We Tried the Famous TikTok Whipped Coffee
You kids and your renegades and your woahs!
If you’re either a pre-teen or an extremely bored quarantined college student, you’ve probably been on TikTok in the last couple of weeks.
Not only is TikTok full of intricate dance challenges, but it also houses a decent amount of short cooking tutorials. The latest cooking trend to blow up on the app is whipped coffee, a drink based on the Greek frappe coffee (shoutout to Local editor Andie Kanaras for educating us).
The ingredients are simple — just sugar, water, instant coffee, and milk — so we decided to give it a try.
Gaby Sotelo:
It took me three tries to finally get this whipped coffee somewhat right. I followed the basic instructions online using 1 tablespoon of water, sugar, and instant coffee. My first try I had to switch from whisking with my hands to using my stand mixer, but about five minutes in I realized nothing was happening and checked to see what I did wrong. It turns out that it’s very important to have INSTANT coffee, whereas I had used ground espresso coffee.
My second attempt went way worse for some reason. I found the instant coffee, mixed everything together, and this time I could not at all figure out why it wasn’t whipping up. My sister suggested the water wasn’t hot enough, but I honestly don’t know what went wrong.
My third attempt I switched from a medium glass bowl to a smaller ceramic one and whipped everything up using a milk frother. My color of the mixture was nothing like you see online and while it did whip to an O.K. consistency, it wasn’t anything worthy of an instagram pic. After pouring it over some iced oat milk, it turned out to be just okay. It didn’t have the strong coffee flavor you usually get when you mix both oat milk and coffee together.
Overall, it took way longer than expected, but mostly because of simple mistakes. My final, semi-successful try took around five minutes.
Trishna Rikhy:
After seeing the viral whipped coffee trend all over my For You page on TikTok, I really wanted to try it myself. I mean, I love coffee, and any new method of doing something during quarantine is welcomed with open arms.
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Just as the recipes I saw instructed, I added equal parts of instant coffee, sugar, and water to a bowl, and used a hand mixer to whip it quickly (or so I thought — all the Tik Toks of people whisking said it took, like, half an hour, but with my hand mixer it took at least 15 and I still didn’t get to the solidified consistency I should have).
I’m someone who cannot stand sugar in my coffee, but I thought it’d taste good, like a Frappuccino. Boy, was I wrong. Not only did the “whipped” consistency give it a weird texture — even when I added to concoction to almond milk and ice — but the sugar in the coffee was absolutely not a good flavor for me. After spending 20 minutes making the whipped coffee, I took one sip and immediately dumped it out. Is it cute to look at and a fun trend? Sure! But unless you have a lot of patience and like super-sweet coffee, it probably won’t be your new favorite quarantine drink.
Anna Choi:
When I saw this whipped coffee recipe on TikTok, it seemed almost too good to be true. How could a mixture without any milk or egg whites foam up enough to become almost solid? I’ve seen enough 5-minute crafts videos to be skeptical, but since the ingredients were already right in front of me, I decided to try it out.
I knew going into this experiment that, if whipping manually, it could take the coffee anywhere from 15–25 minutes to reach the right consistency. I don’t own a whisk, so I used the next best thing — chopsticks.
First, I added a one-serving packet of instant coffee to my bowl (it was about 1 tbsp of coffee). I had heard that using instant coffee rather than ground coffee was crucial, so I made sure to use the Nescafe hazelnut coffee I had instead of left-over drip coffee.
Next, 1 tbsp of sugar. This might seem like a lot of sugar for some people but, as a Starbucks caramel macchiato lover, I’m perfectly happy with a sweet drink.
Finally, the 1 tbsp of water. Time to whip!
Almost immediately, the coffee started to take up a foamy consistency. By five minutes, it was lightening in color, and by 15 minutes, the mixture was foaming loose peaks and was the color of peanut butter.
I poured a cup of ice and milk, then spooned the whipped coffee on top. After taking a ridiculous amount of pictures, I stirred the milk and coffee and took a sip. It was creamy, sweet, and strong — just the way I like it. It tasted almost like a coffee milkshake and was a great mid-afternoon treat.
After trying the drink, I made some more whipped coffee for the rest of the coffee-lovers in my house. This time, though, I used an immersion blender, which cut the whipping time by nearly a third and didn’t leave my arms aching. If you have a hand/stand mixer or an immersion blender, use it. If you don’t, it’s still very doable.
Whipped coffee is great for making a sweet coffee treat while you’re stuck in quarantine. Be warned, though — many in the TikTok comments claim the strength of the coffee gave them heart palpitations.
