Something brewing in the kitchen

Top chefs spill the beans on cooking sweet and savoury with coffee

WE’RE A nation obsessed with coffee, with the coffee shop and cafe industry in Australia worth a whopping $8 billion a year and rapidly rising.

But while coffee may be great to drink, it can be even better to cook with, believes Jock Zonfrillo, chef-owner of Australia’s No. 1 restaurant Orana and its sister venue Bistro Blackwood in Adelaide.

The pan rattler was recently named an official ambassador for Lavazza Coffee, joining fellow brand representatives and world-renowned chefs Ferran Adria, of El Bulli, and Massimo Bottura, of Osteria Francescana.

And like his culinary counterparts, Zonfrillo is passionate about sharing how the humble bean can be used to make some of the most spectacular dishes.

“It’s an ingredient … and coffee has great attributes to make a dish very, very complex,” he says.

“I’m more about, ‘don’t make coffee the headline, make coffee make everything else amazing’.”

To find out exactly how to do just that at home with both sweet and savoury dishes, we asked Zonfrillo and acclaimed chef Jake Nicolson, of Brisbane’s Blackbird Bar & Grill, for their top tips for incorporating coffee into your food.

FORGET THAT IT’S COFFEE

“It’s just another ingredient the same as garlic,” Zonfrillo says.

“Garlic is integrated into a number of different dishes and sometimes you wouldn’t know it’s in there but it’s giving that dish a complexity and a balance, so that’s the way I like to use coffee when I’m cooking.” Nicolson agrees.

“If you consider it just another spice then you can actually utilise it in many different ways,” he says.

BITTER BENEFITS

For Zonfrillo, it’s coffee’s bitterness that makes it a star ingredient in cooking.

“Some people say, ‘Bitterness, why would I want that?’, but coffee is bitter, lots of things that we love are bitter, but the interesting thing is that when you eat something that’s super complex and delicious, it’s because there are multiple layers of flavours in there of which, inevitably, bitterness will absolutely be one of them,” he says.

The chef explains it’s about layering levels of bitterness and balancing them out with the four other key flavour profiles: sweet, sour, salty and umami.

“If you were just to basically hit a flavour that combines one from each of those categories, you’ll end up with something that’s pretty tasty,” he says.

SUBSTITUTION TIME

If you treat coffee as an ingredient, Nicolson says it can easily substitute in for the likes of star anise, cloves, cumin, cinnamon and coriander.

“When recipes call for toasted cumin seeds or toast your cinnamon quills, before grinding them down I think coffee can be replaced in that essence and give you some results that you probably weren’t expecting,” he says.

While Zonfrillo says coffee can be a great swap for recipes calling for beer, like a pie or casserole as they both bring bitterness.

DESSERT DREAMS

There may be multiple savoury applications for coffee, but sweet dishes is where the beans truly shine, believe our chefs.

“As soon as you add sugar to coffee it becomes complex and beautiful. Coffee and sugar love each other,” Zonfrillo says.

“You can make a tarte tatin with coffee, you can make a panna cotta. It’s probably easier applied to sweet dishes than savoury.”

Nicolson also loves making coffee ice creams by infusing coffee into milk and then turning it into an anglaise and churning it, serving it with a prune and Armagnac tart.

Coffee and chocolate are also a match made in heaven, with espresso adding an extra flavour punch and complexity in the likes of mud cakes and chocolate tarts; while a quick coffee crumble can provide fabulous texture to a chocolate mousse or fondant.