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cuppacocoa
April 1, 2021

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Instant Coffee + sugar + hot water. Blend. Dollop onto milk.
So. Good.

I was pretty sure I was the last person to hear about this delightful coffee concoction, but when I texted a photo to one of my friend groups last year, 4 of the 5 didn’t know what it was. When I posted it to my IG account, enough people asked what it was that I decided there were definitely more people that needed to know about it. And bloggers don’t let readers miss out on recipes that are both super easy and super yummy (and extremely Instagrammable). So I wrote this post up for y’all, and then… I forgot about it? I don’t know what happened, but here we are a year later, and I will now think of this as my “1-yr anniversary with Dalgona Coffee” celebratory post. If you haven’t tried it yet, this coffee whip is everything you are hoping it would be: creamy and frothy (without using any cream), tasty, and EASY.

It’s been about a year now since I started making it. As we had all started to adjust to the new normal of hunkering down at home last spring, I watched the world learn new things: how to bake banana bread, how to bake sourdough, and how to make Dalgona coffee. Dal-what?? What was this beautiful creation, and how could I get it in my life?!

It’s really as easy as this picture says:

I use Bustelo instant coffee and 1 tablespoon of sugar (I prefer my milk tea with 50-75% sugar, for reference)

The ingredients are easy to procure, and it’s a texture and taste I would pay good money for. But I don’t have to! You can totally make this at home!

What do I use to blend it?

The main question is how you plan to blend the coffee whip. If you have a hand immersion blender with a whisk attachment, I definitely recommend that. It’s what I use, and it takes about 30 seconds to whip up (unless you’re ridiculous like me and try to do it one-handed while taking a video and end up splattering it on everything within a 2 ft radius).

If you don’t have a hand immersion blender with whisk attachment, the most common recommendation seems to be to use a hand mixer (but you’d have to wash a big bowl afterwards) or a milk frother. Though… if you have a milk frother, I wonder if you might be too fancy for instant coffee. Then again, I have a milk frother and I still like this particular drink very much.

The other option is to use a wire whisk and blend it manually. I’ve read online that it is taking people upwards of 20 minutes when using a whisk, and someone even told me it took an hour. And I honestly couldn’t imagine why. Maybe he tried a little bit of liquid in a big bowl? So I tried it myself and timed it, just so I could tell you here.

First I put the ingredients into a glass, then spun the whisk around with my hands like I was trying to start a fire. I stopped when it was about 3-4x the volume of the original mixture, which took exactly 5 minutes. I dolloped half of the coffee whip into a glass of milk for Ben, and the other half for myself. Stir, sip, and…

It was delicious!!! True, the final result is *slightly* less pretty, but it tasted just as good and still had that wonderful creamy texture. Honestly. And if you were willing to do the fire-starter method for longer (maybe tag team with someone), you could probably get more volume/fluffiness. But I don’t think it’s necessary.

So if the lack of a hand mixer or milk frother or hand immersion blender is keeping you from trying this, and you don’t have 20 minutes of whisking strength in your arms, then try this fire-starter whisking method!

Also, make sure you stir everything up nicely before you drink it to get that whipped texture mixed in, and use your fat boba straw to get nice big gulps of that creaminess!

2 responses to “Frothy Coffee Whip (aka Dalgona Coffee)”

  1. Angela says:

    I saw this all over IG but have never tried it yet =P Looks yummy!