Sometime between the July 4th weekend and tonight, I found myself addicted to Vietnamese coffee. I don't know precisely when it happened but happened it did. Iced or hot, I had to have it. Already twice since Sunday the urge for it has driven me to procure either Vietnamese or Thai cuisine just for the coffee (Thai coffee is very similar to the Vietnamese variety). This afternoon, I decided to take matters into my own hands. At $3 a cup, I figured I could obtain the implements to make the stuff myself. I could and I did.
As most of these enterprises tend to start, my first step was googling the bajeezus out of the thing and seeing what I could find. What I found was that this type of coffee consisted of dripping coffee (traditionally with chicory) over sweet condensed milk. The only necessary equipment is a filter to do the dripping which fits over a glass that holds the milk. One trip into Chinatown later, I had the filter ($5.50), some coffee with chicory, and a couple of cans of condensed milk. I was on my way.
The rest is rather elementary. I put the coffee grounds into the filter, put a bit of the milk into a mug. I put the filter on the mug and boiled water into the filter and, five minutes later, I get one steaming cup of Vietnamese coffee. All addictions should be this easy.
I'm now curious as to if I can get a reasonable facsimile of this to work with powdered milk. If I can do that, I can finally ween myself off the world's worst office coffee. A man's gotta dream.
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