Dalgona (Whipped) Coffee Experiment
Dalgona Coffee, or Whipped Coffee is the latest craze and it seems everywhere I look on social media there are new videos and articles popping up. Maybe we are all just bored from being socially isolated, or maybe there is something to it. This frothy coffee drink originates from South Korea and went viral after someone posted a video about it on YouTube in January. Since then, it seems everyone and their brother has posted their own video. I have some questions though and I am going to get to the bottom of those in this article and with my own video experiment with Dalgona Coffee. Watch the video here.
Question # 1
It looks cool, but what is it??
Basically it is 3 ingredients. 2 Tablespoons of instant coffee, 2 tbsps of hot water and 2 tbsps of sugar. You mix or whisk them together ( I recommend a hand mixer because it is much easier on your arm!) until it becomes a light and airy whipped wonderfulness. You put either cold milk and ice, or hot milk in a glass, and spoon the whipped coffee on top of it. You can also use your choice of soy milk, almond milk or any other type of milk that you like.
Do you have to use instant coffee?? If so, why??
So basically at first I thought, instant coffee + hot water = coffee. So why couldn't I just use coffee for the recipe? Sounds logical, right. It turns out that regular coffee doesn't work well. The recipe calls for equal parts of instant coffee and water, so when you mix that together it is a very thick potent sludge and regular coffee just isn't that thick. I used our Mexico Altura and did get it to froth up some, but it wasn't near as thick and fluffy as the instant version. Also, when you used the same amount of sugar in the mixture, it turned out way too sweet in the regular coffee version. So if you wanted to use regular coffee, you would have to cut the amount of sugar way down, and then that also makes it even more difficult to get a good thick fluffy mixture to happen. I even tried grinding my fresh coffee beans as fine as possible, then pouring hot water in it and letting it steep for a few minutes, in an attempt to get a thicker, more potent fresh coffee that was more of the consistency of the instant coffee. But that didn't really work any better. So unfortunately using fresh coffee doesn't really work that well. Bummer :( If you want to check out our fresh roasted, specialty grade coffees, please visit our catalog to see all of our products.
Question #3
My final question: That is a lot of sugar in whipped coffee, can I use a sugar substitute??
The answer to that question is yes. I tried several different types to see which one worked best. The ones that I had on hand were all the Swerve brand containing Erythritol. I experimented with 3 different types, and here are my results:
Granular Swerve- This type worked fine. It took longer to whip up, and I don't think it got quite as frothy as regular sugar. It tasted ok, but the granules did not completely dissolve, leaving you crunching on the sugar granules. So overall I did not really like the texture and roughness of this one... no one wants to crunch their coffee!
Swerve Brown- The brown sugar replacement. This one did fine as well. The granules dissolve better than the granular type, but there was still a bit of granular consistency to it. I did like the brown sugar flavor better, and I would be able to deal with the mild granular consistency.
Swerve Confectioners- This is basically a powdered sugar replacement and was my favorite substitute by far. It whipped up nice and fluffy, just like the original method using sugar, and the flavor was really good too.
I did find that no matter what method you used you do need to use a lot of milk. The whipped instant coffee, even with the sugar mixed in, is very strong and it is absolutely terrible plain. Once I got the right ratio of milk to coffee froth, and got it all mixed in, it was a good drink. It looks really fancy, and is fun to make, but I am still on the fence as to whether it is worth the time and energy! I guess it depends on how bored you are during social distancing and how much you are missing the fancy coffee shop drinks! I may have to try a hot version tomorrow.
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Try our Mexican Mocha Coffee recipe