Food Friday – New York Egg Cream

For some reason, I thought an authentic New York egg cream was going to be trickier. Growing up, we made egg creams with chocolate milk and soda — root beer was best but cola or any other brown soda worked. The trick was to make a bit of chocolate milk then pour the soda into the glass, letting it cascade over a spoon. Imagine my surprise when I looked for a recipe for a NY egg cream and found that we had it almost right back then.

Egg CreamI found several recipe variations, but usually it was milk (whole milk for the best foam action), Fox’s U-Bet chocolate syrup (mentioned by brand in every recipe), and seltzer. I couldn’t find U-bet in Utah, so I settled for the store brand because that’s what I had in my house. I tried a few variations for making the egg cream over the course of a week.

The first had too much milk, but it foamed great.

The second didn’t get the foam action. I think the seltzer was already going flat. It was supposed to be highly carbonated.

The third was the best (pictured). I didn’t even mix the chocolate before taking the picture; I wanted to get a picture of that great head of foam in case it disappeared too quickly.

The fourth, I tried the cascading over the spoon trick, which was a total bust, and I didn’t have enough seltzer to fill the glass.

They all tasted good, but none were quite right, probably because of using the wrong chocolate syrup. I think I’ll stick with using root beer because I know that it will be good no matter what chocolate syrup I have, and I can drink the root beer plain if I want; I just can’t stand plain seltzer.