If You Love Dalgona Coffee, Then You Need to Try “Strawberry Whipped Milk”

One of the overwhelmingly popular trends to come out of everyone staying at home has been Dalgona coffee. The whipped coffee drink solves tons of problems at once: It makes instant coffee palatable, it creates a little something special out of everyday caffeination, and it looks beautiful, tastes great, and doesn’t require either much skill or many ingredients.

Of course, nobody can really leave a trend where it’s at, so almost as soon as the drink wound its way around social media, people began trying to make their own variations on the drink. Here at Kitchn we tried to “Dalgona” a variety of different powders — including cocoa, instant pudding mix, and Kool-Aid — and they were all complete disasters. We thought it wasn’t possible to get the same “whipped” effect as instant coffee, until we saw this video on Instagram from Valentina Mussi, via Delish.

In the video, Mussi mixes strawberry Nesquik with heavy cream until it’s “whipped” up. She rims a glass with the Nesquik powder, adds some ice and milk, and then dollops the “whipped strawberry milk” on top.

This is definitely different than Dalgona coffee, which just uses instant coffee powder, water, and a little sugar. Mussi is essentially just making strawberry-flavored whipped cream here and serving it over milk. No judgment, just the facts. It still looks similar to Dalgona, and it sounds pretty delicious, so let’s just roll with that.

What makes Dalgona coffee foamy are the same innate characteristics that creates the foam on an espresso — it likely has to do with the proteins that exist in the coffee itself — particularly in the very fine texture of instant coffee, combined with the sugar that stabilizes it. Without those elements from the instant coffee, the foam needs to come from elsewhere — cream, egg whites, aquafaba. Which, like the strawberry whipped cream milk, sounds like a good way to make a treat — it’s just a different thing than Dalgona. But hey, let’s pretend it’s the same and call it dessert!