What do you take in your coffee? Milk, cream, sugar, eggs. Wait eggs? Yes, you can and will want to try this egg coffee.
In coffee houses in Europe, milk and sugar in coffee became the norm, as it quelled the bitter and often stale taste of the not-so-fresh coffee beans. Yet as coffee culture spread throughout the world, people had to be innovative with the limited ingredients they had on hand. For example, the Scandinavian immigrants who moved to the United States brought over their coffee making a la egg shells. Eggs were used to soften the usually unpalatable taste of poor-quality coffee and were boiled with the coffee to purify the taste.
But to drink eggs…with coffee? Well, there’s that too! Again in times of scarce supply and limited resources, people in Vietnam got inventive and used eggs instead of cream.
Unlike milk which has to be refrigerated, the ingredients of this Vietnamese coffee don’t need refrigeration – eggs (which are pasteurized differently in other countries), sugar, and sweetened condensed milk are all you need to make a creamy, and dare I say it… airy coffee.
The eggs are whipped with sugar until they achieve a fluffy, cloud-like texture and are then again whipped even more until they are soft pale yellow in color.
Some people add condensed milk, but it really varies from recipe to recipe. The now billowy egg mixture is dolloped into individual cups or glasses. The cups are placed in hot water (to prevent the eggs from curdling) as hot coffee is poured into the glass. For an iced version, crushed ice acts as a barrier between the coffee and egg layers.
With the sugar and tons of air, the eggs don’t have an eggy omelet taste to them. The strong flavors of coffee and sugar are the dominant stars of this drink, and the eggs play as the textural and creamy sidekick.