A watercolour of a glass mug of dark coffee with pale condensed milk settled at the bottom
Generated with OpenAI gpt-image-1
Adapted from Cà phê sữa

Condensed milk coffee

An established dish converted to shelf-stable ingredients. Every substitution is documented below.

How long it keeps

About 12 months, set by Instant coffee.

Indicative, for planning a build before you buy. The answer for a pack you already own is the best before date printed on it, and that only holds if it has been stored as the label says.

Serves
2
Burners
1
Pans
1
Water
0.3 L
Active
4 min
Total
6 min

Ingredients

The best argument for carrying a tin of condensed milk, and a reminder that it keeps unopened for a very long time.

  1. Condensed milk into the bottom of the mug first. Two generous spoons per mug. This order is not decorative: the coffee poured onto it dissolves it, and milk poured onto coffee sits in a lump.
  2. Coffee made at about double your normal strength with a little less water than usual.
  3. Poured slowly over the milk.
  4. Left thirty seconds, then stirred from the bottom.

Condensed milk is roughly half sugar, so this needs no other sweetening and usually less milk than people first use.

In Vietnam this is served over ice, which is not available here. Hot it is closer to a very sweet flat white, and on a cold morning that is the better version anyway.

Serves 2.

What this was adapted from

Cà phê sữa: the Vietnamese method of coffee brewed strong over sweetened condensed milk

  • coffee dripped through a phin filter → instant coffee made very strong

    A phin gives a slow, thick extraction that instant cannot match. Making the instant at roughly double normal strength gets somewhere in the direction, because the condensed milk will otherwise flatten it completely.