Right now, my coffee smells like campfire.

Liquid smoke is meant for braising meats and adding to recipes, but it seems like a natural fit with coffee’s natural smokiness. Indeed, it doesn’t affect the taste of the coffee much. The smell, though, brings me right back to cool nights in the middle of the woods.

If I plugged my nose, this could be mistaken for bacon (*). It’s got that subtle hickory flavour that I’ve been looking for. Bacon coffee probably won’t get much better than this non-bacon flavoured coffee. (Though it won’t stop me from trying; stay tuned).

Since this coffee isn’t very visually striking, I looked for pictures to stick up here, and found this:

It may look like an alien tripod robot sent to turn our families into ashes, but is in fact a very impractical coffee jug to make and store coffee while camping.

You could drink campfire flavoured coffee prepared on a campfire. Dawg.

* New name for my upcoming death metal band: Mistaken for Bacon.

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.

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.

She could not risk her life by telling me which underground market in which Asian country she had smuggled the rare florets from. However, she did let me take some, in order to distill it into my own elixir.

I cannot read the codified script on the jar, but I am told these are dried flowers of some sort. They also appear to be shrunken. Although originally created to add zest and vitality to tea, my specialty is in the transmutation of coffee.

I used black coffee with a small dipper full of sugar.

I had trouble getting over the dead-June-bugs-in-a-puddle look, but once I did, the taste was not the least bit unpleasant. It was quite like sipping coffee among the flowers of a botanical garden. Or like putting a dab of perfume in your morning brew. Except less poisonous. I could feel my spirits lifting and my humours balancing almost immediately.

Perhaps for Valentine’s Day I will sprinkle my true love’s coffee with ground up rose petals. Wouldn’t that be romantic?

WOULDN’T IT?

P.S. I cannot explain the style this post is written in. Thanks to Vivian for the flower things. You can probably find dried rose buds(I think that’s what these are) wherever unusual foods are sold.

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.