Coffee is regularly used in desserts, but restaurant chefs and home cooks alike are now using the beans in other ways, specifically when marinating, curing and preserving.
If you think about the way coffee is made – roasting fresh beans to unlock their flavour – it’s easy to see how much depth and complexity you have access to once it’s ground. In the days of cowboys and frontier towns, when food was scarce, coffee was often used as a base stock to add flavour to and cook dried ingredients. Nowadays, coffee in liquid form is used in much the same way, while the ground beans are treated like spices.