Viral recipes: whipped coffee & easy egg sandwichDate: 5/12/2020 Like nearly everyone else stuck at home right now, I spend way too much time online. In an attempt to amuse myself when I’m not working, I’ve found myself watching hours of videos, scanning hundreds of recipes and scrolling through my various social media feeds to amuse my shortening attention span.
Recently, as I was scrolling I noticed that some recipes, two in particular seemed to be going viral with dozens of videos and photos of people attempting to make them at home. They looked easy and delicious, so I thought I’d give them a try.
Whipped coffee
In recent weeks it seems like everyone I know has tried some version of whipped coffee. While I first saw this recipe online, it was one of my sisters who convinced me to try the coffee drink. She said to me, “If you like strong coffee, you’ll love it.”
Prior to quarantine, each week I looked forward to my Friday’s – when I allowed myself to stop at Shelburne Falls Coffee Roasters in East Longmeadow. While I’m a die-hard coconut cream cold brew fan, I also love their seasonal drinks. Craving both, whipped coffee seemed like it might be able to take the place of the endless cups of hot, black coffee I’d been consuming in recent weeks.
The recipe for whipped coffee is very simple: two tablespoons of sugar, two tablespoons of instant coffee and two tablespoons of hot water. You beat all the ingredients together and serve in a cup over milk. Easy, right?
I tried this recipe two times. The first time, I used half the sugar and water, and used a small packet of instant coffee I’d bartered from a family member that lives nearby. I found that this didn’t give me the whipped, fluffy coffee that I saw online despite attempting to use my electric hand mixer to beat the ingredients together for a solid five minutes. Additionally, the strong coffee flavor I’d been promised was lacking. It seemed as though once the mixture was poured over milk, it lost any semblance of the coffee flavor and resulted in a less sugary coffee drink you’d find at a supermarket. The mixture tasted more of the oat milk I’d used than the coffee I was promised.
The next time making the recipe I used the instant coffee I’d gotten in my most recent grocery order for a dessert recipe. I stuck to the original proportions, measured them into a bowl and once again beat ingredients together with my mixer. After several minutes the mixture looked less like a brown soup and more like a brown whipped cream. The original recipe says to serve the milk with ice, but ice and milk felt weird to me so I poured the milk and then spooned the coffee mixture on top.
I stirred the mixture together and took a drink. The coffee flavor was, indeed, much stronger than the first time, even after stirring the drink. While the drink certainly had a coffee flavor, it didn’t satisfy my coffee craving.
Maybe it was the texture, which I can only compare to a creamier fruit smoothie, maybe it was that the coffee didn’t disguise the taste of the oat milk, which I don’t typically drink by itself, or maybe it was that my expectations had been built up by others praising the drink.
The drink was tasty, but for me, it wasn’t worth the effort to get my caffeine fix, I’d just rather drink my black coffee.
For those looking for something different, maybe with less sugar and a coffee flavor, it might be just what you’re looking for.
You can try making whipped coffee at home using this recipe: https://tasty.co/recipe/whipped-coffee.
Egg sandwich
I have to be honest, my motivation to make this one wasn’t that I found it mouth-watering, but that my husband does. I was pretty indifferent when I saw the video of this sandwich being made, while it looked delicious, I don’t normally eat breakfast and when I do it’s something quick that I can eat on the go or in a few moments. However, from the moment my husband saw the initial video, he was hooked and wouldn’t be satisfied until we had replicated it, in some form.
To make the sandwich as the video demonstrates, you start with eggs that have been beaten and add them to a frying pan as though you were making scrambled eggs. You add two pieces of bread to the pan, coating each piece of bread in the egg mixture on both sides and leave the bread to cook in the eggs. After that cooks to your liking, you flip the entire thing. After cooking that, you take the extra cooked egg on the outside edges and flip them into the middle of the bread, add items like cheese or bacon and then flip one piece of bread onto the other.
The nice part about this sandwich is as long as you have eggs and bread, you can truly customize it in any way you want. The video is really only a guide to how to position your bread, and how to fold the sandwich. It’s basically an omelette sandwich. We used what we had: cheese and bacon. However, I’d love to experiment with peppers, onions, mushrooms and even spinach. The video I watched also didn’t show any seasoning being added to the eggs, but I use salt and pepper on my eggs.
The video did not note how many eggs to use so I used the four eggs, the remainder of a container I had that were on the verge of expiring. Four eggs is….a lot. The bread soaked up a lot of the egg and made it heavy, but was still delicious. The upside to using four eggs was that the sandwich was insanely filling. I had originally intended on making each of us our own sandwich, but after eating only half of the sandwich each, we were too full to consider making another.
Another positive of this sandwich is that as long as you have your ingredients prepped, it’s pretty quick as the eggs don’t take long to cook.
One note my husband and I both had, however, was that we felt the bread got heavy and lacked texture. We agreed that when we inevitably made the breakfast sandwich again, we’d toast the bread before adding it to the egg.
If you want to make your own version of this delicious and filling breakfast sandwich, you can find the video and some tips here: https://www.foodnetwork.com/fn-dish/news/2020/03/tik-tok-breakfast-sandwich-hack.
|
