CoffeeAM Team Member Makes the Paleo Vanilla Bean Coconut Coffee Creamer Recipe

Hi everybody, this is Matt from Coffee AM. I just wanted to share with you the experience I had making the Paleo Vanilla Bean Coconut Coffee Creamer recipe that I posted on our Facebook page the other day. I wanted to share what I came up with. The original article is about the recipe, and it has some other notes, but the author doesn't really talk much about the experience of making the recipe and how it tastes. That's what I want to share with you, and let you know that there are real people behind the scenes here. We drink our own coffee, and we test our own products and what not. My intent with this article is kind of just along those lines, sharing with you, so here we go. This is just one guy's opinion of this particular recipe. Just like the recipe says, it's Vanilla Bean Coconut Coffee Creamer. What I wanted to do was to try some kind of a new coffee creamer that I haven't tried before, and see if I could get maybe a better result than a regular product on the shelf. The four ingredients that are in there are one 15 ounce can of coconut milk, coconut sugar, a vanilla bean, or half a vanilla bean, actually and a pinch of salt. That's it. My wife helped me while I was trying to read the directions and everything. I had never cut open a vanilla bean and scraped it out and all that, but I really wanted to make this recipe. It sounded great. Still, the net result is the creamer tastes great. I just want to share a little bit more with you about it. In a little saucepan I put the coconut milk in it, put the sugar in it, and started the heat on medium. While that was getting warmed up, I proceeded to cut the vanilla bean and extracting all the seeds out of it. Then, you’re supposed to put the husk, after you're done getting the seeds out of the vanilla bean, you put the husk in the pot too. About that time it was starting to bubble, and the recipe stated not to let it boil. That's fine, we didn't let it boil. After that we cut the heat, put the saucepan lid on and just walked away from it, which was really hard to do because it smelled great. It does look good too. The creamer that we made does not have an overly strong taste. The coconut milk tastes a little bit like coconut. It's not coconut water. It's coconut milk, but it's not overpoweringly sweet or overpoweringly coconut. Coconut sugar I didn't even know was a thing, but the interesting thing about the coconut sugar that I found, is that there's actually a caramel overtone on the coconut sugar. If you think about some flavors that might go great in coffee, in this recipe you have coconut and caramel, and those two really do well together. I have to tell you, they do very, very well. We strained it, let it cool off. I put it in a mason jar, and came back the next morning and saw what I had. It's the color of sand, like the picture in the original article. It's not white. It is definitely not a direct replacement for the flavored Coffee-mate creamers. Those are still a little slicker. They're more white, they're sweeter. This is subtle. This creamer has some really complex tones, and they are really, really nice in coffee. I used 3 tablespoons of this creamer mixture in 12 ounces of iced coffee. It lightened my coffee which is typically a medium to dark roast African coffee. It did not whiten my coffee or totally overwhelm the coffee. Your mileage may vary. I think I'll make it again. It's a very simple recipe, but for a guy like me who likes things fast and without a whole lot of fuss, this was a little bit more than that. Sometimes you’ve got to put in a little bit of the work to get something special out. This was clearly very fresh, very pure, simple ingredients. I'm glad I did it, and I just wanted to share it with you. Have fun if you decide to make it. Let us know what you think. Here's the link to the original post with the recipe.