Turning coffee into flour
The process of making coffee is not as straightforward as you may presume.
Beans do not simply grow on trees and then drop down into containers to be siphoned off into relevant batches before being transported to market. Instead a lot of labour intensive work takes place, including separating the coffee bean from the fruit.
The bean is located instead what is known as a coffee cherry. We all know what happens to the bean from this point – it is dried, cleaned, moved, sold, shipped roast and ground – but not much happens to the discarded fruit. Quite often it is thrown over plantations and utilised as a cheap fertiliser to help stimulate the growth of the next crop in an organic example of the circle of life.
Cue music from The Lion King.
However, a new business is trying to ensure that coffee production is not as wasteful.
The big idea that has got people in the coffee world talking is turning the remnants of the coffee cherry into food.
Notions of having coffee fruit flavoured health drinks that are packed ‘with antioxidants’ is no new idea, yet using the cherries in food is. The notion is that the pulp gets dried and milled with the resulting produce being coffee based flour that is very similar to tradition types of flour you can find on any supermarket shelf.
Ingeniously named Coffee Flour, this product can be used in pasta and baked goods, used as a rub for meat, bring a coffee flavour to sauces and even be used in energy drinks.
The possibilities, it seems, are endless.
Could this be another step on cutting removing inefficiencies from the coffee production process?
We wait with baited breath and quite hope that one day we can have jam on coffee flavoured bread.
Or coffee sauce drizzled over our evening meals.