Recipe
Cà phê muối
Vietnamese salt coffee
Roughly: ka fe MOO-oy
The salt is in the cream, there is less than a gram and a half of it, and what it is suppressing is probably not the caffeine.
How to make cà phê muối
IngredientsFor 1 glass
- Double or whipping cream, cold60 ml¼ cup
- Sweetened condensed milk20 ml1⅓ tbsp
- Fine sea salt⅛ tsp, up to ¼
0.75 g to 1.5 g. Start at the lower end; you can always add.
- Dark-roast Vietnamese robusta, medium-coarse20 g
- Water, just off the boil (90–96 °C)100 ml
- Icetwo-thirds of a glass
Equipment
- A phin, 120 ml
- A small bowl and a whisk, or a milk frother
- Scales, or a ¼ tsp measure you trust
- A tall glass
Method
- 1
Brew and cool the coffee
Standard 20 g phin: level the bed, press finger-tight, bloom with 20 ml, then fill. Let the coffee cool to room temperature, because hot coffee will collapse the foam.
Look for: About 80 ml of coffee, no longer steaming.
- 2
Whip the salted cream
Whisk the cream, condensed milk and salt together until it thickens to the consistency of pouring yogurt. Stop well before it becomes whipped cream. You want it pourable but dense.
Look for: It ribbons off the whisk and sits briefly on the surface.
- 3
Taste the foam on its own
It should taste salted rather than salty, nearer salted caramel than seawater. Adjust before it goes anywhere near the coffee. A quarter teaspoon in 60 ml of cream is about 2.5% salt by weight, which is a lot to discover later.
Look for: You notice the salt after the sweetness, not before it.
- 4
Build the glass
Ice, then coffee, then spoon the salted cream over the top. Serve it layered. The original café in Huế finishes it with a sprinkle of cinnamon.
Look for: Three visible bands: ice, dark coffee, pale cream.
- 5
Stir before drinking, or don't
In Huế it is usually stirred. Unstirred, you get the foam first and the coffee after. Both are served.
Look for: Stirred, it turns an even pale caramel.
If it goes wrong
| What happened | Why | What to change |
|---|---|---|
| It tastes salty in a bad way. | Too much salt, or coarse salt that did not dissolve evenly. | Use fine salt and start at an eighth of a teaspoon. Salt's job here is to sit under everything else, not to be identified. |
| You cannot taste the salt at all, and the drink tastes like a slightly thin milk coffee. | Not enough salt, or a cream so sweet that it has nothing to push against. | Go up in eighths of a teaspoon, and cut the condensed milk to 15 ml before adding more salt. |
| The foam sank straight through. | Cream not thick enough, or the coffee was warm. | Whisk further and make sure the coffee is fully cool. |
| The cream split into butter and liquid. | Whisked past the ribbon stage, which happens fast in a small bowl. | Start again with cold cream and stop at pouring-yogurt thickness. Over-whipped cream cannot be brought back. |
| The coffee underneath is harsh rather than bitter. | Over-extraction, or a scorched dark roast. | Speed the drip up slightly or drop the water to 90 °C. Salt will not rescue a burnt roast, and more of it makes the glass taste of salt instead. |
What cà phê muối is
Cà phê muối (Vietnamese salt coffee) is coffee brewed in a phin onto sweetened condensed milk, with a whipped salted cream spooned over the top. English menus call it salt coffee, salted coffee or salted cream coffee, all for the same thing.
The salt is in the cream, not in the coffee, and there is very little of it: under a gram and a half in a glass, which is roughly a quarter of a teaspoon. Nothing about it is meant to taste of salt.
It comes from Huế, in central Vietnam, and it is recent. The café credited with inventing it opened in 2010.
The short version
Whisk cold cream with condensed milk and an eighth of a teaspoon of fine salt until it thickens to the consistency of pouring yogurt. Brew a standard 20 g phin and let it cool. Pour it over ice, spoon the salted cream on top, and either stir it or drink through the layer.
Where it comes from
Cà phê muối has a traceable origin, which most Vietnamese drinks do not. CNN’s report names the owners of a café called Cà Phê Muối, at 10 Nguyễn Lương Bằng, as the people who created it when they opened in 2010, and spells them Ho Thi Thanh Huong and Tran Nguyen Huu Phong. VietNamNet reports the same year and the same address.
Việt Nam News, writing in 2023, describes the Huế version as hand-filtered coffee with condensed milk under salted whipped cream, finished with a sprinkle of cinnamon, and says other Huế cafés followed with their own versions soon after. The drink reached Hà Nội properly in 2022, through a café opened there by a couple who had been selling it in Huế.
