To the Raspberries Who Want to Be in My Coffee
I know you are out there somewhere.
In Washington.
In Oregon.
Maybe in the backwoods of northern New York—
you, the raspberries who want to be in my coffee.
I thought perhaps you’d arrived in the form of Nature’s Flavors.
But you are eluding me, still.
I promise to find you.
Even if I have to go to the Amazon to get you.
P.S.
This morning’s cup of raspberry flavored coffee tasted beautifully like… coffee. With cream!
The Nature’s Flavors extract had such a strong fragrance, like perfume one might find at a candy shop, that I was afraid to pour it over my whole precious bag of Blue Bottle coffee beans.
So instead, my daughter and I did the math on how much extract a newbie coffee drinker would need to put on just one tablespoon of coffee beans to get the desired effect—for just one cup of coffee.
This was quite the mathematical exercise!
It returned a quantity of something like .017th of a teaspoon of extract. Or something like that.
In the end, I put about a third of a 1/8 teaspoon—using my little orange Tupperware teaspoon measurer I still have from my mom from long ago.
In case you are wondering, a third of a 1/8 teaspoon is a form of kitchen math!—closely related to pie math, albeit having nothing to do with a woman’s desire to appear demure.
Even with just .017th of a teaspoon of extract (or something like that), the fragrance was quite overwhelming. I was doubtful as to what my morning coffee would hold.
Happily, when morning arrived, I enjoyed the coffee that tasted like…coffee!
Then I suddenly decided to put 1/4 of a teaspoon of raspberry preserve into my last bit of cuppa, and it all tasted decidedly more sour even though preserve is SWEET. Perhaps the preserve did not get on so well with the flavoring?
And so the search continues.
If you have a recommendation for a brand of raspberry flavoring you cannot live without, let me know.
My coffee will thank you. As I’m sure the readers of this Substack will, too.