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Michigan Health Coffee
4 CUPS WHEAT BRAN 1/4 CUP MOLASSES 1/4 CUP WATER Moisten bran with molasses and water and rub it together with your hands. Then let it dry and parch, roast or brown it. For making coffee-use 1 tablespoon to 1 cup, boil 15 minutes. A smear of butter inside the pot, near the top, will keep it from boiling over.
Or you might prefer your health coffee in the form of roasted horse beans-we prefer it out of a can-in spite of the berries that grow on the Kentucky coffee tree.
A grain-based coffee substitute of the sort that reappears in American cookbooks whenever coffee is scarce or expensive. The whole thing hinges on the roast: underdone bran tastes like wet cereal, and the dark, slightly bitter edge that makes it read as coffee comes only from real browning.
- The branPlain unprocessed wheat bran, the loose flaky kind sold in bulk or in the baking aisle — not bran cereal, which is already sweetened and shaped. Four cups of bran is light in weight, roughly 8 ounces.
- Parching in an ovenParching -- The recipe gives no method, temperature or time: parching could be done in a skillet as readily as an oven. If you use an oven, spread the moistened, crumbled bran in a thin layer on a sheet pan at a low-moderate heat, stirring every ten minutes, until it is the color of dark toast — figure on the better part of an hour depending on how wet it went in. Let it dry out fully before the browning stage or it steams rather than roasts.
- Watch the last ten minutesMolasses sugars go from brown to acrid quickly. Pull the pan when the smell turns from bready to coffee-like and slightly caramel; a scorched batch cannot be rescued.
- Brewing timeFifteen minutes of boiling is not an error here. Bran is not ground coffee and has no delicate aromatics to destroy; it needs the long extraction. Strain through a fine sieve or a coffee filter, as the bran does not settle as cleanly as grounds.
- The butter trickFat breaks the foam that carries a boil-over. A thin smear around the inside rim of the pot works, and so does simply using a pot twice the volume you need.
- No caffeineThis is a caffeine-free drink. It will not substitute for coffee in that respect, whatever it does for the flavor.
- Horse beans and the coffee treeHorse beans are broad or fava beans, roasted and ground the same way. The Kentucky coffee tree seed mentioned at the end is a different matter — its raw seeds and pods contain a toxic alkaloid, and it is not something to experiment with in the kitchen.
- YieldFour cups of prepared bran makes roughly 60 cups of the drink at a tablespoon each, though it stales quickly. Roast in smaller batches and keep it airtight.
Cereal coffees have a long American run: parched rye, barley, chicory, acorns, okra seed and bran all stood in for the real thing during the Civil War blockade, again in both World Wars, and steadily in households where coffee was simply beyond the budget. Michigan has a connection to the genre — Battle Creek was the center of the Seventh-day Adventist health-reform movement, which condemned coffee and tea as stimulants, and the cereal-beverage industry that grew out of that milieu in the 1890s put roasted-grain drinks into national grocery stores. The name "health coffee" carries that argument in it. The recipe's closing aside — that the writer would rather buy it in a can — is the honest note in the entry.