Haggis is a traditional Scottish dish, made of a sheep’s heart, liver, and lungs, mixed with oats and spices. It’s known for being simmered in a sheep’s stomach, but I didn’t have one handy, so I had to settle for tupperware and a microwave.

You can read about my experience with the haggis itself over on my other blog: Food Review: Haggis in a Can. But this is a coffee blog, so you can probably see where this is going.

I put the microwaved haggis into a cup, then added coffee and sealed it. I let it soak for over 48 hours, to make sure the spicy meaty taste had time to infuse into the coffee.

When I took it out of the fridge and opened it, the smell was not entirely pleasant. I still had to give it a chance, though. I set up an apparatus to filter out the chunks, leaving only pure black haggis-flavoured coffee. Or at least that was the plan.

I ran into a problem. The meat had made the coffee oily and thick; so much so that it refused to drip through my coffee filter. I had to carefully squeeze the filter, coaxing it out the bottom a squirt at a time, not unlike milking a cow. I did this twice, to make sure no chunks remained. It was a slow process, and yielded only a tiny amount of thickened coffee.

Ah well, it’s enough to get a sense of the taste. Bottoms up.

Oh, no. This is not good. Salt is the first taste that hits my mouth, but then the unmistakable taste of mashed up sheep heart, liver, and lungs hits me. It’s a dark, bitter, lingering taste, made even more unpalatable by the coffee.

Oh Christ. This is like drinking the vomit of someone who just won a gravy-chugging contest.

I got some on my fingers and the smell won’t go away. Oh God. I keep washing them. I keep washing my mouth out. It’s still there. Will this be with me forever?

Oh Jesus.

Do not want.

At least I also got this in Niagara-on-the-Lake.

It’s much better. All the taste of Scotland, without feeling like you need to induce vomiting just so there is a more pleasant taste in your mouth.

Oh yeah, obligatory sink shot:

Sorry.

Here is how those plans got derailed.

Assplosion was a lovely gift from my family. It’s not a great hot sauce; it’s spicy enough, but hadn’t really lived up to its name. Still, I had to try it first, to start this series with a “bang.”

The only coffee I had ready was chocolate-hazelnut flavoured. And you know how chocolate with chili in it is all the rage these days? I thought I’d enhance the chocolate with some Fry’s cocoa and go for that idea in drink form.

I’ve been watching Dexter a lot lately, which makes red drips remind me of blood. That was probably the first sign this wouldn’t turn out well.

When it was all mixed up, the smell was … alarming. It literally hurt my nose a bit, with the combination of bitter cocoa and noxious spice. Ah, but I had to try tasting it anyway. For you, dear reader. All for you.

All I could taste was the Assplosion. I only put a few drops in, but it overwhelmed the coffee, hazelnut, and chocolate such that all they did was add some bitterness and enhance the illusion that I was drinking poison. Or ass.

I want to give other hot sauces a chance. Maybe it’d be better with regular coffee and no chocolate. Maybe there is a sauce out there that can contribute to the pleasant coffee / spice balance I experienced with curry coffee. But I can’t bring myself to try any more; not any time soon.

Plus, I’m starting to feel a rumbling down below.

Two follow-up experiments in combining bacon with coffee were conducted under careful laboratory conditions. Test #2 is presented below. Test #3 will follow in next week’s volume.

Bacon Coffee, Test #2:

No-Name brand SIMULATED BACON BITS CONTAINS NO MEAT were distributed over the coffee grounds. Coffee was then brewed as normal.

A surprising finding: after being soaked with water, the bacon bits resemble bacon more than they did before:

The primary finding was that SIMULATED BACON BITS CONTAINS NO MEAT did not contribute the desired amount of flavour. Even after sweetening with cream and honey, the coffee remained nearly unaffected, save for an unpleasant increase in saltiness. Researcher concluded that bacon bits in coffee were not even repugnant enough to be of significant interest.

Further tests are needed.

In an interview in the “Talk of the Town” column of The New Yorker in 1942, the year before his death, Lemuel Benedict, a retired Wall Street stock broker, claimed that he had wandered into the Waldorf Hotel in 1894 and, hoping to find a cure for his morning hangover, ordered “buttered toast, poached eggs, crisp bacon and a hooker of hollandaise.” Oscar Tschirky, the famed maître d’hôtel, was so impressed with the dish that he put it on the breakfast and luncheon menus but substituted ham and a toasted English muffin for the bacon and toast.

While probably not the true origin, I like this story for several reasons:
1) LOL, “hooker.”
2) It acknowledges eggs Benedict’s proper place as hangover food.

We’ve all been there. Eleven o’clock on a Sunday, head throbbing, stomach churning but oddly hungry, at the closest cheap diner, with a big plate of deep fried potatoes, greasy bacon, and buttery buttery eggs Benedict. Oh, and coffee on the side.

Why not pare this hangover cure down to its core elements? Which are, of course, Hollandaise sauce and coffee.

I just so happen to have some lying around after making this masterpiece:

Oh look on top there, it’s smoked paprika making its second appearance on this blog! Hi smoked paprika!

Anyway, a day later, the sauce doesn’t look quite so smooth and creamy after reheating:

But I’m sure it will come around once it realizes it is meant to be with coffee.

Ok, maybe not.

It’ll need some convincing. I introduce it to the whisk, and that seems to chill it out a bit, save for an oily film on top and a few stray chunky bits. Plus, it feels oddly viscous, resisting every swirl of the whisk. Ah well, in with the rest of the coffee!

Looks pretty good. Nice colour (no cream required, since there’s already a lot in the sauce), and a mesmerizing texture on the surface.

I take a sip.

UNGH! Not good.

It’s thick. Like I’m drinking gravy. It’s so buttery that I feel like I gain a pound with each sip. I love butter as much as anyone (even in coffee), but this is too much slippery goodness. Also, it’s saltier than ocean water.

I’m getting involuntary shivers after taking a few sips.

This could help with a hangover, but only because it forces you to vomit. Stick with drowning eggs and English muffins in Hollondaise sauce; it is not friends with coffee.

I shared the love on Metafilter a few days ago. So perhaps I have a voice in what you review next (heh)? I suggest mayonnaise and/or crumbled up Doritos in the grounds.

Indeed, the link from Metafilter is largely responsible for a lot of this blog’s recent success, so Taft deserves special attention. Mayonnaise it is!

Except I don’t have any mayonnaise around. I don’t even have its cheap and ugly little brother, Miracle Whip. Oh, but what have we here? PC Low Fat Whipped Dressing? I suppose that’s the next next best thing.

After my Eggspresso post, several people wrote in to suggest improvements. One that came up repeatedly was to whisk the egg into a little bit of coffee, then slowly add the rest, so it turns into a thick cream rather than a chunky mess. Since whipped dressing has egg in it, I thought I’d try this technique.

It seems to be working. There are a few floaty bits, but mostly it looks like coffee with a nice amount of cream.

I slowly whisk in a full mug. It’s looking good. Doesn’t smell too bad. Maybe this will be a surprise success. Bottoms up.

Oh. Oh my god. The moment it enters my mouth, I know that something has gone wrong. It’s sour; oh jesus, it’s like acid burning my tongue.

In the name of science, I take another sip. No yeah, this is the closest I’ve come to chugging vomit. Somehow it’s even worse than blue cheese dip.

I should have gone with the Doritos.

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.