How much can one really taste the quality of the coffee used in Vietnamese iced coffee through the sweetened condensed milk?
You can check the answer of the people under the question at Quora “what is coffee with condensed milk called“
How much can one really taste the quality of the coffee used in Vietnamese iced coffee through the sweetened condensed milk?
You can check the answer of the people under the question at Quora “what is coffee with condensed milk called“
Vietnamese Iced Coffee ( Cà Phê Sữa Đá ) can be bought almost anywhere in Vietnam – either on a street or in a cafe. And because of this fact, we developed two types of coffee that are not only different in flavor, but also different in what they’re made of.
The iced Vietnamese coffee with condensed milk that you buy and consume on-the-go at a random street corner in Vietnam is not what you think it is. Even though it looks like a black powder putting in a phin-filter as you would normally expect, but it is actually made of overly roasted (or burnt) soy beans. The taste of this sort of “coffee” has been with a low-to-medium class Vietnamese people for many years that they tend to assume that this is real coffee – the taste of strong flavored, burning chemical mixed with condensed milk . If the last time you tried Vietnamese coffee on the street, I assume the taste you experienced was almost certainly burnt soy beans.
If you purchase a coffee at a prestigious cafe in Vietnam (such as Trung Nguyen), now it is more of a relevant topic.
Vietnamese cuisine is all about balance, coffee is no exception. One can tell this balance in Vietnamese coffee by tasting no real dominance in the mixture of coffee and condensed-milk. Some people prefer more milk (sweeter), some people prefer more coffee (stronger) – but overall, this mixture balance out all the elements that I think eventually remove the acidity, bitterness and a bit of aroma of the coffee . Because of this, the question of quality of the coffee element itself becomes less important, or even non-sense in iced Vietnamese coffee. What is more important is the overall taste/sense of the beverage.
One thing I would also note though, is the quality of Vietnamese coffee can be obtained by drinking without ice (not too relevant to the topic). That means, you can’t really tell the difference in quality between 2 glasses of iced Vietnamese coffee with condensed milk – they all move forwards to the being-balanced-out end.
Great answer from User .
Let me add another perspective to the answer. Thai Iced Coffee is also heavily dependent on sweetened condensed milk (SCM( as a main ingredient. From my personal some thirty year experience of drinking coffee, I would say that one learns to distinguish the taste of coffee from the SCM anyhow.
Especially in Bangkok, there is a genre of coffee popular among office areas. It is a half breed between the traditional Thai iced coffee and Western styled coffee. The coffee used are of better quality (and more expensive) and are brewed with espresso machine, yet the recipe is still SCM dependent. The reason it is more popular is that may Thais do feel they taste better than the variety of the traditional beans/blends.