Unusual coffee pairings from around the world: avocado, butter and tea!

So what’s your pleasure? Do you like a knob of butter in your coffee first thing in the morning, like they traditionally do in Sweden? How about stir frying your coffee beans in butter before filtering them like they do in Singapore? (Wow!)

During their travels The Bean Team have encountered many strange coffee-food pairings. Here’s three down below for you. What do you make of these? Have you these coffee recipes?

Coffee with Butter – straight from Sweden!

In Sweden they have a tradition called ‘fika’. At least once a day they love to take their coffee with friends or family. And they often take it with something sweet on the side too. But the older generation sometimes add a knob of butter – adding about 1/5th of a stick of butter for a 12-14oz cup of coffee!

Apparently, this is now catching on like wild-fire. Everyone from business gurus, holistic health gurus to rock stars are are now adding butter to their coffee. One ‘executive guru’, Dave Asprey, calls it ‘Bulletproof Coffee’. He claims it boosts creativity, productivity, and keeps your body burning fat the whole day through.

Our gut feeling is not good about this one. We checked out this review of a true coffee lover who risked a fine Kenya roast by attacking it with a stick of ‘happy-cow’ butter, as he calls it, and we tend to agree. Why waste a beautiful roast by adding a slab of butter – no matter how healthy?

The next one, on the other hand, really floats our boat!

Coffee with Avocado – from Indonesia!

If you’ve ever taken a holiday over in Bali, you may well know about this delicious Indonesian coffee-avocado pairing. Known as ‘Es Alpukat Kopi’, this mix of avocado, vanilla, coffee and condensed milk is served over ice. By all accounts, it is super-refreshing, creamy and utterly addictive!

Es alpukat kopi is great as a midday snack, a treat on a hot summer’s day, or even as a healthy early morning starter. Some hip bars and restaurants also serve it as an appetiser!

And it’s easy to make too:

Scoop out your avocado flesh into 500a blender. Add all the ingredients. Purée for about 1 minute. If this really tickes your taste buds you might want a more in depth recipe for Es Alpukat Kopi. And there’s even Vietnamese and Brazilian variations too!

And so, to our final unusual coffee pairing for now.

Coffee with Tea – from Hong Kong!

Yuan Yang (also known as Yuenyeung) is massively popular in Hong Kong. It is a mix of three parts coffee, seven parts Hong Kong-style milk tea. Yuenyueng is delicious served both hot and cold. It’s also called a ‘spreeze’ in Ethiopia. Some love it, some hate it. We haven’t tried it yet, but we are intruiged. Here is a simple recipe for Yuenyueng.

So, fellow coffee-lovers. Have you ever tried yuan yang? If so, what did you make of it?

Finally: a question about coffee-tea pairings

Some say that Yuenyeung (the ‘coffee-tea’ combination) is a Dutch invention. And, it sort of makes sense – especially as the Dutch even introduced the word ‘coffee’ into the English language as far back as 1582. But we haven’t heard too much about coffee/tea being a traditional Dutch affair. Have you?