Tag: alternative coffee ideas

Savoury coffee recipes

Posted on by Sara Walker

Savoury coffee recipes

It’s common knowledge that chocolate and coffee are perfect cooking partners, teaming up to great effect in sweet recipes such as our Chocolate Espresso Brownies. What you may not know, though, is that coffee also goes extremely well with beef in savoury recipes. If you use wholesale coffee, why not use up any leftovers with one of these easy ideas?

Rump steak with coffee marinade

Ingredients
3 tablespoons strong coffee
1 tablespoon Demerara sugar
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns, crushed
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 piece rump steak per person

Mix all the marinade ingredients together thoroughly. Place the steaks in a flat dish, and pour the marinade over, working it well into the steaks. Cover the dish, and leave in the fridge for six hours or overnight. Cook the steaks under a hot grill, or on the barbecue.

Fillet steak with coffee and peppercorn crust

Ingredients

1 teaspoon black peppercorns
1 tablespoon coffee beans
Pinch of salt
Olive oil
1 fillet steak per person

Crush and peppercorns and coffee beans together with a pestle and mortar, until they’re
about the consistency of coarse grains of sand. Tip the mixture out onto a plate, and mix in
the salt.

Brush each steak with oil, and press it firmly into the coffee mixture until firmly coated on
both sides. Pan-fry the steaks until cooked to your liking – you may have to add a little extra
oil to the pan to stop the crust from sticking.

Beef casseroles and stews

For a rich, tender beef casserole, pan-fry the beef and a chopped onion until browned. Add
two tablespoons of flour, and stir until the mixture is evenly coated, then add equal quantities of stock, coffee and red wine. Simmer for four – five hours until tender. The coffee adds an extra depth of flavour, and a deep, intense colour to the dish.

Would you wear a top made from coffee beans?

Posted on by Sara Walker

Coffee bean clothing might sound like something from an Alexander McQueen collection, but apparel made from coffee beans doesn’t necessarily have to mean high fashion.

Fabric manufacturers, Singtex, based in Taiwan, were the first company to make clothes out of ground coffee. Instead of the waste coffee grounds being dumped in a landfill, Singtex, saw an opportunity to make environmentally friendly fabric from them.

The finished material is surprisingly soft, breathable and airy, making it ideal for outdoor activities, sports and yoga. However, the benefits don’t just end there – clothes made from coffee beans also absorb horrible smells, protect you against harmful UV rays, and they don’t need to be washed as often as regular clothing. This would obviously depend on your work out style!

As a result, Singtex fabrics have been snapped up by many global sportswear brands such as North Face, Nike and Adidas – in 2011, the company had as many as 70 brands buying its products and since 2009 when the fabric was launched, the company has won international recognition for its eco products; however, it doesn’t end with coffee – there are others.

Singtex and the manufacturing company, Petagonia, also make sportswear from discarded plastic bottles and even stinging nettles. Apparently, nettles were used to make fabric for thousands of years before cotton took over in the 15th century.

However, a few years ago when the cotton industry started to get a bad reputation due to some companies trying to genetically engineer cotton plants and exploit cotton farmers in India and reports of child labour, it seems clothing manufacturers started to look for alternatives.

Due to the massive success of coffee based fabrics, in the future, Singtex plans to create other functional environmentally friendly products out of coffee beans such as shoes and even soap.

The Coffee Pot Shoe

Posted on by Sara Walker

Do you remember the nursery rhyme, ‘There was an old woman who lived in a shoe?’

It might be a far-fetched connection, but that’s exactly what sprung to mind after the discovery of the footwear designer, Kobi Levi. Some of his designs almost look as if tiny people could inhabit the shoes or use them as functional everyday objects. For example, the shoes that resemble miniature red shopping baskets or the high heels sculpted to look like ladders.

Other designs include shoes that look like ducks with the heels sculpted to look like yellow beaks, rocking chair shoes and even pink chewing gum shoes – we’re not so sure about wearing these ones though.

Our favourites out of the Kobi Levi collection are the coffee pot shoes that really do look like coffee pots filled with deliciously brewed coffee beans with the heels of the shoes resembling hot black coffee being poured. So, if you like the idea of wearing coffee pots on your feet, you’ve got two designs to choose from – the sophisticated black coffee pot or the classic white coffee pot resembling fine china.

