The coffee drink that makes me cross this stifling summer

Like a large part of the rest of the world, I spent a lot of 2020 hiding at home. My basic memories of this year are mainly made up of social distancing, intense washing of hands and cooking through the books that had long seated on my shelf. But there is a recipe that I remember having made again and again this year: Dalgona Coffee.

Made by whisking instant coffee, sugar and hot water together until the mixture looks like a soft meringue, the social media flows dominated by sugary drinks that year, spilling the interest of millions (including me) stuck at home. It is not surprising that the drink was such a success. Café Dalgona, that the Los Angeles Times The described as “photogenic Instagram bait” have been practically designed for virality: it is aesthetically pleasant, requires only three ingredients and looks as much like a magic thing as a recipe. At a time when most of us could not walk in our favorite cafe for a cup of Joe, trying the fashion of coffee seemed … exhilarating. But unlike many culinary trends that I tried during the pandemic, it remained part of my repertoire, and I particularly like a dalgona coffee by a stifling day.

Where does the Dalgona coffee come from?

Café Dalgona exploded in popularity when Korean actor Jung Il-Woo was filmed while trying the drink for the first time in Hon Kee Café in Macao and compared it to Dalgona Candy, a Korean candy who has Tofeee’s taste. “When I was in primary school, they sold candy of sugar burned outside [the] School, “says Jung on the camera.” It has a melted version. Although many people combine the drink with Korean, its roots are much darker, because many cultures in the world have their own version of whipped coffee.

The owner of the Hon Kee Café, Leong Ham Kon, told the Macao post every day He picked up the technique for the glass in 1997 to a couple who visited Macao each year to attend the city’s grand prize, although he did not try to make the drink until 2004, when the actor of Hong Kong, Chow Yun-Fat, visited coffee. Eager to impress Chow, Leong made him a cup of whipped coffee in his hand. Chow loved it so much that he told Leong that it was better than some of the coffee he had taken in five -star hotels. Since then, Leong has served the drink – which he would have done by stirring the instant mixture of coffee and sugar 400 times by hand! – at his coffee.

Science behind Dalgona coffee

Let’s start with the basics: Dalgona coffee is a foam. A foam, like the contributor Serious Eats Kevin Liu wrote for us, is the dispersion of gas in a liquid, like beating air bubbles in egg whites to make meringue, thick cream to make whipped cream or a mixture of instant coffee, sugar and water to make Dalgona coffee. In the case of the meringue, the bubbles are coated and suspended by the proteins of the egg white. In the whipped cream, the bubbles are held by the fat molecules of the thick cream. These proteins and fat molecules act like surfactants who, as Daniel writes here, forms a shell around bubbles, stabilizing them.

With the Dalgona coffee, there is a minimum of fat and protein. So, what acts as a surfactant? If you’ve already seen a freshly pulled espresso, you’ve probably noticed the cream, a reddish brown foam that forms on the plane. According to James Hoffmann, the award -winning barista and author of How to make the best coffee at homeRoasting coffee beans produces melanoids, a foaming agent responsible for the bubbles of the cream and cappuccino. In his video of Café Dalgona, Hoffman says that he suspects that these foaming agents act as surfactants – the warning being that surfactants alone do not make a perfectly stable foam. Leave espresso outside for a few minutes and you will see the crema starting to dissolve.

The melanomian acts as a surfactant by helping to maintain the air bubbles that we introduce while whisking; The longer you whip, the smaller the bubbles, which leads to a more stable foam capable of maintaining its shape longer. But the viscosity of the mixture of coffee, sugar and water is also essential to help Dalgona coffee maintain its shape. Mousse, writes Gastronomist Hervé this in his book Molecular gastronomyare “stabilized by increasing the viscosity of its liquid phase (for example, by adding sugar and glycerol)”. The thicker the mixture, the slower your drainage. In short, it means that it will take more time for any liquid flowing, what happens when a meringue cries.

This would explain why most Dalgona coffees recipes require equal parts by volume of coffee, sugar and instant water. As you will see in my recipe below, however, you don’t really need to use a 1: 1 of instant sugar coffee ratio. You just need enough sugar to increase the viscosity of the mixture. Here, I use 2 coffee rooms to 1 part of sugar in volume, but I do not recommend reducing the amount of sugar beyond that.

How to make coffee dalgona

Here are the basic instructions for making Dalgona coffee: dissolve the instant coffee and granulated sugar in hot water, whisk (by hand or with an electric mixer) until they are duvets and doubled in volume, then in a tank on a glass of milk. While Leong Ham Kon, the founder of Hon Kee Café, makes his coffee dalgona by hand – until he mousses just – most people, including myself, prefer the faster option to use an electric mixer. You can certainly do it by hand, but the resulting foam will be much softer.

Can you make Dalgona coffee with a more beautiful instant coffee?

Coffee Dalgona calls on instant coffee granules, which allows a lot of coffee flavor to be wrapped in the foam without introducing additional water which would slim the viscosity necessary to contain a somewhat stable foam. But instant coffee is not exactly celebrated for its flavor. Now, however, there are a lot of serious coffee roasting that fall into the instantaneous space of coffee, except with more delicious results.

Curious to see if the coffee specialty coffee, Daniel gave my recipe with an instant coffee from an artisanal roasting. Even after whipping the mixture in the bowl of its stand mixer for 14 minutes, the mixture would not hold a stable foam, quickly collapsed in a puddle of uninocated water. “I think we can safely say that specialized coffee does not definitively foam as the basic instant coffee,” he sent me a message on Slack.

I cannot say with certainty, but I have an intuition explaining why it may not work. More beautiful instant cafes are generally lyophilized, which helps preserve the oils that give coffee its rich aroma. Just as a meringue does not go as well if there is fat in the bowl, it is possible that the presence of these oils in specialized lyophilized cafe is more difficult to prepare. Cheaper instantaneous coffees, on the other hand, are generally dried by spray: coffee is spité in hot air, which dries it by evaporation, leaving dehydrated coffee granules.

In an article published in the Tea and coffee trade newspaperDr. Terry Mabbett notes that the “oil content with low coffee” dried by spray is what makes it so ideal for foam. Although you can be more aromatic, coffee oils present “can quickly stimulate and accelerate the collapse of the monsoage process”.

This does not mean that you could not play to make it work, however. Certain high -end instant coffee brands may be able to work better than others. It is also possible that recipe adjustments can optimize any particular coffee brand. The addition of gum or gelatin to the Xanthan or manipulation of the temperature of the coffee mixture could help the specialized instant coffee to hold its shape. In his video, Hoffmann manages to operate his Dalgona coffee with a more beautiful snapshot coffee, leaving his mixture in the freezer for several minutes to lower the temperature, which makes it more viscous and easier to whip in foam.

That the experiment in order to make a brand of coffee specializing in worth, it will depend on the importance of the quality of coffee for you. If you are just looking to make a funny caffein drink that takes less than five minutes from start to finish, you would probably be better to use an old instant coffee.

Aside from convenience, I also think there is an argument based on flavors in favor of cheap instant coffee: it generally comes from much more roasted grains, which have a more bitter and burned flavor. Mixed with a lot of milk and sugar, this burned flavor becomes much more pleasant to taste, like the burned caramel … similar to the Dalgona Bonbon Jung Il-Woo compared the drink to its first viral sip. Maybe cheap instant coffee is how dalgona is supposed to taste.

Cook mode
(Keep the screen awake)