When to drink that coffee at the end of a meal?
Conventional wisdom on the global dining scene is serving your coffee after desert. Have we been doing it all wrong all these years?
I stumbled the other day on a research paper from Aarhus University that took me back to a sweet memory of a night at the far northern end of Sardinia, at the town of Olbia.
While spending a night before a flight, I dined in a small but fantastic local restaurant. My memory fails me when it comes to what it was I ate there or on the restaurant’s name, but I do remember the scolding i got from an Italian waiter that taught me that there is a right order when it comes to desserts & coffee.
Choosing a tiramisu and an espresso macchiato for a banal, but delicious ending for my meal, the waiter refused to bring me both at the same time. “In Italy”, he lectured me with a smile, “we drink coffee after eating the dessert. That is the rule!”.
Since a few years back I had an incident of almost being thrown out of an Italian restaurant in Tuscany for asking a cappuccino at the end of a dinner, I have learned my lesson and embraced with humility the new divine truth that was instilled upon me about the right order of things. And that wise lesson has held it’s way through hundreds of dinners in time - Coffee after desert, not together and never before!
But last week, I came across a research that is undermining one of the biggest truths in the holy Italian kitchen and global dining, as it claims findings that support coffee consumption with, or even, god forbid, before enjoying a dessert!!! The Blasphemy!
Coffee to sharpen sweetness!
The study that was published on Feb 2020, states that drinking coffee makes your taste buds more sensitive to sweetness. Sweet food is becoming even sweeter when you drink coffee. The results have been published in the scientific journal Foods.
But it also makes bitter food became less bitter.
“When people were tested after drinking coffee, they became more sensitive to sweetness, and less sensitive to bitterness,” said associate professor at Aarhus University Alexander Wieck Fjældstad, who was involved in carrying out the study.
If the case is so that this news has hit Italy, it is now up to the Italians, and thousands of other restaurants world wide, to reconsider that old age wisdom.
Fjældstad has attributed this effect to the bitter substances in the coffee that sharpen the sweetness. “This may explain that if you enjoy a piece of dark chocolate with your coffee, it’s taste is much milder, because the bitterness is downplayed and the sweetness is enhanced,”.
If the case is so that this news has hit Italy, it is now up to the Italians, and thousands of other restaurants world wide, to reconsider that old age wisdom. I guess applying this new knowledge still depends where in the world you are dining. If you want to sharpen the sweetness in your dessert and/or dull the bitter side, drink coffee before in a more forgiving food culture, but if you do not wish to be thrown out of Italian restaurants anywhere in Italy, drink it after.
