Cleaver seeds in 39% white chocolate

Cleaver

Galium aparine

This is one of those totally surprising wild flavours that is easy to go 'Oh yes?' when someone tells you it is as good as something more 'normal', in this case coffee!  It is not an obvious outcome; cleaver is a vigorously growing annual, well designed for seed transport and garden domination, with its climbing, clambering habit of smothering plants, and its velcro like burrs that ensure the small green/brown seed burrs cover your dog's fur, stick to your clothes and generally cause nuisance.  I was assured that it would taste like coffee, and even has a small amount of cafeine, but it was in a slightly sceptical mood that I labouriously picked a cup full of the burrs, roasted them in the oven at quite a high temperature, with fear of burning them completely before the promised coffee flavour revealed itself.  The burrs are so hard you can't even bite into one to see if coffee has been reached - you have to trust your nose really.

But yes, it DOES taste of coffee.  SO much so that I wonder if the first reactions to New World coffee in the 17th Century were along the lines of 'nah, tastes like cleavers to me', or 'can't see that catching on - look at the price of it and we can get cleavers for free'.  But that would assume people were making a beverage with cleaver seeds long before coffee was introduced to the UK and I don't know if they did.  It is certainly a lot of work, and despite cleavers being so abundant and their helpful nature of jumping onto your clothes, it takes some time to gather together a few spoonfulls of the burrs for a pot of coffee.

Even stranger, coffee grows on a shrub Coffea arabica, and originates from tripical Africa, and cleavers is an annual small climbing plant growing in a temperate climate - but they are actually distant plant relatives of each other, both in the family Rubiaceae.  

Back in the day when I did make coffee chocolates with Glen Lyon Coffee, the latte version, broken coffee beans in white chocolate, was the most popular so I decided to make the cleaver seeds into a white chocolate.  I have used our own 40% white chocolate, using Madagascan cocoa butter, as it is smooth and very creamy.  The cleaver seeds hvae been ground into the chocolate, turning it a coffee brown colour and the taste is truly of milky white coffee.

Ingredients: 

Cocoa solids 39% minimum: cocoa butter, cane sugar, whole MILK powder (25%), toasted cleaver seeds (2%).

Net wt: 50g