Barley Coffee

One of the processed foods on my list to go and hopefully be replaced with a homemade version, was the chicory coffee we used to drink. It was an instant, roasted and most likely freeze dried vegetable coffee, which had a great taste, but obviously was highly processed to get it at the 'stir in your cup' stage.

Our mainstay morning drink is dandelion coffee, however, at times this can be hard to get and we like to stretch out the supply we have to make it last longer. The dandelion coffee is not ground or processed other than being roasted, thus it is lower on our list at the moment! 

Because we have been missing the chicory coffee and needing something to add in with dandelion, today I decided to try my hand at making some roasted coffee using barley. I have been mulling this over in my mind for a few weeks now, and this grain seems to be easiest to work with.

I found very little mention of what to do with it, while the information I did find varied quite a bit. So, once again, it is hit and miss - try something and see how it works out. To be honest, I thought it would be far more complicated then it turned out to be, or maybe I have got it all wrong! LOL

To roast the barley, I poured 2 cups of dry barley grain onto a flat pan and placed this into a hot oven, of about 220º for nearly 45 minutes. My plan was to roast it for at least the full 45 minutes, but I felt that it was getting too dark and turned off the heat around the 40 minute mark.

Barley grain ready for the oven

Then, I let the grain sit and cool down completely as the oven cooled. Once it was cool to the touch, I used my immersion blender and ground it up in the same way I do the dandelion coffee. I noticed right away, once it was ground - it smelled very rich and full, reminding me of the chicory.

Roasted barley grain

Now, that I seemed to have some promising results, I couldn't wait to try it out. When I was making our dandelion coffee, I added in 2 heaping tablespoons of the roasted barley and made our coffee as usual. 

It tasted great - there were some small bits of coffee floating around, and the plunger was a little harder to push down. These things we can work on and perhaps we can make coffee some other way to avoid this. Otherwise...

Barley coffee ground in jar ready to use

As I write this, I can only think one thing - it was that easy to make! OMG! Here I was thinking making a grain coffee was some magical process, and it was nothing of the sort. Right now we have a full jar of the barley coffee and I plan to make more each week to enjoy with our dandelion drink.

Great stuff!

Have a healthy day,

April

Dandelion and barley coffee with goat's milk - Yumm!!