Day 21: Egg Coffee

While surfing through some food blogs I stumbled upon the notion of “egg coffee” in one of the suggested posts. I had never heard of anything even remotely like this so, intrigued, I clicked on the link to the post.

The post was about Vietnamese egg coffee, which is a sweet, rich and frothy drink. But the post also mentioned a Scandinavian egg coffee, in which the coffee is brewed with a whole egg in it. The egg protein traps certain bitter chemicals in the coffee, so you can taste the other more delicate flavors.

Although I love the flavor of coffee, I often find black coffee too bitter to drink on its own. I usually need to add a teaspoon of sugar to really enjoy it. So this mild flavored coffee sounded delightfully tantalizing.

When I set out to try making it this evening I was quite skeptical as to whether it would turn out to be the lovely amber liquid it claimed it would. Ammama, who was watching me get all the ingredients together, was very utterly shocked!

And while it looked a bit ungodly when it was actually brewing, the end result was not at all gross, like my family was certain it would be. It actually turned out amber in colour, fairly mildly flavoured, and lacked the piercing bitterness and acidity of regular black coffee. And it didn’t taste eggy at all! Although, it did have a faint eggy smell. But apparently you can use a single egg to brew up to nine cups of this coffee, so I assume if I more than a single cup the smell would hardly be noticeable.

The recipe I used was from this blog post, which I rather liked.  

While "egg coffee" may sound like a slightly gross concept, I thought the scientific principles behind it were rather neat. Egg protein binds to the bitter and astringent polyphenols of the coffee and precipitates them, while the calcium carbonate of the eggshell neutralizes some of the acids in the coffee, together creating a mild, yet flavourful brew.