Putting Salmon in Coffee
Coffee can have a smokey kind of flavour. I had some smoked salmon cream cheese lying around. Are they a match made in heaven?
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.
Putting Weird Things in Coffee 
You are a brave man my friend. While I love coffee, cheese, and salmon… I prefer not to have fish and coffee in the same 5 hour time span… just couldn’t do it.
Are you sure you don’t have some sort of nutritional deficiency? Like Pica or something? (that disease that makes pregnant women crave non food items…) I’m worried for you dude, fish and coffee? Logic says that won’t end well.
Psh, “logic” when it comes to food preferences is just a set of cultural biases. There may be some things that naturally don’t go together, but there are also many undiscovered combinations that do. Who first thought of putting chocolate in coffee? Now the cafe mocha is commonplace.
Or maybe I do have pica. Delicious, delicious pica.
this would work if you tempered the cream cheese.
1. melt a bit of cream cheese in the microwave in a pyrex dish.
2. add a small amount of milk to the cream cheese and stir until smooth.
3. add about 1 or 2 teaspoons of hot coffee to the mixture, versus dumping it into the coffee.
4. stir the coffee and cheese mixture until smooth.
5. continue to drizzle more hot coffee into the mixture while stirring briskly.
most cheese based additions will work way better if you use this method.
aaron
Thanks for the advice Aaron. I’m going to have to try these more advanced techniques. Some people have recommended a similar procedure for the egg coffee.
This would probably be great with regular cream cheese. The salmon chunks complicate this one.
the salmon cream cheese sounds interesting … also, try some mascarpone. it is an italian ‘cream cheese’, although it is more on the soft butter side of life. you can use it to make cheesecake from, or cream sauces .. but it is quite nice in a hot, fresh cup of coffee.
.mashka
mascarpone can be hard to find! i wanted to make tiramisu for a houswarming party a few weeks ago, and i hunted everywhere in my town but none of the grocery stores had it. i googled how to make it and found out it is really easy to make…
Mmm, I had a cheesecake made with marscapone recently, and it was one of the best I’ve ever had. Thanks Mashka, I will definitely try it in coffee.
Wicks, I believe I’ve seen marscapone in big grocery stores, NOT in the cheese section, but in little specialty food areas. I’m gonna try the local market as well.
Although this post IS old, i just wanted to say I found 3 errors while visiting your site. Check your wordpress install!
I give you the most credit in the world for doing this. Mixing salmon and coffee?! Ah I would be terrified that I would never be able to drink coffee again from mixing the two! Keep it up!