But first let’s look back to the Coffee Hack we hosted in February. It was a resounding success, with all sorts of adventurous people showing up, many with their own ingredients to try in combination with coffee.

We had all the coffee hardware you could dream of.

Including a beer infuser, which sorta maybe almost worked. It’s at least good in theory; Mill Street’s Coffee Porter is one of my favourite beers.

Labels were important. Participants created coffees that were everything from sweet to spicy to savoury.

Unusual brewing methods were as abundant as unusual ingredients. Co-organizer Laura tried out some delicious flavoured cold brew coffee. Other co-organizer Andrew “Twitch” Berdan handled the Turkish coffee. He also brought some home-made ingredients, like this from-scratch cottage cheese:

It didn’t look appetizing, but the cheese didn’t affect the taste of the coffee much, so I’d say it’s neither recommended nor a disgusting failure.

My main contribution stemmed from the idea that traditional Thanksgiving foods—turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, stuffing, pie—all go well together, and leave you feeling warm and satisfied, but also sleepy. How can we possibly have all the goodness of Thanksgiving without the sleepiness?

Coffee. The answer is coffee.

(The following pictures are courtesy of Jody “3oh6″ Bailey; more pics here)

Step 1: Brew coffee with low salt chicken broth in the water.

Step 2: Add gravy powder and instant mashed potato mix.

Step 3: Add cream and sugar. Top with whipped cream. Garnish with more gravy powder.

Step 4: Top with cranberry stuffing biscotti. This was another of Twitch’s creations, and was delicious on its own and dipped in coffee.

The Thanksgiving coffee itself, oh man, I was not expecting it to actually taste good, but it was like a family holiday in my mouth. Just a bit of each ingredient made sure nothing was overpowering (like the downfall of many of my creations, saltiness). I quickly gave thanks to every known deity for leading this liquid comfort into my belly. Thanksgiving coffee is worth trying.

Bottoms up to a successful Coffee Hack. Let’s do this again sometime.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I thought it was really just artificially fish-flavoured and pinkified cream cheese, but the third ingredient is real honest-to-goodness smoked salmon.

Be sure to avoid leftover bagel crumbs stuck in the cream cheese.

In with the coffee. This one needs to be mixed up really good. But even then…

My god—it’s full of stars.

It looks really cool when you swirl it around.

Ah, but my arch nemesis, texture, is back. The bits that refused to melt tasted like little blobs of half-melted rubber. Maybe adding cream will help.

Er…nope.

The taste of the coffee itself was actually not that bad. Once I was able to suspend the knowledge that I was drinking coffee with fish in it, I realized that the smokiness of the salmon actually did go pretty well with the earthy Sumatra coffee I used.

I thought maybe the chunks were just cream cheese that refused to melt, so I threw the mug in the microwave for a while. All that accomplished was a fishy-smelling microwave. I’m thinking the rubbery white bits were the salmon itself, which given their unrecognizable state, tells you something about the quality of the salmon used in the cream cheese. Perhaps it would have been more accurate to list “ground up fish product” on the ingredients label.

Maybe if the coffee was drained through a very fine filter (say, a coffee filter), it would be drinkable. Delicious even. But unfortunately I tossed it down the drain in disgust before I thought of this. Maybe next time. Stay tuned.

So let’s say you order a pizza and two dipping sauces. You eat the pizza, dipping all the way, but in the end you still have half a blue cheese dipping sauce left over. What could you possibly do? Well, when you run a blog called Putting Weird Things in Coffee, the answer is obvious.

Mind those leftover pizza crumbs!

It looked okay at first. I eagerly anticipated the smooth, creamy, savoury goodness. Then I stirred.

It immediately became a curdled mess. The smell was oddly familiar, not unlike vomit after the drunken inhalation of late-night street pizza.

I couldn’t just dump it without at least one sip, so I bravely filled the cup and plunged in.

As soon as my lips hit the coffee, I knew it wasn’t going to end well. It was a multi-step experience; the top layer of curdled blue cheese had a sour taste that hurt my tongue. Then the actual coffee broke through and added some earthy bitterness. I forced myself to swallow, but now I’m regretting it, because it’s been half an hour since that sip and both the taste in my mouth and the feeling in my belly resemble having just gotten my guts forcibly ripped from my body, through my mouth.

All in all, I don’t recommend putting blue cheese in coffee.