DecafDivas LOVE cooking with coffee!

As an ingredient in cooking, here are some key guidelines for you to follow...

• First and foremost, always consider using decaffeinated coffee in your recipes when feeding a crowd. Otherwise, your family and friends may be waking you up at three in the morning (if you aren't already awake) after they've realized that your clever new recipe is so loaded with caffeine that they can't sleep! This is especially true when serving chocolate desserts, as all chocolate is already caffeine-charged.
• In all recipes that call for ground coffee, try to grind it from freshly roasted beans and follow the instructions as to whatever grind is called for—fine, medium or coarse.
• In all recipes that call for brewed coffee, brew it fresh and strong, preferably using a rinsed paper filter in a simple cone coffee maker (Melita^® or Chemex^®)) with freshly boiled water. In most cases, make it at least twice as strong as you normally would. See How to Brew the Best for more tips...
• If you don't have a home espresso machine, consider picking up some espresso from your local coffeehouse. Take it home promptly, again freshness is important, and measure the called for amount. In lieu of not being able to obtain freshly brewed espresso, try brewing Espresso, French, or Dark Roasted coffees at double strength in your drip machine.
• Some savory dishes should only have coffee added after all the other ingredients have been cooked. Otherwise, you may end up with a dish tainted by acrid, burnt coffee, undertones. Coffee does NOT take well to long exposure, at high temperatures (as you may already have experienced from that over-cooked stale stuff you get at careless coffeehouses)!
• If you want to experiment by adding coffee to a recipe that does not call for it, consider whether the dish will benefit from the color and depth of flavor that coffee will add to it. Scallop soufflé, for instance, would not likely be improved with the addition of coffee. (And that's a recipe that my husband tried in his bachelor days—yuk!)