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Vietnam Coffee
Vietnamese Milk Coffee
How
to make Cà phê sữa đá
Ca phe sua da or cafe sua da (Vietnamese: cà
phê sữa đá, literally "milk coffee with ice")
is a traditional Vietnamese coffee recipe. It is also called ca phe nau da
(Vietnamese: cà phê nâu đá,
"iced brown coffee") in northern Vietnam.
At its simplest, Ca phe sua da is made with finely ground
Vietnamese-grown dark roast coffee individually brewed with a small metal
Vietnamese drip filter (cà phê phin) into a cup containing about a
quarter to a half as much sweetened condensed milk, stirred and poured over ice.
Coffee was introduced into Vietnam by French colonists in the late 19th
century. Vietnam quickly became a strong exporter of coffee. The beverage was
adopted with regional variations. Because of limitations on the availability of
fresh milk, the French and Vietnamese began to use sweetened condensed milk with
a dark roast coffee.
Cà phê sữa đá ready to be stirred, poured
over ice, and enjoyed.
How
to make Cà phê sữa đá - Vietnamese
style iced coffee
Ca phe sua da (Vietnamese style iced coffee)
· 2 to 4 tablespoons finely ground dark roast coffee (preferably with
chicory)
· 2 to 4 tablespoons sweetened condensed milk (not evaporated milk!)
· Boiling water
· Vietnamese coffee press [see notes]
· Ice cubes
Place ground coffee in Vietnamese coffee press and screw lid down on the
grounds. Put the sweetened condensed milk in the bottom of a coffee cup and set
the coffee maker on the rim. Pour near boiling water over the screw lid of the
press; adjust the tension on the screw lid just till bubbles appear through the
water, and the coffee drips slowly out the bottom of the press.
When all water has dripped through, stir the milk and coffee together. You can
drink it like this, just warm, as ca phe sua nong, or over ice, as ca phe sua da.
To serve it that way, pour the milk-coffee mixture over ice, stir, and drink as
slowly as you can manage.
Notes:
A Vietnamese coffee press looks like a stainless steel top hat. There's a
"brim" that rests on the coffee cup; in the middle of that is a
cylinder with tiny perforations in the bottom. Above that rises a threaded rod,
to which you screw the top of the press, which is a disc with similar tiny
perforations. Water trickles through these, extracts flavor from the coffee, and
then trickles through the bottom perforations. It is excruciatingly slow.
Loosening the top disc speeds the process, but also weakens the resulting coffee
and adds sediment to the brew.
If you can't find a Vietnamese coffee press, regular-strength espresso is an
adequate substitute, particularly if made with French-roast beans or with a dark
coffee with chicory. I've seen the commonly available Medaglia d'Oro brand
coffee cans in Vietnamese restaurants, and it works, though you'll lose some of
the subtle bitterness that the chicory offers. Luzianne brand coffee comes with
chicory and is usable in Vietnamese coffee, though at home I generally get
French roast from my normal coffee provider.
Vietnamese coffee should taste more or less like melted Haagen-Dazs coffee ice
cream, while Thai iced coffee has a more fragrant and lighter flavor from the
cardamom and half-and-half rather than the condensed milk. Both are exquisite,
and not difficult to make once you've got the equipment.
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Cafe cut chon
(The Fox-Dung Coffee)
Amongst the best coffees of
Indochina
, one has to mention the infamous
"Fox-Dung" coffee of
Vietnam
. No, you read it right. In Vietnamese,
it is called "Cafe Cut Chon", and literally translated, it
means Fox-Dung coffee. This coffee is so good, so precious, that it is
practically impossible to find, nowadays. One of the stories about
"Fox-Dung" coffee goes like this:
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"At the time of the French colonies, the
workers at the coffee plantations were severely punished for taking coffee, and
anybody caught having coffee beans would be harshly dealt with, to the point
where the workers did not dare possess or even drink any coffee. However, as any
coffee drinker knows, coffee is strongly habit forming, and once a coffee
drinker, a person would have a hard time to go without. So one day, the workers
told their masters: "We work for you, harvesting all this coffee, and we
are not even allowed to drink any. A little coffee would make us wake up early
and work better for you." A French planter, thinking about it, saw some
logic to their request. So he walked between rows and rows of coffee trees, and
just could not decide which part of the coffee beans he would be willing to give
to the workers. The one on top? No, because they are the first to ripen and
would be the early sellers of the season. The one at the bottom? No, because the
shade ripe beans are the very best tasting. Looking down on the ground, he saw
tracks of fox excrements, and in the excrements, were un-digested coffee beans.
He showed those to the workers, and told them: "I would not mind that you
take these."
Well, if you are a real coffee drinker and are desperate for coffee…. Anyway,
the workers picked up the un-digested coffee beans from the excrements of the
foxes, washed them well and roasted them to a dark, crisp consistence. Those
beans yielded a heavenly good coffee, with unusual aroma and body, with a "je
ne sais quoi" (French for "I don't know what") which made
it so good that people swear that you would get drunk on more than one cup.
And despite its unsavory origin, Fox-Dung coffee became a legend, and one of the
most sought after coffee by real "connoisseurs". Unfortunately, foxes
are almost extinct by now, their habitat pushed back by human expansion, and
they no longer roam the coffee plantations to eat coffee cherries, and leave
behind Fox-Dung coffee.
Note: Foxes are very smart animals, they chose the best coffee cherries to eat,
and they only pick the ripe ones to eat. The coffee cherries go through the
digestive system of the fox and lose the shell and the pulp, but the beans,
still protected by the parchment layer, remain undigested. During the time the
coffee beans reside in the body of the fox, a subtle transformation happens to
the chemical composition of the beans, which could be though of as a natural
fermentation process under warm temperature.
QY researchers are now reproducing Fox-Dung coffee by selecting the best, tree
ripe coffee beans, and submitting them to a period of fermentation under
controlled temperatures, and then drying the beans as soon as they have
completed their chemical change.
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FOODOFVIETNAM.COM