We love our spice mixes here at Glover Gardens. There are three in the “Zippy” family: Zippy Southwest, the original, Zippy Cajun, which followed soon after, and Zippy Sicilian. They are joined by Everything Rub, and these spicy concoctions make it easy for us to spice up our meals when we cook on the fly.
I got inspired to experiment with creating a coffee rub when one of our YPs (“Young Peoples”), my second cousin, waxed poetic about some beef they had grilled over Christmas in New Mexico, with a purchased coffee rub. He’s a great cook and we enjoy talking about food and cooking together. Hmmmmm, we don’t have a coffee rub in the Zippy collection…. but wouldn’t it be fun to create one?
It All Started with Robert Del Grande’s Happy Accident
I remembered that Robert Del Grande, an acclaimed and James Beard award-winning Houston chef, had pioneered the use of coffee on beef, way back in the 90s, so I looked it up and found the story here. He had accidentally spilled coffee grounds on roasts and decided to give it a try – and it worked!
The recipe at the story link is for tenderloin and is quite simple: coffee, cocoa and cinnamon. It is paired with a chilé sauce that’s rubbed over the meat. It looks like a great recipe, but I wanted something that had the spice built in and didn’t need a sauce. I read a bunch of recipes online to see and learn from what other folks were doing their coffee rubs and then, it was test kitchen time!
Three Different Approaches
The Grill-Meister was on a business trip last week, so I had time to spend alone in my kitchen playground in the evenings. Before I got started on what I had already decided to call Zippy Coffee Rub, I looked at my other spice mix recipes and decided to try something similar to the Everything Rub, which has brown sugar along with the spices. I put together a base recipe with brown sugar, ground coffee (dark roast), smoked paprika, coarse salt, cumin, red pepper flakes, black and white pepper, and nutmeg. Nutmeg is a wonderful secret ingredient in many recipes, my friends.
Then, to try several different approaches, I divided the base coffee rub into three portions and put additional spices in the second two: one of them got ginger and cardamom, and the other, dark cocoa and cinnamon. The first one, on the left, is my base coffee spice mix.
Coffee-Rubbed Steak Bites
I chose prime sirloin for my experiment, cutting it into ~1½ inch bites and then separating it into three bowls to coat with the three different coffee spice mixes that were trying out for the starring role of Zippy Coffee Rub.
Got It in One!
I tasted all three versions, in the plates below, but the first, more simple one was by far the best. By faaaaaar. I mean, how far it is from one side of Texas to the other far. THAT far.
The winning Zippy Coffee Rub will be published in a day or two.
Less Than Award-Winning Plating for the Experiments
Check out my coffee-rubbed steak bites experiment and my all-by-myself test kitchen plating. I find it humorous. I served it to myself with broccoli and homemade Glover Gardens hollandaise and a chopped salad, but that plate was not pretty. Not pretty at all, my friends.
So I laid down a quick bed of the hollandaise, just to make myself feel better about the plating. I might be eating alone, but I’m not a peasant! It was still not beautiful, but not as starkly unattractive as the plate above. And what a happy accident: hollandaise is excellent with coffee-rubbed steak bites! That’s some test kitchen serendipity right there, my friends.
The Duchess of Leftovers
The Grill-Meister’s business trip was long, so I had solo steak bite dinners for several nights. The Duchess of Leftovers strikes again, I thought, making steak bites into a filling for empanadas by grinding them up in the food processor with some root vegetables, adding cheese and sprinkling more of the coffee rub on top of the pastry.
Yum.
An A+ from The Grill-Meister
Once The Grill-Meister got home, I did the experiment one more time, this time with tri-tip beef, using the “got it in one” simple coffee rub.
It was awesome. He gave it an A+ and agreed that the coffee simply adds a rich, dark flavor to the beef, rather than making it taste like a cup of joe. It’s a serendipitous match, thanks to Chef Robert Del Grande’s happy accident.
Zippy Coffee Rub is born, and it’s the BOMB! Stay tuned for the recipe for the spice mix as well as the steak bites and more Duchess of Leftover ideas.
2025 Update
Recipes are here!
© Glover Gardens, 2024
Sounds good. Look at the picture above the graph where you say you’re not a peasant. What language is the caption written in? After last years pepper success, NOJO is going all in. We’ll have bushels of them if you are interested.
LOL, a secret language! I think that was when the cat got into my lap and I was typing around her, the needy thing. Thanks for the QA! Is the pepper growing completely outside, or do you have a greenhouse approach? I’ve always wondered how people in colder climates with shorter growing seasons manage things like that. We had our last habanero on the bush when a hard freeze finally showed up in the second week of January here in SE Texas.
Our weather isn’t cold right now. Days are in the low 60s, as we move towards summer the highs are in the 80s. What we have is much less humidity. We grow everything outside. But, our “garden” is a half acre, mostly because we have an ancient tractor.
I bet you are a monster tractor driver!!! How fun that sounds. I had no idea it wasn’t frosty where you are.
YUMMY!!!!!
The rub sounds delicious on steak bites! I’ll have to share this with my hubby who is the chef in the house. Thanks for stopping by my blog to share your thoughts, it’s nice to cross paths here in the blogosphere! 😉