If You Eat Your Vegetables, You Won’t Have to Drink This Terrible New Broccoli Coffee

We really need to eat more vegetables. The vast majority of us are not eating as many vegetables as we should be, and most of us know it too. The obvious answer to the problem would be to cook one of the many delicious vegetable-heavy recipes out there more often. But that’s not working, and because of that we now live in a world in which broccoli coffee exists.

According to Vogue Australia, researchers at Australia’s CSIRO decided to try to tackle the “everyone please eat some vegetables already” problem by turning broccoli into a fine powder that can be added to other foods. The broccoli is dried, stems and all, and the powder retains many of the nutritional benefits of eating whole broccoli. In fact, two tablespoons of the powder count as a whole serving of vegetables.

People might not be eating vegetables, but we are drinking a whole lot of coffee. So a Melbourne cafe called Common Folk decided to fuse them into a “broccolaté” by adding broccoli powder to the milk for their lattés. Logically, it makes sense. The broccoli powder is best eaten when added to a liquid or another type of food, and a lot of people drink coffee every day. If you added two teaspoons of broccoli powder to your morning coffee, you’d have your first serving of vegetables out of the way before breakfast.

Unfortunately, the broccoli powder still tastes like broccoli, and people do not seem to be loving their broccoli-flavored coffee. CSIRO said the broccolaté test generated “mixed reviews,” which sounds like it’s an optimistic way of saying people really hated it.

The guy who tries it in this video from CSIRO seemed OK with the flavor at first, but he didn’t even make it through the phrase, “Hey, that’s all right” before the aftertaste hit him.

CSIRO did not seem to be put off by the failure of the broccoli coffee experiment and said the powder could be used in other things, like smoothies, dips, soups, and bread.

The powder is made from whole broccoli, including the stems, and it’s produced from vegetables that were perfectly edible but considered too “ugly” to sell and would have gone to waste. Adding it to smoothies sounds pretty tasty, and there are a lot of other ways a person could use it, too. Maybe adding some to brownies or a spinach dip would go over well.

CSIRO’s broccoli powder sounds like an interesting supplement. I’d try it in a heartbeat, although maybe not in coffee.

Would you ever try broccoli coffee?