which led to a pretty big crash later in the day.
With all of that being said, it is still a decent cup of coffee and I would definitely recommend trying it, if not to drink, then at least for the Instagram opportunity.