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Whipped coffee (Dalgona coffee) is a recipe combining instant coffee crystals, sugar and water.Even traditionally brewed coffee is not well understood and this whipped coffee seems to work by magic.The whipped coffee is named for the Korean term for a confection also known as honeycomb.Whipped coffee, or Dalgona coffee, is a three-ingredient recipe named for a Korean confection that has been trending online in the last few weeks.The whipped coffee craze began on TikTok and has made it to the Instagram accounts.Making whipped coffee is simple. The recipe is one part instant coffee crystals, one part sugar and one part water, whisked or beaten, until it forms a rich foam. The recipe can also be made with Splenda, but using sugar makes the process faster, with a better end product. The reason sugar works better is illustrated in chemist Tom Kuntzleman’s Diet Coke experiments. Soda with sugar foams differently than soda without sugar, and that’s because sugar acts in a way that prevents bubbles from coalescing. Bubbles stay smaller and separated, which means that while a diet soda might generate more volume of foam right away, a sugar soda has foam that lasts longer. Kuntzleman tried regular ground coffee and cocoa powder at first, before he could get some instant coffee crystals. Ground coffee will never dissolve into a liquid, but perhaps more importantly in this experiment, it has an amount of fatty oil that could inhibit the formation of foam no matter what. The same is true for cocoa powder, which is hydrophobic, meaning it resists mixing with water at all.When Kuntzleman was able to try the real thing, he combined the instant crystals, sugar, and water. He tried with just crystals and water and got a much more “watery”-looking and transient foam. Then, he made some using salt with the coffee crystals. It turned out almost as good as the version with sugar.At first, Kuntzleman wondered if the whipped coffee wasn’t something like churning butter. But after a handful of trials and some time to think, he revised.“I tentatively suggest that what we're seeing with the dalgona coffee is very similar to what goes on when you make egg foams such as meringue,” he told Popular Mechanics. To beat a meringue, you must use only egg whites — even a speck of residual fat in a bowl, let alone a trace of egg yolk, will stop the entire batch of egg whites from foaming up.Kuntzleman says the reason egg whites fluff up so easily into such a stable foam is in their proteins. “These proteins are folded into a particular shape in which the hydrophilic portion of the protein is on the outside, in contact with the surrounding water, while the hydrophobic portion of the protein is on the inside, unable to interact with the ‘outside world,’” he explained. “The beating process unfolds the protein strands into linear chains," he continued. "The beating process allows air bubbles, pushed into the mixture through the beating process, to interact with the hydrophobic portion of the protein. he air preferentially interacts with the hydrophobic portions over the hydrophilic portions. The protein chains become scrambled together, and air gets trapped inside, making a foam.” Virtually all coffee shop milk products have sugar. Milk naturally has sugar in the form of lactose and the naturally occurring sugars in soy or coconut milk are boosted with added sugar for taste.Salt doesn’t work as any kind of glue, but research shows salt does inhibit rather than fully prevent bubbles from coalescing, which explains why it performed okay in the whipped coffee mix. The whipped coffee recipe says to use two tablespoons each of coffee, sugar and water.Coffee proteins are very concentrated and aided by the sugar. As they agitate, they twist and change and fill with air. This is why the reaction can work without sugar, but sugar helps to make a much richer, more stable foam out of the coffee proteins. You can also use decaffeinated coffee crystals to make whipped coffee, as long as they’re made from coffee beans instead of a clever substitute like chicory.If you have the ingredients on hand, making whipped coffee is a little piece of science that seems like magic.