As a wholesale coffee company we’d love to see a whole collection of shoes dedicated to coffee beans with the shoes perhaps boxed in shoe boxes made to look like miniature coffee machines…the possibilities are endless. The way things are going with companies such as Singtex, designing sportswear out of coffee beans, perhaps we’ll start to see some more functional shoes actually made with coffee beans.

About Kobi Levi

Kobi Levi’s footwear design career began in childhood when he would craft shoes out of cardboard. After completing his degree, Levi went onto become a freelance shoe designer of weird and wonderful shoes. He gained worldwide recognition for his interesting creations through his blog ‘Blog Kobi’ which attracted the attention of Lady Gaga who used one of Kobi’s shoes in her music video ‘Born this Way’.

Cooking savoury dishes with coffee

Posted on by Sara Walker

If you’re a coffee lover and you like your food, why not try cooking with coffee beans – savoury dishes that is.

You’re probably familiar with all the yummy desserts coffee can be added to – coffee and banana cake, chocolate brownies, and coffee based tiramisu, but what about coffee and meat or coffee and black bean soup?

At first it doesn’t sound that appetizing but adding coffee to your cooking could give your food a warm winter kick. Still not convinced? Don’t just take our word for it – try some of these recipes and make your own mind up.

Black Coffee Bean Soup

Ingredients:

Olive oil, one pound of black beans, one large onion, one pepper, two pieces of celery, one jalapeno pepper, two-three cloves of garlic, one tablespoon of cumin, water, two cups of freshly brewed coffee, one bay leaf, a pinch of salt, a good helping of cream and rocket for a garnish.

Make the dish:

Let the black beans soak overnight, then boil for a few minutes and drain. Heat the oil and fry the onion, garlic and the rest of the vegetables until they’re cooked. Add the cumin, black beans and brewed coffee beans to the mix and boil gently. Cover the food and simmer for another 30 minutes and blend once cooked. The soup can be served with some yoghurt or stirred in cream and rocket.
Delicous.

Beef and Coffee Bean Winter Stew

Ingredients:

Olive oil, one and a half pounds of beef, one large onion, two garlic cloves, two peppers, flour, a good splash of white wine, five tablespoons of freshly brewed coffee, salt, fresh thyme and few bay leaves.

Make the dish:

Start by heating the oil, and then add the beef until brown. Now take the meat out of the pan and cook the onion, garlic and peppers. After a few minutes add the flour, white wine and freshly brewed coffee beans and continue to stir. Now put the beef back into the pan, add some salt, pepper, fresh thyme and bay leaves and simmer until cooked. Serve with dumplings and green beans for a hearty English winter meal.

Would you drink coffee from an elephant’s bum?

Posted on by Sara Walker

We love a good bargain in the UK which is why at the Wholesale Coffee Company, the products we supply such as commercial coffee machines, and coffee bean supplies are excellently priced without the quality being compromised.

But, not everyone loves a bargain. There’s a coffee shop in Melbourne selling coffee for $25 a cup. The Geisha coffee, also nick-named the ‘God shot’ takes four minutes to make and the brewing process involves bunsen burners  and is said to look a bit like a school science project. The result is a coffee that tastes rather like tea with a jasmine and strawberry aroma – intriguing.

Moving things up a notch to the Maldives – home to the world’s most expensive coffee beans – is the elephant dung coffee, going for about $50 a cup. It sounds like something from Brass Eye, but coffee from an elephant’s bum can be found on the menu at Antara Resorts in the Maldives and Antantara’s Golden Triangle property in Thailand.

The coffee beans, called ‘Black Ivory’ are being sold for a massive $1,100 per kilo, the equivalent of £693.11 – all because they’ve passed through the bum of an elephant. But it’s not just about the gimmick.

Coffee beans that have been naturally refined by elephants are less bitter because during the digestion period, the elephant enzymes break the coffee protein down as it’s the protein in coffee beans that’s responsible for the bitter taste. The outcome is a coffee with a chocolate, floral, nutty aroma with traces of red berry and spice.

It doesn’t end with elephants though – there are other similarly if not more bizarre and fascinating coffee bean creations out there such as civet coffee which is made from the poo of civet cats, coffee beans made from deer dung and finally, there’s even a special breed of bat that can harvest coffee.