Super-Caffeinated Coffee Flour is Totally Real, Delicious Heaven on Earth
We all know that you can bake with all sorts of flour. While wheat and white flour may have had their heyday, it’s almond, tapioca, rice, and even chickpea flour that’s captured trendy baker’s hearts these past few years. Well, now it’s time for those lesser flours to take a backseat and let coffee flour have the spotlight for a while. That’s right, coffee flour is now a glorious, energy-producing thing.
Coffee flour is made from green coffee beans that are naturally filled with antioxidants, and, of course, caffeine. Professor Daniel Perlman, a biophysicist from Brandeis University, discovered a way to mill par-baked green coffee beans. Once the beans are milled they become flour, and after they become flour, they can become scrumptious baked goods. The patent for Perman’s flour was approved in December 2015.
Perlman’s process allows the coffee to retain chlorogenic acid (CGA), which is “an antioxidant that appears to modulate how rapidly the body breaks down glucose,” Eater reports. “[The process] involves par-baking green coffee beans at a relatively lower temperature for a short period of time, which retains the CGA that's typically lost in the regular coffee roasting process. The resulting light-colored beans are no good for brewing and drinking, so instead, he turned them into a finely milled flour that has up to four times as much CGA as regular roasted coffee beans.”
The flour also retains its caffeine. Coffee flour contains about 2.5 percent of caffeine by weight. Perlman explains that if someone put 4 grams of the coffee flour into a muffin, eating the muffin would be equivalent to drinking one cup of coffee. This form of caffeine also is considered a “natural food source caffeine,” so it gradually works its way into a person's system and gives them “longer-term stimulation.” Hear, hear, to that.
And if you’re concerned that baking with coffee flour will be tough, worry not — Perlman says it’s incredibly user-friendly -- it’s a very fine flour and can easily mix with wheat, rice, or other flours. And of course, a cup of coffee.
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Image of green coffee beans via Shutterstock
