Great tip from How To Basic on Youtube.

(via Jeff Preston)

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.

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.

But now, as hot summer days turn to cool fall nights, we’d rather have a drink that lights a fire within us rather than squelching the sun without. Can we keep the rummy minty goodness of a Mojito, but rejigger it into something toasty? How about a warm cup of Mojijoe?

First, get all your ingredients:

I started with the sugar (2ish tbsp), mint (4-5 leaves), and just a squirt of lemon juice. I didn’t have a muddler handy, so I used the back of a spoon to mash it together just enough to bruise the tasty oils out of the mint leaves.

I added the rum (1.5 oz) next, then stirred and mashed a bit more. I used dark rum rather than the usual white; I thought it would compliment the coffee better.

Then the coffee. Then stir.

But um, I wouldn’t recommend the fancy glass. Oww, poor fingers. I guess mugs have handles for a reason. Also, the mint leaves kinda get in the way. So you may want to use one of these deals:

After all that, how’s it taste? Good! With the rum and mint, it’s very reminiscent of a crème de menthe-based dessert coffee, except the fresh mint has a more authentic taste and smell. It’s very rich; a whole mug may be too much. However, just a few sips were enough to have the intended warmth-in-the-belly effect.

The Mojijoe is going in the success category.

Since then, the community has banded together, offering suggestions that could prevent this tragedy from ever happening again. Many people suggested that temperature was a key factor. So let’s just chill out and try a few new techniques.

Frozen Tim Tam with Hot Coffee:

Freezing a regular Tim Tam overnight was a definite improvement. Suckage increased by at least 1 or 2 sucks, so that a decent amount of Tim Tam flavoured coffee could be extracted before it all fell apart. Even after its messy death, some particularly cold spots remained intact.

Frozen Caramel Tim Tam with Iced Coffee:

Just biting off the corners, it was clear that there were some solid bits in the frozen caramel Tim Tam.

Oh wow, so many sucks! This biscuit refuses to go mushy. I hoovered 5 or 6 good squirts of coffee, and even after that it didn’t crumble, but just lost its ability to transport liquid.

Biting into it was not tooth-friendly. A solid skeleton of jagged caramel had kept the whole thing together, and the cold coffee had done nothing to soften it.

Using the frozen caramel kind and sucking up cold coffee is the best way to delay the senseless murder of Tim Tams.

The Tim Tam Slam is the practice of drinking a hot beverage, e.g. hot chocolate, through a Tim Tam (a commercial biscuit).

Hey, coffee is a hot beverage!

Tim Tams are Australian, so I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find them. Thankfully, they seem to be as ubiquitous as Fosters’s, so I found them at a larger Canadian grocery store.

They had two kinds, regular and caramel, so obviously I got both. To prepare for the Tim Tam slam, you bite off opposite corners.

Then you dunk one end in the coffee and, quickly, clamp your mouth around other end and suck like you’ve never sucked before. The tricky part of this process—and probably the reason it’s called the Tim Tam Slam rather than the Tim Tam Leisurely Suckle—is that the whole thing immediately begins to disintegrate when the coffee hits it. You really only get one good suck in before it’s mush in your hands.

The caramel kind was harder to hoover through, but lasted a bit longer. Maybe a suck and a half. Plus the ribbon of caramel acts like a skeleton to keep the whole thing intact even after the slam, making it easier to eat.

So the whole experience doesn’t last long, but while it does, it is a sweet one. The coffee picks up chocolate and liquified biscuit as it travels, arriving in your mouth with burst of sugary goodness.

The rest of it often plops into the coffee unless you can catch it in time. This gives the coffee itself a very nice mocha flavour, and even the soggy bits at the bottom are not half bad. They can be spooned out for a tiramisu-type treat.

Just be sure to wash your hands before attempting this. You’re going to end up licking them, and you wouldn’t want them pre-flavoured with Cheeto dust and whatever other filth you usually have coating your grubby flesh mittens. Might wanna have a napkin nearby too. Especially if you plan on writing a blog post about it and don’t want your keyboard all sticky. Oops.

Anyway, I highly recommend this messy success. Tim Tams and coffee are a match made in Australia heaven.

Note: Sorry for the blurry pictures. I was forced to use my iPhone 3GS, since I can’t even afford an iPhone 4. Oh hey, look, you can buy merchandise over to the right there!