Toasted Rice Coffee

A reader named Dahae sent the following email suggestion:

[…] what about putting rice in your coffee?
Rice is sweet.
If you toast the uncooked form and put it in your coffee filter along with the coffee beans, its sweetness might go well with coffee.

Sounds logical. Plus, putting rice in green tea has long been a staple of ancient Japanese wise-men and all-you-can eat sushi joints. Why not in coffee?

I sprinkled some uncooked rice in a frying pan, added just a tiny bit of butter, and toasted it over medium heat, stirring constantly, about 10 minutes.

It filled the kitchen with a very pleasant toasty-sweet smell. Even if it ends up tasting like burned garbage, this technique will be useful for making the place smell good when guests come over.

I tried it black first. Now see, the thing is, coffee is already just toasted beans. So it’s a bit hard to distinguish the toasted rice flavour from the toasted bean flavour. However, it did seem to have a stronger, darker taste than it should have, and there was just a hint of a that ricey sweetness.

To enhance that sweetness, I added some brown sugar. Brown, because the rice was brown, so uh, that made sense somehow. The taste is still subtle, but there’s something different going on there, and it’s not bad.

But to hell with subtlety. Let’s see what happens when we just dump the rice directly in the coffee.

As soon as I added the coffee, that smell came back with a vengeance. Nice.

Some of the rice floats on top, so you get a few grains in each sip. Thus, that toasted rice taste is right in your face now. It absorbed the coffee, so it’s softer than uncooked rice, but the toasting leaves it with a bit of crunch.

This is actually quite good. When you can get over the weirdness of sipping down solid bits (as with the Chia Pet Coffee), it’s got a pretty cool texture, and a very rich, dark, smokey taste. If that sounds good, I fully recommend giving this a try.

P.S. This is PWTIC’s 30th post! It also just passed its one year anniversary! Yay! I don’t think I’ve even mentioned it before, but there is a PWTIC store with some sweet-ass mugs and other stuff. I know they’re overpriced, but if you like the site, consider it a donation that nets you a free mug. Then maybe one day I can afford a real camera (ok, or a new iPhone, which has a pretty good camera).

P.P.S. Next week is Cheese Week! It’s like Shark Week, except with cheese instead of sharks, and coffee instead of the ocean. Stay tuned.