CHEESE WEEK DAY 4: Oven Baked Bread Cheese
Ok, so Cheese Week turned into Cheese Three Days Then a Month Then Another Day. Sorry. Anyway, here’s more cheese coffee.
I still had some bread cheese left. I’d heard it’s good with brown sugar and cinnamon baked on. I had the brilliant idea of topping coffee with a layer of the cheese, topping that with cinnamon and sugar, broiling it in the oven, then having a lovely crust to sip the coffee through, giving it just a hint of the cheesey brilliance before finishing it off with a soon.
I soon realized that there was not a large enough slice of cheese left to cover the whole ramekin (yes that’s a real word; look it up), and it wouldn’t be much of a “crust” if it immediately sank to the bottom. Thus, I drafted up and implemented a complex cheese apparatus, with smaller bits of cheese acting as supports to keep the larger slice aloft.
Of course, now is when this cheese finally decides to get its melt on. It immediately collapsed to the bottom of the coffee.
Regardless of its structure, it smelled delicious. But, well, you put anything with cinnamon in an oven, and it’s going to smell great. Luckily, this lived up to its smell. I had to use a spoon, treating it more like soup than coffee, but oh what gooey goodness.
This reminded me a lot of French Onion soup, in texture and even in taste; it’s a bit less salty, more sweet, but it’s got that delightful soggy melted cheese flavour that the French refer to as merde fondu dans ma bouche.1
People with less adventurous pallets would probably be turned off by this unusual combination of flavours. But when you think about it, coffee, cheese, and cinnamon all have an earthy quality to them. In fact, next time I do this, I’ll leave out the sugar and add some cognac, further emphasizing that this works better as a soup than a dessert coffee.
All of these bread cheese experiments have been successful. I give it my serious recommendation. If juustoleipa isn’t available where you live (as it isn’t here), I’m sure other cheeses could be substituted. Swiss, Gruyere or emmenthal could have similar results. And as we saw, cheddar has its place in coffee.
Thanks again to Monica Wright for the bread cheese and continual awesomeness. And thanks to you, Internet, for your incoming suggestions. Got more? Got enough for a whole other week of coffee experiments? Send them in.
1 No they don’t.
CHEESE WEEK DAY 3: Cheddar Coffee
Sue writes:
I stumbled on your blog, and wanted to tell you about a tradition in my family. I’m from rural eastern North Car0lina, and my family has been having “cheese in coffee” as a treat as long as I can remember. It should be hoop cheese, or “rat” cheese — a medium cheddar that is NEVER refrigerated, and has either a red or black rind. Cut the cheese into large-ish chunks, pour very strong, very hot, very fresh coffee over it in a big, deep cup. Let it steep while you toast two pieces of bread. Once the bread is toasted, fish the cheese out in wonderfully warm, soft globs and eat them off the toasted bread. Then you dump out the coffee — it’s done its part by melting and flavoring the cheese.
Well I didn’t have any rat cheese around, but I did have some regular cheddar that’s about to go moldy.
I should’ve cut off a bigger chunk, because half of it seemed to go missing after mingling with the coffee. I only managed to scoop out a little smear to put on my bread.
It tastes great on the bread. The coffee added just a bit beyond melting cheese directly on bread, and it wasn’t as soggy as I feared it may be.
Of course I didn’t waste good coffee by harvesting its goo and tossing it aside like a cheap male escort. It had taken on an aesthetically pleasing bubbled look. HEY I DIDN’T THINK THIS WAS SWISS CHEESE LOL.
At first it was fine. I didn’t notice much difference in taste except for a bit of oiliness. But then that missing cheese came back, in the form of fuzzy bits gradually appearing in the coffee.
The weird part was, even when the coffee had been sitting perfectly still for a few minutes, the fuzzy bits danced and swayed in the coffee’s convection current. It was actually quite lovely.
Here, I’ll show you. I present the very first PWTIC movie. Please hold your applause until after the film has concluded.
But while it was lovely to look at, I was less inclined to continue putting self-locomotive fuzzy things into my mouth.
Stay tuned for CHEESE WEEK’s exciting conclusion.
Time to go beyond dipping cheese in coffee and get a bit more, um, immersive. Here is a short report on chopped up Carr Valley bread cheese in coffee.
Even after extended exposure to steaming hot coffee, this cheese didn’t melt. It’s a tough little mofo. Each cube had that mellowed-out taste I described last time, except more so. The bigger surface area and the ability to mix coffee and cheese in each spoonful really allowed the flavours to mix.
This is truly great. If you’re willing to take the next step beyond dipping bread cheese in coffee, this is the better way to experience it.
STAY TUNED for more CHEESE WEEK excitement.
A while ago I wrote about my desire to try Juustoleipä, aka Leipäjuusto, aka bread cheese, aka squeaky cheese, aka call it whatever the hell you want.
As the ancient Chinese proverb goes, “if you blog it, they will come.”
The finest purveyors of bread cheese on this continent seems to be Carr Valley, based in Wisconsin. Monica Wright, a Minneapolis reporter, read my post and got in touch with me. Minnesota happens to be close to Wisconsin, and being pretty much the awesomest person in the world, Monica offered to send me some Carr Valley cheese for testing.
You can read Monica’s scoop over on Hot Dish, featuring an interview with yours truly (warning: contains Cheese Week spoilers). Keep reading for a more detailed analysis of the experiment.
Well, this is the first cheese I’ve seen that actually recommends dipping it in coffee right on the package.
The cheese took two weeks to arrive. There was a chance that after two weeks in an unrefrigerated truck, it could have gone nasty. Only one way to find out, though.
