Then, a few days ago, a friend of mine (hi Nick) sent me a recipe for coffee-infused ham gravy. I had to give that a try, but given this blog’s ongoing quest to combine bacon with coffee, bacon seemed a better choice than ham. And what could I do with the coffee-bacon gravy? Pouring it on eggs and more bacon seemed only logical. It’s sorta the opposite of Café Benedict.

As with most endeavours, the first step is bacon. Lots of bacon.

Set the bacon aside. Then pour the coffee into the bacon grease; just a bit more coffee than there is grease. I used a dark roast brewed extra strong, but a milder coffee probably would have been better.

Add some flour to thicken and make it look like gravy. Use a sifter to avoid chunks.

Let it simmer for a few minutes. Stir it often with a whisk; mine got chunky even after sifting, so you might have to whisk that gravy vigorously. Yeah. Yeah, real vigorously. Now that’s gravy. Oh yeah.

Tenderly spoon that gravy onto whatever you’d like. I treated it like Hollandaise, pouring it over an egg, slices of bacon, and an English muffin.

The gravy on its own was pretty bitter (probably due to the strong coffee) but not entirely unpleasant. Poured on top of everything else and with a little extra salt and pepper, it was quite good. A rich, earthy, smokey, meaty sort of meal. I was full for hours after eating this. I accosted a young woman (hi Danaë) and asked for a second opinion, and she liked it even more than I did. My gravy brings all the girls to the yard.

I’ll label this a success, but next time: 1) Milder coffee; 2) Maybe a touch of sugar to sweeten the gravy; 3) Think of a cool name for it.

The quest for bacon coffee is still ongoing. I’ve got a few leads and orders in the mail that may lead to breakthroughs. Stay tuned.

Obligatory aftermath shot:

Edit Feb 23: As some kind commenters pointed out, gravy made with pork drippings and coffee is known as red-eye gravy, especially in the southern U.S.

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.

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.

Bacon was first placed into coffee.

Researcher proceeded to hold bacon up to light while laughing maniacally.

Bacon and coffee were then placed into Magic Bullet apparatus and blended for 10 seconds (or less). No cream was added. The mixture took on a creamy colour and texture. Repeat: no cream was added.

Researcher became nervous; began to exhibit signs of distress such as sweating and trembling hands.

Despite further blending, chunkage was apparent. Given previous encounters with chunks, researcher became visibly agitated. After several minutes of contemplation and pacing, he exclaimed “[expletive deleted], I’ve got it,” produced a coffee filter, and set up another apparatus.

Coffee was poured through (another) filter in order to remove chunks. Coffee had taken on thick texture and required manual squeezing in order to drain into mug. Researcher became covered in oily coffee.

Yield was small, but enough to gauge properties of coffee. Filtering was successful; no chunks were detected. The texture was, however, slimey. Taste was not terrible. Smokiness of bacon came through, as did saltiness. However, the researcher was left unsatisfied, expressing a desire for an idealized bacon coffee that he claimed to “have dreamed about nightly,” yet also added, “I will not rest until I find it.”

Further research is needed.

Footnote: The unfiltered, chunk-laden coffee was also attempted. Not recommended. Taste was similar to Cafe Benedict, except chewier.

Readers with strong stomachs may wish to observe the residue.

This research was funded by two generous organizations: Klix offers spiffy coffee vending kiosks, while Flavia offers smaller bean to cup coffee machines. Those certainly look better than vending machines where I’ve worked. The sludge that came out of those didn’t need weird things to taste weird.

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.

The long tradition of putting egg in coffee caught my attention. John Steinbeck once wrote: “I cracked an egg and cupped out the yolk and dropped white and shells into the pot, for I know nothing that polishes coffee and makes it shine like that.” Me, I’ve learned a few things in my time, for example: 1) Don’t argue with John Steinbeck; and 2) Shiny things kick ass.

lol! jk!

I crumbled the shell by hand and just dropped it right in there.

Then put the rest of the egg in the mug to await its caffeine infusion. I know I know, Steinbeck recommended just the white, but it’s not like I’m on a freakin’ diet.

The brewed coffee didn’t look any more shiny than usual, but it had yet to meet the rest of the egg.

I saw a few floaty chunks as I was pouring, but I was surprised by how well the majority of the egg blended smoothly with the coffee.

Of course, when you dig for them, the chunks are still there.

The taste is actually quite good. Honestly the egg doesn’t affect the flavour much (or the shine), but it does have a slightly thicker texture that is quite nice. I barely needed to add cream or sugar. The aftertaste seems to linger longer than regular coffee. As if the flavour is glued to the roof of my mouth for a few minutes rather than washing away like regular drinks.

As usual, the only real problem comes at the bottom of the cup. I’ve used the “warm snot” analogy before, but, well, it’s even more appropriate here.

I think, what the world needs now, is love swe coffee mugs that, somehow, have bottoms that can be cut off from the rest of the coffee and removed after a few minutes. Sure, I could put it through a filter, but I think that would mess with the flavour. This invention is, um, copyright and patent pending and stuff.

In the interest of science I also tried the egg shell brewed coffee on its own. It may have had a less-bitter, more-chalky flavour, but it’s subtle at best.

Until next time, coffee lovers. It was eggsellent to see you.

Disclosure: I got paid for one of the links in this post. Yay money.

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.