The Kitchen Tool You Need To Easily Thicken Homemade Coffee Creamer

There's no quicker way to ruin a cup of coffee than adding a splash of mediocre, runny coffee creamer. It's the ultimate slap in the face for carefully roasted beans painstakingly brewed to perfection and poured into a waiting vessel. Fortunately, diluting your coffee in such a careless way is entirely avoidable, especially when making homemade coffee creamer in your own kitchen. You have control of the ingredients, techniques, and the all-important texture that slides into your cup. 

Even so, most homemade coffee creamer recipes focus more on flavor than texture, leaving the issue of thickness to your own devices. That's why we reached out to an expert on all-things-coffee: Andrea Allen, co-founder of Onyx Coffee Lab, 2020 U.S. Barista champ and 2021 World Barista runner-up. When discussing the topic, Allen recommended a simple kitchen tool for easily thickening homemade coffee creamer; one that's often tucked into a kitchen drawer in many households. 

"Honestly, if i wanted it to be thicker, I'd buy a little handheld frother," explains Allen. "These are accessible and easy to use and create awesome foam/creamed milk in coffee or beverages generally." There are no extra ingredients to add, either during or after the cream-creation process. That includes cornstarch, which is suggested in many valid tips for making homemade coffee creamer. The frother itself is all you need, though a few pertinent techniques can help create the velvety texture of your java dreams. 

There's no rocket science involved in using a handheld milk frother — it's exactly like it sounds: a simple battery-operated, wand-style device with a spinner that whips air into milk or coffee creamers. Tips for using a milk frother vary between built-in espresso-machine steam wands, countertop electric frothers, and handheld wand frothers. Generally, getting the best texture and thickness with a handheld device requires dipping it just below the milk's surface, then gradually moving it by hand as it spins, tilting at an angle and periodically lifting up, down, and around to ensure the air gets into all of the pockets.

Coffee creamer is different from heavy cream or half and half, due to differing amounts of inherently thick, high-fat cream in each. Many standard supermarket coffee creamers contain no actual dairy at all, instead consisting of water, sugar, vegetable oil, and an array of stabilizers, preservatives, and other fillers. This all affects the thickness, requiring more or less frothing to reach the desired texture. Fortunately, with a homemade version, typically made with half and half, you've avoided the pitfalls of inferior commercial versions.

Depending on the chosen recipe, it's also possible to add thickness through a small portion of heavy cream. Another popular thickening agent is sweetened condensed milk, which brings the added bonus of flavoring the creamer, more or less per taste.