Have you ever heard of bulletproof coffee? It’s a recent craze, particularly among paleo/low carb people to add butter and MCT (coconut) oil to coffee and blend it. Coffee lover that I am, I was intrigued about this, but never quite had the nerve to try it. However, I am certainly not afraid to try something just for the heck of it!
But first, a little backstory: I like to eat a big breakfast. It’s usually around 400 calories or a little more. I eat around 7 am. You would think that 400+ calories would be enough to last until lunchtime, right? I read blogs and things on line where people eat oatmeal or maybe a piece of toast with an egg or even just coffee with cream and a few slices of bacon and they are so full until lunchtime. How do they do it? I feel like my system is totally effed up. By 10 a.m., I am really hungry. Like blood sugar drop hungry – not mind hungry. So, I usually eat a protein bar or something like that to tide me over. Oddly enough, the only times I am not hungry before lunch are the 2 days we go out for bagels for breakfast – and there is almost always exercise involved with that by either walking or biking to breakfast. So maybe it is just calories.
I have tried a lot of different things. I normally do a carb/fat/protein balanced breakfast (oats with egg whites and nut butter, banana breakfast bread pudding, protein waffles, blintzes, etc). I’ve tried high protein with eggs and sausage. Same thing, hungry at 10 a.m. Higher carb breakfast, same thing. Like if we maked baked donuts. The only thing I hadn’t tried was a pure fat breakfast which, to be honest, sounds scary and a little gross LOL! I finally decided to try a bulletproof coffee and make it around 400 calories like a normal breakfast for my little n=1 experiment.
Now, I don’t believe any of the hype that it has to be a specific kind of coffee. The guy that ‘invented’ bulletproof coffee sells a special one, but his claims aren’t anything that the coffee industry as a whole isn’t already doing with they way they process the beans. Guru-ism at its best. Anyway, here I am ready to do the coffee.
I dropped 1.5 tablespoons of unsalted butter into a mixer cup. Please use unsalted butter. I can’t imagine how awful salted butter would taste! I do admit to looking at this and thinking am I really going to do this?
Our Magic Bullet is on the fritz, so I used a cup from it and then an immersion blender. Be careful if you do this since hot liquid and skin contact is no bueno, right? Just don’t fill the cup too full.
Then blend until it is emulsified and frothy. It looks sort of like a latte or something, doesn’t it?
For the coconut oil part, I ended up just eating a tablespoon of coconut butter, which I adore and could eat by the spoonful anyway.
Enjoying my breakfast while perusing the flower catalog:
How is the taste? Surprisingly, it’s pretty good! It is creamy, almost like coffee with milk, and the butter does not separate out, which I thought it might do. It really isn’t greasy, surprisingly. I maybe noticed a bit on my lips, but not enough that it was bothersome.The coffee flavor is more crisp and pronounced – for lack of a better term – than a cup of coffee with cream, but fat brings out the fat soluble flavors in the coffee anyway (which is why I never drink it black). If you had given me this and not said it was blended with butter, I wouldn’t know what was in it.
I had 2 of these and with the coconut butter and my ‘breakfast’ came in at 400 calories. The verdict? Fail. I was hungry around 10:30. LOL. On a side note, I had some concerns about having gastric distress from a fat breakfast, but that didn’t happen either. No issues with that. I know you all wanted to know about that. 😀
So, while that was interesting, I doubt I would deliberately make butter coffee again. If someone gave me one, I would drink it. It is good to know that if we were out of milk for some reason and I wanted a cup of coffee, I could still have one without resorting to drinking it black.
As far as the calorie thing goes, I guess if I want to last until lunch I need to increase my calories at breakfast. It just seems like 400 calories should be enough, you know? Especially when you are decreasing calories and you only get so many in the day, it is easy to eat a lot of them for breakfast. I don’t really know why I feel the need to not eat between breakfast and lunch, but maybe it is because it’s easier to over consume food if I have a snack and breakfast.
Anyway, that was my little experiment. I’m glad I finally did it so I can stop wondering 😀
