With 'coffee flour,' your muffin could have as much caffeine as a cup of coffee
Most researchers agree that drinking a few cups of coffee a day has its health benefits — as if you needed any excuse to drink coffee. But what if you could eat your morning brew, too? That's the goal of Professor Daniel Perlman of Brandeis University, who has developed coffee flour milled from par-baked green coffee beans, Eater reports.
"This flour contains 2.5 percent caffeine by weight, so if you were to put four grams of this into, say, a breakfast muffin, it would be the equivalent of drinking a cup of coffee," Perlman explained. "I would expect it to be absorbed a little more gradually than the caffeine in a cup of coffee, so [it would offer] a more sustained release and longer-term stimulation than you get when you drink a cup or two of coffee."
But aside from just being a pick-me-up, Perlman's coffee flour retains the antioxidants that are thought to be a large part of what makes drinking coffee so good for your health. His patent for the process was approved in December — hopefully bringing us a step closer to caffeinated everything.
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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.