Add Sugar to Coffee Before Milk or Cream
How to drink coffee is a highly personal matter, and I always hesitate to tell people that they are “doing it wrong,” especially because coffee pedantry is the worst kind of pedantry.
But my boyfriend did it wrong and I had to tell him. Like Samin Nosrat , he takes his coffee with “enough halves to make it look like Haagen-Dazs coffee ice cream.” It also adds an amount of sugar that I previously thought was only suitable for hummingbirds, but taste isn’t the issue. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with sweet creamy coffee, but the man added cold half and half – straight from the fridge – to his coffee before adding sugar, lowering the temperature of the drink and preventing the sweetener from completely dissolving into solution. leaving a bunch of granules at the bottom of the mug.
You see, this is a matter of solubility. Sugar doesn’t dissolve well in cold liquid – which is why we have simple syrup for cold coffee and smoothies – which is why you need warmth from fresh coffee, especially if you have a very high sugar (solute) to coffee (solvent) ratio. It is obvious that the addition of cold dairy products lowers the overall temperature, making coffee less effective as a solvent. This is why you should always add sugar before the cream so that all the sugar is dissolved. (To quantify, I made a comparison in which I added a sugar cube to an ounce of coffee and another sugar cube to a mixture of 3/4 ounce coffee and 1/4 ounce cold half and half a cube of sugar. 26 seconds more than a sugar cube in black coffee.)
Of course, it all depends on how much of each you add to your morning drink and how much hot coffee you start out with, but adding the ingredients in that order will ensure that the sugar is completely dissolved. If you add just a tiny splash of cream, you won’t change the temperature as dramatically, and a little extra stirring will probably help. Conversely, a small amount of sugar can still dissolve in a not-so-hot cup of coffee simply because you are dealing with a small amount of solute.
If you’re a fan of raw sugar or turbinado sugar (which tends to have a larger granule size), additional heating is even more beneficial. (If you drink it black, I’m not sure why you clicked on this, and if you are Joel , I don’t know how to help you.) So add sugar to hot coffee, stir, and then a spoonful in cream. Sugar and cream are good, but sand is not.