Coffee Cuisine from Steve Petusevsky

Steve Petusevsky is Chef, author and natural foods gourmet and has created some recipes with coffee, quite similar to what I think coffee cuisine ought to be in the all around kitchen.

Coffee has several nutritious properties

What happened with coffee along the way?

Many, many, many years ago some people in Africa – mainly in Ethiopia – started making drinks out of roasted beans. While some took the pulp of those berries and made wine, others made hot drinks with its pulp and threw away the seeds. There have been various uses for the fruits of coffee plants, but wherever one reads, it seems as though Africans, Asians and Americans alike have all taken the drinking path and always a sweet one, when it comes to coffee.

Everyone DRINKS Coffee. Why?

Ethiopians could have roasted their beans back then with spices as they do today and used it for some dark soup with meat and other cereals, which could have become a typical Ethiopian dish. Or they could have mixed it with Teff – the nutritious grass native to the northern Ethiopian Highlands – and made some typical African or Ethiopian flatbread with it. It could have even been mixed with Teff for their production of beer, obtaining some strange or perhaps beloved African Dark Beer, which could have become a world famous product.

It is in Europe where coffee – just like cocoa – was mixed with milk and cream to begin with. The Aztecs used only water and spices for their symbolic cocoa beverages and the Viennese did not really show a particular craze for Coffee, until the pole Kolschitzky started mixing it with milk for his guests.

More and more acclaimed Chefs use coffee to spice meats and sauces, instead of sticking with the beloved taste for desserts. Is it only chance? Is it imposed by nature itself? Is it the most agreeable alchemy for the palate that led us along this cultural path? A few days ago I tried an absolutely sugarless mixture with vanilla. As a friend of mine put it up to her nose, not knowing at all, that it contained vanilla, she immediately perceived sweetness in the scent. For this reason I started asking myself, if it is indeed an imposed nature’s path, the more agreeable composition for our olfactory sense, or is it just that we have accustomed ourselves to this particular composition?

Experiment yourself a bit!

At the Beginning

At the beginning it was nothing more than a bitter taste – not a need, no routine, but simply curiosity for what the whole world seemed to be in need of daily. But the sense for the taste and the expectations grew constantly until the pleasure and the quality became the priority. And Aristippos – the coffee drink – was born.

Aristippos from Cyrene (435-355 BC) knew how to enjoy philosophically without losing himself and used pleasure as a means of rising spirit and mind. True joy and inner peace imply having the insight that enables the individual not to become a slave of pleasure. This was his thought. He taught his daughter Areté – the first declared woman philosopher – and she taught her son, Aristippos the Younger, who further developed the teaching of hedonism with Epikur from Samos.

Wisdom, the depth, height and width of being as a whole and the love towards being it, could be expressed symbolically by handling raw materials in a creative, thoughtful and careful manner. Coffee provides one of the most multi-layered ways of expressing ones love for wisdom. From growing the plant – based on soil, geography and height – to harvesting the fruit, preparing and drying it, then roasting it and finally the grinding and the process of making a drink, coffee should NEVER end as a mere black brew.

Early thinkers viewed alchemy as the philosophy of nature. Just take the wonderful scent of Vanilla and the so loved smell and taste of coffee. In terms of these fantastic scents and tastes, nature could have never made it on its own. The fruit of an orchid must be pollinated by bees or hummingbirds. The harvesting of the fruit must take place just in the very short time in which is ripe, but not open. This vanilla capsule must be then put in hot water to stop it from growing further, before it gets hours of massage from human hands and ferments, becoming black, in order to reach the wonderful scent we know as vanilla. The coffee berries suffer just as much, before becoming coffee beans as we know and love them. They may not experience the heat of water, but the heat of fire is inevitable for their taste.

Nature and culture, they might not be such a contradiction, as some may claim.