Then it went everywhere. CNN dates the national spread to the years after the pandemic and notes that Starbucks branches in Vietnam launched their own cà phê muối in May 2024. VietNamNet describes it in Huế as an everyday order now, alongside black coffee and brown.
Recent is not the same as inauthentic. A drink invented in 2010 in a city that has been drinking coffee for a century is still a Vietnamese drink, in the way that coconut coffee is.
What salt does to bitterness
Sodium suppresses bitterness in taste experiments, and it is the sodium doing it rather than the chloride. Keast, Breslin and Beauchamp tested sodium chloride, sodium acetate and sodium gluconate and found that swapping the anion left the bitter suppression roughly unchanged, while perceived saltiness fell as the anion grew larger. Breslin and Beauchamp’s earlier note in Nature frames the effect as selective filtering: unpleasant tastes are suppressed more than palatable ones, so the sweetness in a mixture comes forward.
How much gets suppressed depends entirely on what is bitter. In the same experiments, sodium chloride cut the bitterness of urea by 76% and of magnesium sulfate by about 4%. Caffeine and quinine sat at the resistant end of the range.
That reads badly for coffee until you notice that coffee’s bitterness is mostly not caffeine. Gigl, Kreissl and Frank added caffeine at about ten times its detection threshold to a brew made from green beans and got no significant bitterness out of it; adding the same amount to decaffeinated roasted coffee moved a trained panel’s rating from 3.8 to 4.0. The compounds that make roasted coffee bitter are built during roasting, among them the caffeoylquinides and the phenylindanes formed from 4-vinylcatechol.
Those are built from chlorogenic acid, and robusta carries more of it: 9.5% of dry weight against arabica’s 7.0%, measured across 74 samples of green beans. So pointing salt at a dark-roast robusta is a reasonable thing to do, by inference from where the bitter compounds come from rather than from any measurement of the finished drink.
What nobody has published, as far as we can find, is a human sensory study of salt added to brewed coffee. The receptor-level work is also less tidy than the recipe blogs imply: Kumar and Behrens screened four human bitter receptors in cell assays and found sodium chloride clearly reduced the response of only one of them, to one compound, which led them to suspect that a good that central processing contributes alongside the receptor-level effect.
The effect is real and well documented in mixtures of single compounds. It has not been measured in a cup of coffee.
How much salt, and which kind
USDA puts table salt at 38,800 mg of sodium per 100 g and 6 g per teaspoon. So an eighth of a teaspoon is about 0.75 g of salt and 290 mg of sodium, and a quarter teaspoon is about 1.5 g and 580 mg. The FDA’s Daily Value for sodium is less than 2,300 mg a day, which it describes as roughly a teaspoon of salt.
In 60 ml of cream, 1.5 g of salt is about 2.5% by weight, which is firmly salty on a spoon. Stirred through a finished glass of around 300 ml it is nearer 0.5%, which is not salty at all. That gap is why the cream has to be tasted on its own before it goes near the coffee, and why a cream that tastes correct neat will usually read as flat in the glass.
Sea salt, kosher salt and table salt are all mostly sodium chloride, and since the sodium ion is the active part, the suppression does not care which tin you use. Grain size does. A coarse flake that has not dissolved delivers a salty spike instead of an even background, so use a fine salt, or dissolve a coarse one in the condensed milk before you whisk.
Hot or iced, stirred or layered
Both temperatures are served in Huế, and CNN quotes the founders as preferring theirs iced. A hot one is harder to keep layered, because the cream thins against the heat, so hot cà phê muối is usually drunk stirred.
Iced, the choice changes the drink. Stirred, the glass turns an even pale caramel and the salt spreads through everything. Unstirred, each mouthful is sweet salted cream first and strong black coffee behind it, which tastes like a different drink built from the same ingredients. In Huế it is normally stirred.
The cream is doing as much as the salt
Sixty millilitres of whipping cream is the largest thing in the glass by calories: USDA puts heavy whipping cream at 340 kcal and 36.1 g of fat per 100 g. The fat is what carries the drink, coating the mouth and holding the salt in suspension where a milk foam would let it drain through.
The whole build comes to an estimated 285 calories with about 16 g of total sugars, which puts it above every drink on the calories page except cà phê dừa. The arithmetic, drink by drink, is there.
That is also why the condensed milk stays at 20 ml here rather than the 30 ml a cà phê sữa đá takes. The cream is already sweet, and salt against a very sweet base has nothing left to reveal.
