Cà phê muối, and why salt works

Salt in coffee sounds like a dare. It is not — it is one of the more sensible things done to a cup of coffee in the last twenty years, and Vietnam did it.

Cà phê muối is on our menu at 42 Nguyễn Thái Bình, Bến Thành Ward, District 1. Here is what you are ordering.

What the salt is doing

It is not there to make the drink taste salty. Done properly you should not be able to name salt as an ingredient at all.

Salt suppresses bitterness. That is a plain fact about how taste works, and it is why it turns up in grapefruit, in dark chocolate, in caramel. Vietnamese robusta is a strong, bitter coffee by design, and the traditional answer to that bitterness has always been sweetness — condensed milk, a lot of it.

Salt gets to the same place by the opposite route. Instead of covering the bitterness with sugar, it turns the bitterness down, which leaves the coffee tasting more of coffee rather than less. The result is less sweet than a cà phê sữa, not more.

What is in the glass

A salted cream over Vietnamese coffee, usually over ice.

The cream is where the work is. It is lightly salted and whipped loose enough to sit on the coffee rather than sink into it, so the first mouthful is cream and the last is coffee, and everything between is the two arriving in changing proportions. Stirred together immediately, it becomes an ordinary sweet iced coffee and you have wasted it.

How do you tell a good cà phê muối?

• You should not taste salt as salt. If you can, there is too much.
• The layers should hold for a minute or two before you touch it. If the cream sinks straight through, it was not whipped enough.
• It should be less sweet than the cà phê sữa on the same menu. If it is sweeter, the salt is decoration on a dessert.
• Drink it in order. Do not stir it flat at the start. Let it come apart on its own.

Where did salt coffee come from?

Huế, on the central coast, in the mid-2010s. It spread south fast and is now on menus across Saigon, which is unusual — most regional Vietnamese drinks stay regional.

It travelled because it solves a real problem rather than being a novelty. Any café pulling a strong robusta has the bitterness question to answer, and salt is a better answer than more sugar.

Ordering

Ask for cà phê muối. Iced is the default; hot is worth asking for, and the cream behaves differently — softer, and it goes faster.

If you have found Vietnamese coffee too sweet rather than too strong, this is the one to try. It is on our menu alongside cà phê sữa and bạc xỉu, and of the three it is the one that tastes most like the coffee it is made from.