How do you usually take your coffee? Strong and dark? Milky and sweet? Whatever your usual serve, it’s almost definitely nothing like the mind-boggling creations of chef Jozef Youssef, for whom coffee transcends the boundaries of a drink altogether and becomes a tool for alchemy.
“Coffee has a versatility which lends itself to both savoury and sweet dishes, it can add depth and intensity to a jus or a rounded complex bitterness to balance a dessert,” he says, when we meet at an immersive dining experience at Siemens London Showroom, just off Oxford Street, to celebrate the launch of the game-changing EQ900 coffee machine. “Despite coffee’s popularity as a drink and liberal use in many classic and modern desserts, I enjoy the challenge of finding unique ways of including it in savoury dishes,” he tells me.
Today, his unique combinations include souffle pancakes with bacon and coffee caviar (little espresso bubbles); succulent monkfish with a coffee jus; and levitating ice-cream, from which coffee bubbles float to the ceiling in an atmosphere of dry ice. “Many people would not expect coffee to pair well with seafood,” he says. Spoiler alert: it does.
Youssef, who founded the London-based design studio Kitchen Theory in 2010, is fascinated by food as a multisensory experience. After honing his skills at The Connaught, The Dorchester and The Fat Duck, he started to collaborate with scientists and artists, delivering a Ted Talk and authoring a book Molecular Gastronomy at Home, which provides a simple introduction to the science behind modernist culinary techniques. “I could not find the job that I wanted, so I created it,” he says. “Our mission is improving global wellbeing through innovations in gastronomy; that’s why when anyone asks if I want a Michelin star I have no interest … It would bore me to think that everything we were doing was purely for someone to give us a review and have it printed with a little star next to it.”
Rather than obsessing over how to secure rave reviews, Youssef sought out the insights of Prof Charles Spence, an experimental psychologist at the University of Oxford. Prof Spence explores how people perceive the world around them and how our brains process information from our senses – taste, smell, sight, hearing and touch. This helps explain why the Siemens x Kitchen Theory taste experience begins with two experiments. First a tiny strip of paper is placed on the tongue of diners – some taste nothing at all, others recoil. Next, everyone sucks a cherry-flavoured sweet with a peg on their nose.
The paper experiment is a very basic genetic taste test. Diners who demonstrate a horrified reaction to the strip of white paper – recoiling from a bitter, chemical type sensation – represent the “super-tasters” of the human race. As it turns out, I’m part of the quarter of the population who taste nothing but a piece of paper – which may explain why I’d be quite happy not eating at all were it not for the transient hunger pains. However, even the super-tasters couldn’t taste the cherry sweet until they removed the pegs from their noses.
The human tongue, Youssef has shown us with a flourish, is only part of your taste toolkit. “It’s not until we get our nose engaged that we really have a lot of the nuance we appreciate about something like coffee,” says Youssef. Research suggests that our olfactory system is capable of detecting up to 1 trillion distinct aromas and, Youssef says, “80-90% of what you perceive as flavour is actually coming from your sense of smell”.
With his interest in innovation, science and pushing boundaries, he makes a great culinary partner for Siemens, which has worked with Kitchen Theory for several years to showcase the full capabilities of Siemens’ appliances.
Together with Prof Spence and the rest of his team, Youssef is also “constantly looking at how we can stimulate our diners at the table, stimulate their senses, how we can make people more mindful of the flavours and the textures and the experience that they’re having at the dining table.” He hands out headphones transmitting the sounds of the Siemens EQ900 for us to wear while we enjoy our delicately flavoured souffle pancakes with coffee caviar.
“It all starts with drawing on the research we’ve done, looking at the experience we want, all the different sensory touch points, and how we can present ingredients that pique people’s interest and make them curious,” Youssef says. In the case of coffee, he adds, it was all about taking inspiration from the flavour notes of the coffee beans that have been provided by Future Self Coffee, the brainchild of YouTuber Alfie Deyes, who has teamed up with Siemens for the launch of the EQ900.
“From there we start to see how we can use the food as a medium,” Youssef continues. “Build a storyboard, create the arc of the journey, plan a starter, main and dessert, select the ingredients, methods and techniques and really think of how we can engage the guests at the table, get them thinking about the food.”
The point of using coffee in cooking is to build depth of flavour, rather than create a meal that tastes like an espresso. Youssef uses the analogy of adding dark chocolate to a chilli con carne. “Coffee in cooking adds ‘earthiness’. As humans, we’ve come to appreciate these complex flavours.
“But there’s more to coffee than just consuming it for flavour … a deeper psychological relationship,” Youssef concludes. I’m no gourmand, but I couldn’t agree more.
The future of coffee is here. Enjoy exquisite coffee brewed to perfection at the touch of a button, in the comfort of your own home, with the Siemens EQ900 bean-to-cup coffee machine. Find out more
