Dalgona Coffee Whip

2020

Date: March 2020 · Place: South Korean kitchens, then global TikTok · Figures: Jung Il-woo, actor · Korean Pinoy Cuisine YouTube channel · home-bound office workers worldwide · Tags: TikTok, Lockdown Recipe, Whip 01. Four Hundred Stirs Korean actor Jung Il-woo orders a whipped coffee in Macau on the variety show Stars' Top Recipe at Fun-Staurant in January 2020 and likens it to dalgona, a honeycomb candy. The clip seeds Korean YouTube tutorials. By mid-March the recipe migrates to TikTok under the hashtag dalgonacoffeechallenge. The recipe is one to one to one: instant coffee, sugar, hot water, whipped by hand for roughly four hundred strokes until it holds peaks. Spoon over cold milk. Photograph the two-tone glass. Post. 02. Domestic Performance Dalgona is the first lockdown recipe meme, beating sourdough by weeks. It requires no yeast, no flour shortage workaround, no oven. The performance is the whisking arm and the layered glass. Google searches for dalgona coffee peak the week of 22 March 2020, the same week most of Europe locks down. Sources • BBC News, 'Coronavirus: Whipped coffee that's taking over the internet' (24 March 2020) • The New York Times, 'How to Make Dalgona Coffee' (24 March 2020) • Google Trends, search term 'dalgona coffee' (March 2020 peak)