SYgle > News > Vegetable Coffee Is Getting Out Of Hand

Vegetable Coffee Is Getting Out Of Hand

Tag：Vegetable Coffee Popular Drink Beverages 2024-07-16 13:16

Static Media / Shutterstock / Getty

Vegetable coffee. These two words would likely never go together if not for social media. The vegetable coffee pairing that's trending at the moment is spring onion coffee — a cup of iced coffee with milk and heaps of chopped spring onions. However, trending does not always correlate with well-liked. We spoke to coffee expert Mathew Woodburn-Simmonds, who runs Home Coffee Expert, a resource for all things coffee, about this odd combination. With the benefit of the doubt, we asked him if it works well.

"I cannot understand why you would ever bother doing this," Woodburn-Simmonds says. It's a TikTok trend that he, like many other people, has trouble getting on board for. "If I was going to be extremely generous, then I can see a world where you've made a coffee with so much creamer that it's just dense and texturally unpleasant, and some crunch and sharpness from a spring onion adds contrast," he adds, but ultimately, Woodburn-Simmonds doesn't think you can fix unpleasantness with more unpleasantness. If you're looking for a new coffee recipe, you may want to stick with coffee recipes that put a standard cup of Joe to shame (like our salted caramel iced coffee), not recipes that do the opposite.

Could any vegetables work in coffee?

n.tati.m/Shutterstock

The TikTok trend of spring onion coffee started in China as part of the trending concept called "dark cuisine" or strange food combinations. With strangeness at its roots, it's no surprise that spring onion coffee is unenjoyable. Still, plenty of people posted videos of the recipe and their reactions. Mathew Woodburn-Simmonds likens the drink's virality to "the endless need to try and find something new to post on social media." Extreme things are intriguing, and like us, maybe viewers held out hope that the drink was good.

We also asked Woodburn-Simmonds if there is a way to successfully add onions to coffee and if he has other recommendations for vegetables. "Don't put onion in coffee, ever," he declares, and "[avoid] every single vegetable at all times and at all costs." Copy that. But if he absolutely had to, Woodburn-Simmonds says he would "caramelize some red onion with plenty sugar, blend into a puree with some heavy cream, then use it as an espuma on top of an iced coffee." The juice of sweeter vegetables like carrots or beets is an even better option. (Fruit juice works well in coffee, too, but that's a different topic.)

There is one vegetable commonly found in coffee that probably hasn't crossed your mind. The root vegetable ube gives coffee a natural sweetness and ube coffee is a popular drink found in coffee shops across the country. If you were to try any vegetable coffee, this would be the one.

Previous：Don't Make These Hard Cider Serving Mistakes

Next：How To Tell If A Hard Cider Is Sweet Or Dry (Even If The Label Doesn't Say)