Coffee Flour: What You Need To Know About The New Gluten-Free Flour

If you're like me, you harbor a special love for your freshly brewed morning (and sometimes afternoon) cup of coffee. So, without actually knowing what coffee flour was, I knew immediately that I liked the sound of it.

I also realized that I hardly ever pause to think about the actual plant coffee comes from or where and how it's grown. I was curious to learn more about coffee flour, so I looked into it. Here's what the CoffeeFlour brand has to say about their product:

What is coffee flour?

Coffee plants have both fruit and beans. When the beans are harvested to be roasted and ground, the fruit pulp is either used as fertilizer, or more often, dumped into rivers or landfills. This creates unwanted waste that compromises the local and global environment.

Coffee flour repurposes the otherwise discarded fruit pulp and grinds it into a useful and nutritious flour.

Coffee flour's estimated benefits include:

1. Nutrition

It's a gluten-free flour that contains good amounts of fiber, protein, potassium and iron.

2. Taste

It has a rich, roasted fruit taste that complements a variety of baked goods, which I can personally vouch for. I tried a coffee flour brownie and thought it was the perfect complement to the cocoa — adding a subtle depth of flavor.

3. Sustainability

Being able to use more of the coffee plant rather than throwing it away is better for the environment and creates less waste.

4. Job creation

Coffee flour has the potential to create more jobs and money in existing coffee farming communities by turning waste into a new product.

Because flour's shelf life is longer than other foods it makes prices less volatile, creating a market that's more stable for those earning their living from it.

What do I do with it?

It can be subbed in for or used in combination with other flours to make gluten-free brownies, cakes or even pasta.

Where can I find it?

At the moment, you can only find coffee flour in products from businesses working with the CoffeeFlour brand.

Places like Dan Barber's wastED pop-up in New York City, Brooklyn Roasting Company in partnership with Izzy & Em’s gluten-free bakery, and Earnest Eats are all selling specialty items made with coffee flour.

Coffee flour has inspired a series of events (brunches, pop-ups, etc.) called "Whole Coffee." These gatherings, scheduled in major cities like New York and Sydney throughout 2015, set out to reimagine using the whole coffee bean and fruit.

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