By Bret Thorn
Reprinted with the permission of Nation's Restaurant News
The notion of eating ground coffee beans doesn't appeal to many people, but Robert Del Grande, chef-owner of Cafe Annie in Houston, thought about doing just that even before a happy accident on Christmas morning forced his hand about a decade ago.
He and a friend, who worked for a large food company, were "talking about pork loin basted with espresso or something," Del Grande recalls, "about coffee [having] a meaty flavor."
So cooking with coffee already was on his mind when, early in the morning, he started preparing a couple of beef filets for his family's Christmas dinner.
Since it was early, Del Grande also was grinding coffee for his morning brew and spilled the ground coffee onto the cutting board where his filets were.
He decided to experiment on his relatives. He ground more coffee, rolled the filets in it, tied and roasted them.
"Nobody could tell that it was coffee," Del Grande says, but they loved it.
And so a signature dish was born.
Now chile is added to the coffee that coats his filets, and in the past he also has added bitter cocoa, cinnamon and other spices.
Del Grande says that when you say "ground coffee" or write it on a menu, people think of coffee grounds, but it's not the same thing. "Coffee grounds are all puffed up with water and gritty," says Del Grande, who adds that most of their flavor has been extracted. "But if you take coffee and add a little oil, it soaks it up and becomes luscious," more like a cocoa bean.
He says that's what happens when you roll beef in coffee: It soaks up some of the fat from the beef.
"When you cook it on a roast or filet of beef, it gets very dark," Del Grande adds, giving the visual appeal of a dark outside and pink inside reminiscent of steakhouse char. "You get tremendous richness on the outside, and it doesn't come across as coffee."
Del Grande also uses ground coffee as he would other bitter spices, such as fennel seed or cinnamon. He'll sprinkle finely ground coffee powder, along with olive oil and sea salt, over roasted loin of lamb or beef.
"Put a little ground coffee on French fries," he suggests. "Unbelievable."
And of course the aroma of coffee will get most people's juices flowing. "Even if I don't want to have a cup of coffee, I don't mind smelling it," Del Grande says.
His idea of coating meat in ground coffee spread across Texas, and chefs from Houston to Austin give him credit for developing the technique, including Robert Rhoades, the new executive chef at Hudson's on the Bend in Austin, and Hugo Ortega, the chef at Hugo's and Backstreet Cafe in Houston.
Ortega says an ex-cook from Cafe Annie brought the idea to Backstreet Cafe.
"We just gave a little twist to it," he says.
Ortega crusts both venison rack and beef tenderloin with ground coffee. For the venison he mixes the coffee with some Creole mustard, presses it onto the meat, pan-sears it and then finishes it in the oven.
"The coffee gives a kind of smoky flavor and also a sensation of stimulating your palate," Ortega says, adding that coffee's natural sweetness and spiciness gives the food a different "dimension of flavor, beyond the ordinary. . . . It's not like you have an idea of how it's going to taste. It's a very unique, distinctive flavor."