There are many different alternatives to use in baking instead of wheat flour these days. Among them are almond flour, rice flour, tapioca flour and coconut flour. Now you’ll be able to add coffee to that list. Daniel Perlman, a biophysicist from Brandeis University in Massachusetts, has invented a flour made from green coffee beans that are filled with antioxidants.
According to Eater, Perlman’s method involves baking the beans at a lower temperature and at a shorter length of time. This allows for the antioxidant chlorogenic acid (CGA) to be retained, which is usually lost in the normal coffee roasting process. The parbaked beans can’t be used for brewing, but it can be turned into a finely milled flour perfect for baking. Think caffeinated muffins, breakfast cereals and snack bars.
Although Perlman describes his coffee flour as a “user-friendly ingredient,” it would be more like an additional enhancement due to cost. “I don’t see this as being a direct one-to one replacement for regular flour since coffee beans are relatively expensive compared to wheat flour,” he said, “so it’s more of an enhancing nutritional ingredient to provide the antioxidants a well as the natural caffeine boost.”
Plus, if one of these muffins were made completely of the coffee four, there’d be no need to drink an actual cup of coffee with it. Where’s the fun in that? Perlman tells Eater, “This flour contains 2.5 percent caffeine by weight, so if you were to put 4 grams of this into, say, a breakfast muffin, it would be the equivalent of drinking a cup of coffee.”
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