Ordering it
Muối is salt, and the name stacks like every other drink on a Vietnamese menu: cà phê muối is coffee plus salt, as cà phê sữa đá is coffee plus milk plus ice. Asking for cà phê muối will get you one in Huế without further explanation, and in most Vietnamese cities now. How the rest of the menu is built is on the coffee words page.
Substitutions
| Instead of | Use | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| Double cream | Whipping cream or coconut cream | Coconut cream makes a dairy-free version that holds a foam and sits well with the salt. |
| A phin | A double espresso, or a Moka pot | About 60 ml of espresso matches the strength. Filter coffee does not; under the cream it disappears. |
| Sweetened condensed milk | Evaporated milk plus sugar | Thinner, so the cream needs more whisking to hold. Allow about 2 tsp of sugar per serve. |
Questions people ask
- What is Vietnamese salt coffee?
- Cà phê muối: coffee brewed in a phin onto sweetened condensed milk, with a whipped salted cream spooned over the top. It comes from Huế in central Vietnam, where the café credited with it opened in 2010. The salt sits in the cream rather than in the coffee, and a glass carries under a gram and a half of it.
- What does cà phê muối mean in English?
- Salt coffee, word for word. Cà phê is coffee and muối is salt. English menus also label it salted coffee or salted cream coffee, and all three describe the same drink.
- Where is Vietnamese salt coffee from?
- Huế, in central Vietnam. CNN names the owners of a café called Cà Phê Muối, at 10 Nguyễn Lương Bằng, as the people who created it when they opened in 2010. It spread through Vietnam after the pandemic years, and Starbucks branches in Vietnam launched their own version in May 2024.
- Does salt reduce the bitterness of coffee?
- Sodium suppresses bitterness in taste experiments, and it is the sodium rather than the chloride that does it. How much depends on which compound is bitter: in one set of experiments sodium chloride cut urea's bitterness by 76% and magnesium sulfate's by 4%, with caffeine and quinine at the resistant end. Coffee's bitterness is mostly not caffeine, so that is less discouraging than it sounds, but no published study has measured salt against a cup of brewed coffee with a human panel.
- How much salt should I use?
- An eighth to a quarter of a teaspoon of fine salt for a 60 ml cream base, which is 0.75 g to 1.5 g. At the upper end that is about 580 mg of sodium by USDA's figure for table salt, against the FDA's Daily Value of 2,300 mg. If you can clearly identify the drink as salty, there is too much in it.
- What kind of salt is best for salt coffee?
- Sea salt, kosher salt and table salt are all mostly sodium chloride, and since the sodium ion is what suppresses bitterness, the type matters less than the grain. A coarse flake that has not dissolved gives a salty spike rather than an even background, so use a fine salt or dissolve a coarse one in the condensed milk first.
- Is salt coffee served hot or cold in Vietnam?
- Both. CNN's report quotes the café's founders as preferring the iced version. Hot is the normal cold-weather form, and the cream is harder to keep as a separate layer in it, so a hot one is usually drunk stirred.
- Do you stir Vietnamese salt coffee?
- In Huế it is usually stirred, which turns the glass an even pale caramel and spreads the salt through it. Drunk unstirred you get sweet salted cream first and strong black coffee after, which is a different experience from the same ingredients. Both are normal.
- How many calories are in a Vietnamese salt coffee?
- ESTIMATE: about 285 for a glass built on 60 ml of whipping cream, 20 ml of condensed milk and 20 g of coffee, with about 16 g of total sugars. Most of it is the cream, which USDA puts at 340 kcal and 36.1 g of fat per 100 g. That makes it the heaviest of these drinks after cà phê dừa.
Sources
Figures on this page come from the following. Where a claim is an estimate or a common description rather than a measurement, the text says so.
- Suppression of Bitterness Using Sodium SaltsCHIMIA 55(5):441–447 (Keast, Breslin and Beauchamp) · 2001 · accessed 2026-10-09Sodium chloride measured as reducing urea's bitterness by 76% and magnesium sulfate's by about 4%; sodium rather than the anion identified as the active component, since NaCl, sodium acetate and sodium gluconate suppressed bitterness comparably while perceived saltiness fell as the anion grew larger; and quinine-HCl and caffeine named as the compounds sodium suppressed least.
