Recipe: Dalgona Coffee – The popular coffee from South Korea

South Korean Dalgona coffee is trending everywhere (=Tik-Tok and Instagram) so when Elisabeth from AltAsiatisk.no sent me her recipe, I knew I had to try it. Dalgona is a kind of honeycomb candy made from baking soda and sugar, and the coffee foam has a deep, toffee-like flavor similar to the candy. It is tasty, and very easy to make. Just whip together equal parts of instant coffee, white sugar and boiling hot water to a fluffy foam, and scoop it on top of your favorite kind of milk. 

Here is the recipe:

Dalgona Coffee (3-4 cups)

5 tbsp instant coffee

5 tbsp white sugar

5 tbsp boiling hot water

1 cup of milk I use Alpro Almond Milk for Professionals (the only non-dairy milk allowed in my coffee), but you can use any kind of dairy or non-dairy milk.

Ice cubes

Elisabeth’s recipe has 5 tablespoons of each ingredient, which makes a rather large portion of coffee foam, but if you use smaller quantities of the ingredients, it will be difficult to whip the mixture together properly. And hey, if you end up with more foam than you need, you can always store it in the fridge for later use. 

I struggled to get the foam as light and fluffy as I wanted it, which was probably because I didn’t have the patience to whip the mixture for long enough. The first time I made Dalgona Coffee, I also accidentally added too much water, but I managed to save the foam by adding more sugar and instant coffee.

If your foam is on the heavy side, as mine was, make sure you put lots of ice cubes in the cup to prevent the foam from sinking to the bottom too fast.

Update: I finally took the time to whip the coffee properly, and after 10 minutes I got a beautiful fluffy foam as you can see in the new photos I have added:)

Pimp your Dalgona Coffee:

In Denmark we eat something called guf on top of ice cream, and I found a package of just-add-water guf when I was looking for the electrical mixer (no, I don’t use it very often:)) and figured it would be tasty together with the coffee foam. Guf is a meringue-like gooey mixture made with egg whites, corn syrup, sugar and strawberry jam. Will post a guf-recipe later. 

..and a word of caution

The Dalgona coffee is really tasty and it is easy to slurp down several cups a day, but remember that the coffee foam has a lot of caffeine. I used Nescafé Gold (I think it is called something else in the US) instant coffee which has around 50-90mg of caffeine per teaspoon. When I made my first serving of Dalgona Coffee, I added most of the foam to a single cup. It tasted so good, that I drank all of it, which is equivalent to drinking around 10 cups of regular black instant coffee, yikes! 

Here is my Dalgona Candy Recipe