Tomato Coffee: The Recipe, Taste, and Verdict

Tomato and coffee might seem like an odd pair, but a tomato Americano has been making rounds online. We decided to test it with fresh cherry tomatoes, blending and filtering them into clear juice. Combined with ice and espresso, the first sip brought sourness and bitterness together, with a noticeable astringency from the tomato skin. It was a bold experiment.

The result was not a drink we would rush to recreate. While the sweet-tart flavor of cherry tomatoes can echo certain fruity notes in coffee, the clash of acidity and bitterness made it hard to enjoy. If you are curious, try it with a fruity coffee like Kenya Asalia, but keep expectations low. Tomato coffee is more of a novelty than a daily drink.

Tomato scrambled eggs are common, but have you ever tried tomato coffee? After a certain brand launched a tomato Americano, Front Street decided to verify it firsthand. We start with the logic of selecting cherry tomatoes, compare the performance differences between large tomatoes and cherry tomatoes in specialty drinks, and analyze why commercially available tomato beverages are not suitable for being directly mixed with coffee. Then we record two fresh-squeezing processes—the first failed because the fruit pulp was too thick, and the second, after adding water, blending, and filtering, yielded a clear juice. The final product was made with 90g of ice cubes, 120g of tomato juice, and 38g of Warm Sun coffee liquid. On the first sip, sourness and bitterness clash, with an obvious astringency from the tomato skin. This whole experiment tells you: is this specialty drink really worth recreating?

Front Street has a coffee bean that has won many returning customers with its highly recognizable fruity flavor. Whether served iced or hot, it carries a clean yet rich sweet-and-sour juice-like quality—it is Kenya's Asalia. That full aroma reminiscent of cherry tomatoes is one of this bean's most famous labels.

Not long ago, Front Street noticed that a certain brand had released a tomato Americano. Just the name makes one curious. After all, ketchup has a broad audience, but not many people are actually willing to drink tomato juice. Although Front Street did not place an order to buy it, this drink did give us some inspiration and made us want to try it ourselves. Today, Front Street will test it for everyone: what flavors will collide when tomato juice and coffee are put together? Without further ado, let's get started.

Which kind of tomato to choose?

As a fresh ingredient loved by men, women, the young, and the old alike, the tomato has always straddled the two categories of fruit and vegetable.

Large tomatoes are classified as vegetables. Eaten raw, they are sweet, sour, juicy, crisp, and refreshing, but if the fruit is not fully ripe, it easily carries the raw green taste of melons and vegetables. Cherry tomatoes, on the other hand, have thin skin and crisp flesh. Once ripe, their tomato flavor is especially concentrated, and their sugar content is also higher, so the sweet-and-sour balance is better and the eating experience is more pleasant. They can be eaten directly as fruit, are also suitable for juicing, and are likewise a priority ingredient for baristas when making specialty drinks.

There are actually quite a few channels for obtaining tomato juice. In recent years, beverage-making technology has continued to improve, and ready-made tomato beverages can now be bought at any time on major e-commerce platforms. However, Front Street found that most tomato drinks on the market are sugar-free formulas with a relatively thick texture. Drunk directly, they carry the taste of the fruit or vegetable itself, along with a throat-clogging sourness. Once mixed with coffee, the experience is like adding Chinese herbal medicine to thick ketchup. Don't ask Front Street how we know—those who know, know.

If you keep a juicer at home all year round, you might as well try it yourself. You can enjoy the fun of DIY and also choose the variety of cherry tomatoes according to personal preference. Referring to the previous approach for orange C Americano, Front Street this time also bought cherry tomatoes suitable for eating directly to make juice.

Start making it

Considering that the final drink would be a 300ml iced coffee, Front Street first directly took 20 cherry tomatoes to juice. We removed the stems, washed them, cut them in half, and put them into the juicer to blend. But we soon realized that things were not looking good. Unlike juicing oranges before, no water was added when juicing the cherry tomatoes, and the resulting pulp was almost semi-solid, looking just like mousse, with no fluidity at all, let alone being used to make an Americano.

After learning from that lesson, on the second attempt Front Street first added 120ml of purified water to the fruit flesh, then blended them together.

Next, a sieve was used to filter out the fruit residue and foam, and the final cherry tomato juice was noticeably much clearer. If you like it sweet, you can add 10 to 15 grams of syrup as appropriate.

With the main ingredients ready, all that remained was to combine them. First put 90g of ice cubes into a glass, then pour in 120g of freshly squeezed tomato juice. Immediately after, according to today's adjusted extraction plan, grind 19.6g of Warm Sun coffee powder and extract 38g of coffee liquid in 30 seconds, pour it over the tomato juice, and finally stir well before tasting.

How does it taste?

When this cherry tomato iced Americano first enters the mouth, you can sense the aroma of fresh cherry tomatoes and coffee, but very quickly the whole palate is taken over by a heavy sourness, followed closely by the bitterness of coffee and the astringency brought by the tomato skin. This reminded Front Street of a sharp comment from a netizen who said it was like the sourness of tomato and the bitterness of coffee dueling on the tongue. To sum it up in one phrase: intense!

After the ice cubes slowly melted, the coffee was diluted and further cooled. Although the previous bitterness faded quite a bit, you could still feel the sourness and astringency of the fruit skin when drinking it. Overall, this tomato Americano really cannot be considered tasty. Friends who usually do not particularly like fruit or vegetable juice should be even more cautious about trying it. Sure enough, curiosity killed the cat.

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The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.