The brown spots are supposed to be there, and there were no other visible deformities, so that’s a good sign. I sliced a good sized finger of cheese, then poked it right into some nice hot, strong coffee.
Damn! This is good!
I’m not a cheese connoisseur, so I don’t have the pallet or vocabulary to fully describe this. It’s got the saltiness of feta, the “squeaky” texture of mozzarella, and just a hint of that pungent blue cheese taste. Dipping it in the coffee doesn’t melt it, but mellows it out, making it less crumbly, more rubbery. The coffee seems to soak in just a bit, adding an earthiness that wasn’t there in Carr Valley’s solo effort.
When the cheese was gone (far too quickly), the coffee was left with a bit of an oily film, but the taste was otherwise unaffected.
This has a lot of potential. Stay tuned for further experiments in the coming week.
Toasted Rice Coffee
A reader named Dahae sent the following email suggestion:
[...] what about putting rice in your coffee?
Rice is sweet.
If you toast the uncooked form and put it in your coffee filter along with the coffee beans, its sweetness might go well with coffee.
Sounds logical. Plus, putting rice in green tea has long been a staple of ancient Japanese wise-men and all-you-can eat sushi joints. Why not in coffee?
I sprinkled some uncooked rice in a frying pan, added just a tiny bit of butter, and toasted it over medium heat, stirring constantly, about 10 minutes.
It filled the kitchen with a very pleasant toasty-sweet smell. Even if it ends up tasting like burned garbage, this technique will be useful for making the place smell good when guests come over.
I tried it black first. Now see, the thing is, coffee is already just toasted beans. So it’s a bit hard to distinguish the toasted rice flavour from the toasted bean flavour. However, it did seem to have a stronger, darker taste than it should have, and there was just a hint of a that ricey sweetness.
To enhance that sweetness, I added some brown sugar. Brown, because the rice was brown, so uh, that made sense somehow. The taste is still subtle, but there’s something different going on there, and it’s not bad.
But to hell with subtlety. Let’s see what happens when we just dump the rice directly in the coffee.
As soon as I added the coffee, that smell came back with a vengeance. Nice.
Some of the rice floats on top, so you get a few grains in each sip. Thus, that toasted rice taste is right in your face now. It absorbed the coffee, so it’s softer than uncooked rice, but the toasting leaves it with a bit of crunch.
This is actually quite good. When you can get over the weirdness of sipping down solid bits (as with the Chia Pet Coffee), it’s got a pretty cool texture, and a very rich, dark, smokey taste. If that sounds good, I fully recommend giving this a try.
P.S. This is PWTIC’s 30th post! It also just passed its one year anniversary! Yay! I don’t think I’ve even mentioned it before, but there is a PWTIC store with some sweet-ass mugs and other stuff. I know they’re overpriced, but if you like the site, consider it a donation that nets you a free mug. Then maybe one day I can afford a real camera (ok, or a new iPhone, which has a pretty good camera).
P.P.S. Next week is Cheese Week! It’s like Shark Week, except with cheese instead of sharks, and coffee instead of the ocean. Stay tuned.
This may come as a surprise, but I drink liquids other than coffee, and eat food that hasn’t been dunked in a cappuccino. Of course, my pathological need to experiment with unusual combinations does carry over to everything else that I stuff in my mouth.
It was in that spirit in which I found myself with lobster and sweet potatoes, and decided to make a unique poutine out of them.
You can read more about this sweet potato lobster poutine over on this other blog. No, I don’t have any lobster left to dump in coffee; maybe next time.
In other news, Cate sent me a link to these recipes using blood (probably not a good idea to click that if you’re sensitive to the red stuff). I’ve eaten some gross things, but these managed to make me a bit queasy. I’m sure blood could taste pretty good in coffee, but the instruction to “pour the fresh cow’s blood through a sieve, separating it from the clots” made me consider having a quick barf.
PWTIC will be back with your regularly scheduled coffee concoctions soon. Some monumental projects are in the works. Stay tuned.
P.S. Remember to send suggestions and the results of your own coffee experiments to suggestions (at) puttingweirdthingsincoffee (dot) com.
Copfee: Donut Coffee
If television and movies have taught us anything, it’s that police officers subsist entirely on coffee and donuts.
It is only logical, then, to put the two together, and name it after cops. Here is copfee.
The first thing I tried was simply dipping a donut (sour cream glazed) in coffee. A curious thing happened: I held it there for a few seconds (to snap a picture), and when I tried pulling it out, it had disintegrated into mush, and a piece of the donut was breaking off, getting sucked into the coffee. It was like the coffee and donut wanted to become one, so they could be together forever.
It continued to liquify as I pulled it out.
The rest of the coffee had donut mush on top. It tasted kinda good once I got over the slimy texture. But surely there must be a better way to integrate these flavours.
I got myself more coffee and a vanilla dip with sprinkles, then went to work. By “went to work” I mean I put them in a blender.
I took the lid off, and immediately noticed the smell; it was like I’d walked into a donut shop. That smell of freshly baked bread and brewing coffee. It tastes much the same way. The main flavour that comes through is the breadiness of the donut, although the icing and sprinkles are hanging around too.
This is actually not bad. The baked dough taste is something I haven’t yet experienced in my coffee creations, and it works. I’d do this again, but maybe with a slightly higher icing to dough ratio.
There is a sludge at the bottom as usual, but not much of one, presumably due to the aforementioned donut-liquifying powers of coffee.
Copfee needs a bit of work before I can label it a success, but it’s close. And when I get there, expect to see me setting up a booth outside the local police station to fill cops’ cups. I’ll either be unimaginably successful or arrested for perpetuating cruel stereotypes.
