Zoe Williams reviews Starbucks’s latest offering, instant coffee, in today’s Grauniad.
The verdict? ‘Not even as nice as Nescafe.’ Which is saying something.
Also, to describe (as Zoe does) Starbucks’s’s’s regular coffee as ‘hot and wet’ is, in my opinion, generous.
I doubt on the strength of that review that I’ll be bothering. Where there’s no real stuff available (and let’s face it, making decent real coffee is expensive and/or messy), for me it has to be Douwe Egberts. (That website incidentally is spooky, featuring a virtual bloke ‘serving’ you from behind a coffee shop counter.) Here’s my recipe for the perfect cup of instant:
1. Put large heaped teaspoon of Douwe Egberts Pure Gold into a mug. Add brown sugar to taste.
2. Boil a kettle and leave it to stand for a few seconds.
3. Pour a little of the hot water into the mug, just enough to cover the coffee and sugar.
4. Swish it round until coffee and sugar are more or less dissolved.
5. Pour in cold milk until the mug is about 2/3 full.
6. Put mug in microwave for 1 min on full power.
7. Top up with more hot water and stir.
That way you get a nice creamy top and good temperature and consistency, and although it’ll never taste quite like the real thing, it does still taste better than a Starbucks 🙂