Many people find that the hot cup of coffee in the morning is the one
thing they don't want to give up when switching to a more healthy
lifestyle. A hot beverage upon awakening is very traditional, and it
can be made more nutritious. It is not necessary to use new coffee
grounds every time you make coffee. Put your ground coffee in a ceramic
or non-reactive pot and let them stay there through several
coffee-makings. This will reduce the overall amount of caffeine in each
cup. Add other flavorings and spices, vanilla, cocoa, a good quality
cream, sorghum syrup, coconut oil, honey or homemade sweet syrups
like apple syrup.
 You can use a cultured cream in your
coffee as long as the coffee is not so hot as to kill the probiotics in
it. To do so, mix
cold or warm
coffee with cultured cream and whip with a stick blender. This is
especially good in the summer when making iced coffee. If you want it
hot, once you have added the cultured cream, warm
it up to just below the point where it would feel hot, or be
painful, to the touch. You
cannot heat
cultured cream too hot or it will kill the enzymes. You may want to try
putting the cup of coffee in hot water in a saucepan to heat it up over
the stove without boiling. The heated mug will
then help
the coffee retain its warmth as you drink it.
Iced coffee
Fill a glass with
ice. Put some
cooled off coffee in the blender with cultured cream and a spoonful of
raw honey. Blend until frothy and pour over ice. A few drops of vanilla
in the blender is very good, too.
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Adding
Minerals
Add some clay, dirt, powdered dolomite or plant ash to your coffee for more minerals. Doesn't
that make it taste gritty?
Yeah,
a little, but not intolerably so, or at least you get used to it.
It will fall to the bottom of the cup where you can eat it with a
spoon, or you can stir it up into the coffee and drink it, whichever
way seems more palatable to you. You can use just plain, ordinary plant
and wood ash from a fire, and grind it fine
and then sieve it as you would flour.
Finding a coffee pot
with no metal parts
I tried for some time to find a coffee maker that did not have any
metal parts. Finally, I found the only thing that was completely
ceramic was my baked enamel saucepan. So I make "cowboy" coffee, as you
would on a campfire. I put the fresh-ground coffee into a baked enamel saucepan, add water, bring to a boil and then let simmer for
awhile. When it is done, I let it sit for a few moments so the grounds
will sink to the bottom and then I pour the coffee off the top. The
next day, I add more coffee grounds and water. I only remove grounds
from the pot when they get up too high so that I cannot add as much was
as I want.
I originally started doing this because I couldn't
find a coffee-maker that met my requirements of no contact between
coffee and metal or plastic. However, since then I have learned some
things about coffee.
It is untrue that leaving water on coffee grounds and re-using them
will make coffee bitter. Perhaps that only applies to coffee grounds
kept out of water in a metal percolater or maybe they develop mold or
something. or maybe they just want to sell you more coffee. I don't know. At any rate, I use about 1 teaspoon of ground
coffee per 20 ounces (2+ cups) of coffee, which I believe is about 1/6 of what the
coffee industry says to use.
This
reduces the amount of caffeine in the coffee but I don't
care. It still tastes the same. I only buy caffeinated coffee because I
don't trust the industrial decaffeination process anyway. Caffeine is an anti-nutrient so the less the better, anyway.
I
have also used the cowboy method with whole coffee beans, instead of
ground coffee beans. It took about 3 days of steeping before the coffee
made with whole beans began to resemble coffee, but since I put cocoa,
cream, honey, nutmeg and coconut into my coffee it didn't matter. Whole
beans are even less likely to get in the coffee than ground coffee, and
they're edible even if they do or I can drop them back in the pot. I
still use the same proportion of about a teaspoon of whole coffee beans
for each additional 20 ounces of water I add to the pot. I don't know
which I will buy when I run out of the current bag of whole beans I am
using. Both the coffee and the work to make it is identical with ground
or whole beans, so I have no reference point to judge between the two.
Perhaps I should try to make something-covered coffee beans out of the
old beans and if it turns out okay, that could be the decider.
How is coffee made with month-or-more old coffee grounds or beans? Well,
there may be coffee connoiseurs out there who could tell the
difference, but my peasant taste is perfectly happy with it. Not only
do I make my coffee without any contact with metal, but I save
money by not throwing away the used grounds until
I've gotten more use out of them.
Coconut
Oil
If you're adding coconut oil to your diet, melted in a cup of coffee
is, to me, the best way to enjoy it.
Natural sweeteners
besides raw honey are maple syrup or sorghum syrup. I also make my own
apple syrup out of apple peels and cores and damaged windfalls when the
apple crop comes in. See Apples.
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Rejuvenating
Taste, Health and Community With Naturally Fermented Foods by Nancy
Bentley
