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Nothing—not even a pandemic—should come between us and iced-coffee season. Enter: this simple, impressive dalgona coffee recipe.
Remaining inside for weeks on end, staring out the window, preparing increasingly decadent grilled cheese sandwiches—these all pass for premier indoor activities now. I feel fortunate to be safe and never farther than three feet away from a wheel of Brie, but there is one thing I miss. No, it’s not face-to-face interactions with friends or the feeling of fresh air. It’s the mellifluous, clink-clink springtime jingle of a delicious, cold iced coffee, procured at an overpriced café! I should be doing my annual routine of taking two sips of cold brew, seizing with anxiety, and then wondering if this is what drugs feels like!
But of course that’s off the table, so please join me in letting this new, Instagram-friendly drink save you from despair. If you’ve seen a mouthwatering, visually delightful, obscenely fluffy coffee beverage pop up on social media, you can thank South Korean food vloggers, who innovated the DIY latte trend under their own recent quarantine. Named after a Korean toffee candy—because both are brown-sugar-colored and delightful in their cloudlike presentation—dalgona coffee is here to fill the iced-coffee-shaped hole in your quarantined heart. It's simple to make, contains only ingredients you already have around the house, and is very, very photogenic. In other words, it is the opposite of a sourdough starter.
Here’s what you’ll need to make (a single serving of) dalgona coffee:
- Instant coffee
- Sugar
- Hot water
- A hand mixer (or a whisk or a spoon, but see notes below)
- Milk or an alt-milk
Yes, that's really it.
First, measure out equal amounts of instant coffee, sugar, and hot water. (Start with two tablespoons each, and scale up from there.) Then pour the ingredients into a bowl. The water needs to be hot or boiling to help the coffee and sugar dissolve.
The definitive recipe comes from South Korean YouTuber Ddulgi, who somehow managed to make a video with a hand mixer a soothing ASMR experience. Like her tutorial, most recipes call for even proportions—a 1:1:1 ratio of instant coffee, boiling water, and sugar.
As someone who has woken up family members every day this week with the whirring sounds of a hand mixer as I manically blend my new favorite ingredients, I must warn you that if you use less than one tablespoon of instant coffee plus one tablespoon of water plus one tablespoon of sugar, there really won't be enough liquid to whip up. It will look like you are making onion dip for a single ant. Please learn from my mistake:
For a single serving, a minimum of two tablespoons of instant coffee and hot water works best. That being said, you absolutely do not need to add an equal amount of sugar, depending on your tastes. But you do need some sugar, to create the creamy whipped peaks effect. I tried subbing out a spoonful of Nutella for sugar—it tasted good, but it did not look good enough to impress a TikTok teen and thus was pointless. You cannot use drip coffee, but if you really don't have any instant, you can allegedly use finely ground coffee beans instead. You can also mix in cocoa powder or cinnamon. Or you can make a matcha version.
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The dalgona coffee recipe works best with an electric mixer. Using a standard mixer on a medium setting, I made the coffee in about three minutes. Watching the raw ingredients morph into a chocolatey paste and then ripple into golden waves in a matter of minutes is quite satisfying and made me feel like a mad scientist.
But! I have a hand mixer only because I am now living with my parents in a Grown-Up House. If I were in my Brooklyn hovel, I would have only mismatched teaspoons, so I also tried making the coffee with nothing but a glass bowl and a spoon:
If you do decide to go the homesteader spoon route, doubling the recipe will make it a little easier
This approach felt, I will admit, insane. I felt like I was on a homestead, whipping cream into butter before the menfolk come back from the fields. My arm muscles withered in their flesh prison. I watched the better part of an episode of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and fed myself half a bag of baby carrots with my left hand before I was able to make something resembling the desired coffee topping. I also tried making dalgona coffee with a hand frother, which was a little more efficient than the spoon.
If you're looking for a quick cup of coffee, do not do this. If you are looking for a fulfilling quarantine activity and you aren't trying to learn how to knit or bake sourdough, start stirring. You are a modern corona-homesteader, and soon you will have one Michelle Obama arm!
Once your creation looks golden and sea-foamy (but not too stiff, or it won't settle over the milk), fill a glass with ice, pour in milk or a milk substitute, and gently top it with the coffee.
Don't let the coffee get too much lighter than this, or the consistency will be too thick to mix well with the milk.
Once you make your dalgona coffee, you are under legal obligation to take many, many photos of it, which you must upload to the internet. Then stir before you drink, to avoid consuming a cup of icy milk followed by straight-up sugar coffee.
Congratulations! You are now a chef, a scientist, and a valuable member of the internet. When you get out of quarantine, tip your barista extra.
Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.
