Irish Coffee: recipe with ingredients and preparation
La storia dell'Irish Coffee
As its name implies, Irish Coffee was born around the middle of the last century in Ireland from the hand of Joe Sharidan, a chef at the Limerick airport restaurant, where at that time the exchanges took place during the first international flights between the United States and Europe. One day, due to a bad and intense disturbance, the travelers of one of these intercontinental flights were forced to wait at the airport for the weather conditions to improve before being able to leave. To warm these travelers from the cold of the harsh Irish winter, Mr. Sharidan invented this original drink on the spot, adding a drop of whiskey to the espresso that he had ready and embellishing everything with cream on the top of the glass. When one of the passengers asked him if the delicious drink he had prepared was a Brazilian coffee, Sheridan replied: “No, it's Irish coffee!”: This is the source of this particular cocktail.
Subsequently, the Irish Coffee spread all over the world thanks to a journalist, who was part of the group of passengers to which Mr. Sharidan offered his creation on that occasion: once he returned to San Francisco, in fact, he wrote a laudatory article, thanks to which the bars of this city began to prepare this drink. Irish Coffee therefore quickly spread first in America and then in the rest of the world: today, by now, there are no existing variants, even if the original recipe remains only one, namely the one we propose below.
Ingredients
To prepare a perfect Irish Coffee you will need a few but fundamental ingredients: therefore make sure you choose quality products.
- 5 cl of whiskey
- 10 cl of hot coffee
- 4 cl of fresh cream
- a teaspoon of cane sugar
Which whiskey to use for Irish Coffee?
Tradition would like an Irish whiskey protagonist of Irish Coffee, something like the excellent Roe & Co. You can actually use it too Scotch, Canadian or Japanese whiskey, the important thing is to choose a good quality product, it does not matter whether it is a single malt or a blended, in my opinion the only characteristic that it should necessarily respect is that it is not too peaty in such a way as not to characterize the cocktail too much as a whole which must remain harmonious.
Eat if you make l'Irish Coffee
The first thing to do is first of all prepare the coffee, preferably with the mocha. Once you have put the mocha on the stove, in the meantime heat the glass where you will serve yours with boiling water or in the dishwasher Irish coffee. The ideal is to use a tulip glass, as it is the most suitable type of glass to maintain the right proportion between the ingredients.
In the meantime, pour the fresh cream into a bowl and whip it with a hand whisk or an electric mixer for a few minutes (do not exceed 3-4 minutes at the most). The cream must not be too whipped, but not too little: to be perfect it must in fact be dense but at the same time fluid.
While you leave the cream to rest, pour the coffee into your glass for 4/5 of its height, adding 5 cl of whiskey and a teaspoon of brown sugar, and then mixing everything well. In the remaining part of the glass you will have to slowly overturn the semi-whipped cream with the help of a teaspoon. A little trick to make sure you don't make a mistake in this step is to pour the cream on the back of the spoon, raising it as the cream goes down in the glass: this is in fact the real secret so that the cream does not sink into the coffee.
You can also decorate the top of the glass with a sprinkle of ground cinnamon or nutmeg. If you are particularly greedy, then, you can also add it as a finishing touch over the whipped cream some dark chocolate flakes or chopped hazelnuts.
Once ready, Irish Coffee should be served hot immediately, and tasted in small sips: in fact, woe to mixing coffee with cream, because you would lose all the taste of this cocktail! The purpose of the cream, in fact, in addition to making the whiskey flavor sweeter, is precisely to keep the coffee hot for as long as possible.