- Salt enhances flavour by suppressing bitternessNature 387(6633):563 (Breslin and Beauchamp) · 1997-06 · accessed 2026-10-09The selective-filtering account of salt: that it suppresses unpleasant tastes such as bitterness more than palatable ones such as sweetness, which makes the palatable tastes more noticeable. Only the abstract and figure caption are outside the paywall, and that is all this page rests on it for.
- Influence of Sodium Chloride on Human Bitter Taste Receptor ResponsesJournal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 72(18):10531–10536 (Kumar and Behrens) · 2024-04 · accessed 2026-10-09Four human bitter receptors screened in cell assays, with sodium chloride clearly reducing the response of only TAS2R16 to salicin and leaving the other receptor-agonist pairs largely unchanged, which led the authors to suggest that central processing contributes to bitter suppression alongside the receptor-level effect.
- Impact of Interactions between Melanoidins and Caffeine on the Bitter Taste of Coffee BeveragesJournal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 74(23):18243–18252 (Gigl, Kreissl and Frank) · 2026 · accessed 2026-10-09Caffeine added at about ten times its bitter detection threshold producing no significant bitterness in a green-bean brew, and moving a panel's rating of decaffeinated roasted coffee only from 3.8 to 4.0; and the identification of roast-derived caffeoylquinides, dicaffeoylquinides and phenylindanes formed from 4-vinylcatechol as intensely bitter compounds in roasted coffee.
- Reliable Discrimination of Green Coffee Beans Species: A Comparison of UV-Vis-Based Determination of Caffeine and Chlorogenic Acid with Non-Targeted Near-Infrared SpectroscopyFoods 9(6):788 (Adnan, Naumann, Mörlein and Pawelzik) · 2020-06 · accessed 2026-10-09Mean chlorogenic acid measured at 9.5% of dry weight in robusta green beans against 7.0% in arabica, and mean caffeine at 2.9% against 1.8%, across 74 samples of which 42 were robusta and 32 arabica.
- Salty cream in your morning brew? Why Vietnam's specialty coffees are catching on around the worldCNN Travel (Maggie Hiufu Wong), read in the KTVZ syndicated copy · 2024-06 · accessed 2026-10-09Cà phê muối created at Cà Phê Muối, 10 Nguyễn Lương Bằng, Huế, by owners the report names as Ho Thi Thanh Huong and Tran Nguyen Huu Phong, in 2010 when they opened their first shop; the drink served hot or iced with the founders preferring iced; its spread across Vietnam after the Covid years; and Starbucks branches in Vietnam launching a version in May 2024. CNN's own page refuses automated requests, so this is the syndicated text.
- Salt coffee, a Huế delicacy, conquers Hà Nội taste budsViệt Nam News (Nguyễn Mỹ Hà) · 2023-09 · accessed 2026-10-09The Huế build described as hand-filtered coffee with condensed milk, topped with salted whipped cream and a sprinkle of cinnamon; the first salt coffee attributed to the owners of Cafe Muối at 10 Nguyễn Lương Bằng, Huế; other Huế cafés following with their own versions; and the drink reaching Hà Nội through a café opened there in 2022.
- Salt coffee: Vietnam's latest global coffee trendVietNamNet · 2024-07 · accessed 2026-10-09The 2010 founding date and the Cà Phê Muối address, reported independently of CNN; salt coffee served hot or iced; and its description as an everyday order in Huế alongside black and brown coffee.
- Salt, table (FDC ID 173468)USDA FoodData Central, SR Legacy · 2019-04 · accessed 2026-10-09Table salt at 38,800 mg of sodium per 100 g and 6 g per teaspoon, which gives 0.75 g and 1.5 g for an eighth and a quarter teaspoon and about 580 mg of sodium at the upper dose.
- Cream, fluid, heavy whipping (FDC ID 170859)USDA FoodData Central, SR Legacy · 2019-04 · accessed 2026-10-09Heavy whipping cream at 340 kcal, 36.1 g of total fat and 2.92 g of total sugars per 100 g, with 238 g per cup, which is the basis for the calorie and fat figures for the cream in this build.
- Milk, canned, condensed, sweetened (FDC ID 171275)USDA FoodData Central, SR Legacy · 2019-04 · accessed 2026-10-09Sweetened condensed milk at 321 kcal and 54.4 g of total sugars per 100 g, with 38.2 g per US fluid ounce, used for the 20 ml of condensed milk in this build.
- Sodium in Your DietUS Food and Drug Administration · 2024-03 · accessed 2026-10-09A Daily Value for sodium of less than 2,300 mg a day, described by the FDA as about one teaspoon of table salt, used as the reference point for the salt in one glass.
