Cascara ✦

Cascara (pulpe de cerise de café)

What it is

Cascara is the coffee cherry's dried flesh, the part a wet mill washes away to reach the two seeds inside; Yemen has brewed it as qishr, spiced with ginger, since at least the fifteenth century while the beans went for export. Europe only cleared it for sale as a food in February 2022, having spent years treating a drink older than espresso as an unproven novelty.

In the kitchen

It is fruit, not coffee: 8 g per 250 ml at 95 °C for four minutes, then taste — pushed past six it goes drying and tannic. Steeped in simple syrup instead, it gives a hibiscus-and-dried-cherry syrup for sorbet.

Goes with

Hibiscus flower Rosehip Dried fig Honey Lemon Cardamom Ginger Dark chocolate

Same species

Coffee Coffee extract Green coffee beans

Something wrong here, or missing? Tell us