Low Carb Gourmet Coffee Drinks ... a CookingWithPam Sugar-Free (Whey Low) suggestions from the kitchen of Pamela Rice Hahn

The purists among you probably grind your own beans. (Shoot! You may even roast your own coffee beans, for all I know!) But, for somebody like myself who has limited time and energy, I'm thankful that I've found a conscientious carb way to have delicious coffee drinks. It's like having a gourmet coffee shop in my own home!

My first "secret" is to use Whey Low^®.

I fell in love with Whey Low^® several years ago, and wrote about it in my grilling, diabetes, and low-salt cookbooks.

You can read a Whey Low^® informational excerpt (from Lazy About Grilling) in the Low-Carb, Sugar-Free Section of CookingWithPam.com. (Since writing that passage, the glycemic index theories about how a food converts to sugar in the blood stream is gaining more credibility. You can read more about the glycemic index at www.mendosa.com/gi.htm.)

My favorite method for making coffee is to fill a large coffee mug three-fourths full of water, and then nuke it until it's hot. (For me, that's only 1 minute and 10 seconds, but I prefer my coffee drinks warm rather than piping hot; adding cream later cools it down.) I then add a teaspoon of my favorite instant coffee (Kava® "Reduced Acid" Coffee), and two heaping teaspoons of a mixture of equal parts Whey Low^® and Hershey's cocoa. (Because I prefer "dark chocolate," I use a mixture of 3 parts Hershey's cocoa and 1 part Hershey's Special Dark Dutch-Processed Cocoa.) I mix well, and then top it off with heavy cream. Because Whey Low^® and cocoa each have 1 equivalent carb per teaspoon, I end up with a cup of cappuccino-style coffee that has less than 4 carbs.

To reduce those carbs even further, other times I use two drops of a Flavor-Mate all natural flavoring instead of the two heaping teaspoons of the cocoa-Whey Low® mixture. I then stir in 1 to 2 teaspoons of Whey Low^® and then add the heavy cream, so I end up with a cup of cuppuccino-style coffee with less than 2 carbs! (Note: You won't want to use more than 2 drops! Flavor-Mate is powerful stuff! One bottle will flavor 50-75 cups of coffee!)

Flavor-Mate comes in an assortment of delicious flavors, such as Chocolate Raspberry, Dutch Chocolate, Kona Caramel, and Chocolate Almond, to name a few. (Two more flavors are shown in the picture.)

Flavor-Mate is Kosher, is sugar-free and salt-free, and has no cholesterol. As pictured, it comes in a tamper-resistant bottle. I should add, that bottle makes it easy to choose the amount of drops you want to squeeze into your drinks.

For the funny side of low-carb, there are these two comic strips:

Low-Carb Comic #1
Low-Carb Comic #2