How instant coffee became beverage of the socially distant
Whipped into a meringue-like peak, it tops dalgona coffee
Before visiting Greece, I always associated instant coffee with my friend’s dad’s fishing boat. Shelf-stable and easily prepared, it was the beverage of choice when sailing the northern end of the Salish Sea. Stirred straight into a mug filled with hot water, it smelled as much of coffee as it did diesel fumes. Certainly, it was a means to a jittery, caffeinated end, and that in itself makes it worthy of appreciation.
The frappé, though, was an experience unto its own. Frothy, frosty and sweet, this hallmark of Greek coffee culture made me realize that instant isn’t an inferior choice. It’s an entirely different choice. Affordable, dependable and water-soluble, instant coffee has its place. And it also has its time, as evidenced by the popularity of a beverage born of South Korean social distancing: dalgona coffee.
With more than 100,000 posts tagged #dalgonacoffee (and another 114,000 tagged with its name in Korean) on Instagram, countless TikToks and YouTube tutorials, the iced beverage appears to be the #quarantinecoffee we were waiting for. Having just tried it, I can assure you it’s worth all the freeze-dried granules that have been spilled. It has a fullness, almost like a milkshake, and a straight-ahead coffee flavour.
To make dalgona coffee at home, you need instant coffee (which I have on hand for Andrea Nguyen’s nochurn Vietnamese coffee ice cream and the chocolate mousse from Joe Beef: Surviving the Apocalypse), sugar, boiling water, your milk of choice and ice. The meringue-like coffee peak is achieved by whisking together equal parts instant coffee, sugar and boiling water (I used one tablespoon of each per serving, but used Swerve, a sugar replacement). Whisking by hand, it took me roughly 10 minutes to achieve a nice, stiff consistency. You then add a dollop of the glossy coffee foam to a glass filled with milk and ice, admire your handiwork and stir (or shake, which I liked better).
Named after a “retro” sponge toffee candy — apparently because it resembles the fluffy mixture before it hardens — dalgona coffee carries a sense of nostalgia in South Korea. Says the L.A. Times: “Convenience stores and arcades used to keep dalgona-making kits around for kids to make it on their own after school." The sugar-baking soda sweets have reportedly been favourites since the ’70s.
Instant coffee on the whole, even for coffee aficionados, can be a reminder of another time or another place. “My guilty pleasure is really, really good milk with a lot of instant coffee,” says Eugene Fung, co-owner of Toronto’s Tandem Coffee, laughing. For him, instant coffee is a treat that comes only when he and his partner Michie Yamamoto visit her parents in Japan. Since Yamamoto’s parents aren’t coffee drinkers, they make sure to have instant on hand.
Instant coffee isn’t something he would ever consider buying at home, Fung adds, but it stands on its own merits. As opposed to the complexity of coffee, with its range of tart flavours and fruity notes, instant coffee is stripped down. It offers a more rudimentary experience, but one he welcomes as a change from the usual nonetheless.
“It’s a very classic, traditional coffee taste — lots of hard sugars, and it can be quite nutty. There’s very little tartness. It’s not fruity. So you get none of those notes at all, which is not bad. It’s its own thing. I treat it as its own drink,” Fung says. “We thought about bringing a hand grinder and bringing our own beans, and doing the whole thing (in Japan). But that would deprive me of my instant coffee once a year.”