Breakfast to Dinner: 3 Delicious Ways to Cook with Coffee
Do you still need an extra pick-me-up to get you through the day? Try adding some coffee to your food and cooking
Lately, you may be drinking more coffee than you normally would — and should — but you can blame it on the negative temperatures and enduring lockdowns.
While your dentist will likely point out the lovely coffee stains during your next visit — don’t forget to schedule one! — you’ll probably just respond with a funny, yet innocent, explanation behind the duller smile.
Speaking of excuses, if you can bypass the part of drinking coffee in the first place, you won’t need to lie through your teeth. You’ll be excused.
Cook with coffee and you won’t need to drink, and thus disclose, the culprit. Right? Well, the jury is somewhat out on that one. Just prepare to receive a lukewarm critique and any upselling on teeth whitening procedures.
Not that you need any more caffeine or excuses in your life, there’s always time and space for creativity and fun in the kitchen, without the gimmick. If you’d like to add even more coffee to your life, while avoiding the extra cup in the afternoon, try cooking with your next cup.
While it’s a fun and rewarding ingredient to cook with, just keep an eye out for the use of different blends. And check the recipes to see whether the coffee is ground, instant, or brewed.
1 | Spice Up Your Meals with Dry Coffee Rubs
Coffee will do wonders for your next pork chop or your barbecue steak. Best paired with red meats, a dry rub — consisting of either fine ground or instant coffee — massaged into your proteins adds depth, contrast, and interest. Simply combine it with hardy herbs and robust spices to create your own unique and impactful blend.
With flavour packed on the exterior, as soon as your steak comes off the heat, not only will you be rewarded with an irresistible crust to your meat but also a rich, savoury flavour. The coffee will beautifully caramelize, yielding an even tastier smoky result.
What’s more, beef and pork briskets are the perfect candidates for the coffee treatment. Preferring a low-and-slow method of cooking, these cuts do quite well with a dry rub of coffee — for an even smokier finish as cooked with wood smoke.
2 | Enjoy Braising with Your Brew
Don’t feel like drinking the rest of the coffee left at the bottom of your French press? Reserve the remaining liquid for dinner. Saving resources and adding flavour, your extra cup or so will make for the perfect braising liquid. Got beef? Use this flavourful liquid.
The best part is that coffee provides an inexpensive, yet effective, way to render a tougher cut of meat more tender, with added flavour. Besides, you’ll actually have on hand a more concentrated coffee flavour, thanks to the natural settling that occurs towards the bottom of the French press.
If you’re starting from scratch without leftover coffee, you can simply use instant coffee powder as a quick fix. The trick is as simple as just stirring in a generous teaspoon of the powder into your typical braising liquid. Experiment along the way with what works with each different recipe.
During braising, the coffee-infused liquid will add a beautiful bittersweet note to your meat. And for an enhanced braising liquid, you can also add in your favourite beer, herbs, and spices. Plus, a touch of unsweetened dark chocolate, grated with the help of a Microplane, will take your dish into restaurant territory, ready to impress your family and your friends.
3 | Add an Intriguing Richness to Your Gravy
What better way to season and finish the main course than with a rich gravy infused with coffee? Add some into the mix, and you have a winner. While not certainly common practice, stirring coffee into the developing sauce can rather push the flavour envelope even further with greater umami depth.
After all, the best part about preparing a gravy or a jus is that the humble sauce comes together in an easy and organic way — built upon the meat’s own juices and fats. As you jazz up the gravy to your own taste, adding seasonings and letting everything blend together to produce layers of flavour, coffee just awakens those flavours even more.
The coffee gives a kick to your gravy — just as caffeine does to the body. Add a little, along with a generous crack of salt and black pepper, to a red wine jus, and you’re ready with a perfect pairing with a delicious Sunday roast. And you’ll notice how coffee does a terrific job of rounding out flavours.
More popularly incorporated into desserts — Tiramisu as the international poster child — coffee isn’t just for sweets or beverages. Thanks to the full-bodied, deep, and roasted flavour profile of many blends, coffee can be used to beautifully enhance and activate the flavours of savoury foods.
Related: From Latte to Spa: Don’t Discard Your Coffee Grounds but Reuse Them Instead in These 3 Ways
