Thanks to Coffee Flour, Caffeinated Pastries Could Be the Next Breakfast Craze
As shocking as it seems, not everyone enjoys drinking a cup of coffee in the morning. If you’re among those who pass on the joe — but you still want the caffeine — you’ll be pumped to know you can now get a buzz from your morning pastry thanks to coffee flour. Professor Daniel Perlman of Brandeis University in Massachusetts has come up with flour made from antioxidant-rich coffee beans that can be put into your favorite breakfast foods.
So how does this work, exactly? According to Eater, Perlman par-bakes the green coffee beans at a low temperature for a short period of time, which causes them to retain chlorogenic acid (an antioxidant). The process creates light-colored beans that would be no good for actual coffee, so he turns them into flour that has up to four times as much CGA as regular coffee beans.
And even though it’s not in liquid coffee form, this flour packs a powerful punch. Perlman tells Eater that the flour has 2.5 percent caffeine by weight. “So if you were to put four grams of this into, say, a breakfast muffin, it would be the equivalent of drinking a cup of coffee.” But he says that because the coffee flour is expensive compared with wheat flour, he expects that pastry chefs would mix it with other types of flour.
Coffee flours already exist, but each process varies a bit. Dan Belliveau tells Eater that his product, CoffeeFlour, uses coffee cherry fruit, which is a byproduct of the coffee bean harvest that’s usually thrown out. There’s also a Michigan-based company called Get Up and Go, which sells naturally caffeinated baked goods that are equivalent to one cup of coffee.
Perlman’s patent was approved in December, so here’s hoping our local bakeries and coffee shops will start selling the goodies soon so we can save money on breakfast — or if it’s a rough morning, double up on the caffeine with a muffin and a latte.
What would you whip up with your coffee flour? Find recipes + more yummy inspo on our Pinterest.
(h/t Eater + Photo by Andrew Burton Staff/Getty)
