Pea Coffee

 A Coffee Maven Kitchen Adventure

Today's entry is not about a café, but it is about coffee. Sort of. 

My librarian spouse and I read together regularly. When in a car, we listen to audiobooks, almost always on her iPad. When at home, it is almost always her reading to me from a printed book in side-by-side recliners in the Reading Room at Whaling House. Our reading location is approrpiate for our current read, Call Me Ishmaelle (not Ishmael) by Chinese novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo. Our son had bought this book for us, and we just got around to starting it in time for a virtual author talk hosted by our local whaling museum.

I will be writing much more on this nautical book once we finish it, but I mention it here because her protagonist mentions a variation on coffee that I had not heard of: pea coffee. Intrigued, I did about 90 seconds of research online before deciding to make some myself, in the name of coffee completism. 

Quick online searches for "pea coffee" will yield many results for "peaberry coffee," a genetic anomaly of Coffea arabica that is well known in specialty coffee-circles. Pea coffee, however, does not merely resemble peas; it is peas. 

I quickly found some guidance on how to make it and also the suggestion that roasted peas were once used in Cuba in the way that roasted chicory is used -- even today -- in New Orleans. That is, it was roasted and mixed in with real coffee to make it a bit cheaper. In the case of chicory, what began as a way to cheat customers eventually became an important part of local identity.  (See the Cafe du Monde post for more context.)

Having once brewed straight chicory (again, in the name of coffee completism) and finding it to be more like a charred cork board than anything else, I decided to go with the "coffee amendment" approach. I put a scant half-cup of dried split peas (not having found any dried round peas and not willing to make this an even bigger project by looking for them) into my trusty Poppo roaster. I used this both because I did not want to make a big batch and also because the small peas would have fallen through the mesh of the roasting basket in my Behmor 2000. 

As I often do with actual coffee, I took "before" and "after" photos of the "beans" in a measuring cup. With real coffee, it reveals the tendency of the beans to expand during the roast -- I usually roast 3 cups, which puff up to 4. In this case, however, the peas actually shrank slightly. 

Not only did the peas not swell, they also did not shed any chaff and they did not make any cracking sounds as they roasted. The sounds that usually help to guide the roasting process were absent. I just used sight and aroma to decide when these were ready. 

I did not breathe deeply of the aroma, but I did notice that it smelled like burnt peas -- even though I am pretty sure I have never smelled burnt peas before. I ground equal parts of the roasted peas together with recently roasted Peruvian coffee and then brewed them together in a Chemex. 

The first thing I noticed was that there was no "bloom" as there usually is when the first bit of water is applied to a pourover. The next thing I noticed was that the brewing was very slow and when I removed the filter cone, it seemed to weigh twice as much as usual. The grounds held on to the water quite tightly. 

I poured a cup -- my third of the morning -- and sipped on it while doing my DuoLingo lessons. At first, the taste was rather unpleasant, like a bad diner coffee. As it cooled to a more appropriate tasting temperature, however, I started sipping absentmindedly, and actually forgot at one point what I was doing. 

In other words, the flavor was not distractingly bad once it had cooled slightly. I don't think I'll be repeating this, but if I do, I might make an exception to my usual practice and serve it with sugar. After all, if it really was ever a staple in Cuba, it would have been roasted very dark and served with plenty of locally-grown sugar. 

Lagniappe 

This beverage is mentioned in a brief article Pea Coffee in a 2023 issue of Plantings, which is the Journal of the World Sensorium/Conservancy. It is offered without irony as an alternative as actual coffee is threatened by climate change.