Until the end of March, the Lobby Lounge is doing its part to save the world while making it a sweeter place.
The R-Cookie Coffee (VND100,000++) joins the latest food trend in edible packaging in the form of a deliciously edible coffee cup made from pastry and housing a shot of Procaffe espresso eccellente, a blend of Arabica beans with Asian Robusta.
The cookie is slightly denser than your average cookie but without being too thick thanks to the almond flour in the dough, allowing it to hold hot beverages for up to 20-25 minutes. An inner coating of white chocolate does double duty by helping to keep the coffee from seeping through with the added benefit of sweetening your coffee as it melts, so no extra sugar needed. And best of all, when you’re done, there’s no coffee cup to wash!
Sustainable packaging is all the rage in the culinary world these days. Among the innovations are containers made from caramelized sugar and wax that crack open like an egg and packaging made of biodegradable beeswax that can be peeled like fruit – all compostable or soluble in water. Not content to simply produce planet-friendly biodegradable packaging, other companies are trying to make containers tasty as well. There are now commercially viable products like WikiPearls ― skins for foods like ice cream, cheese, and frozen yogurt and even agar (a seaweed-based gel) cups that look like glass and taste like pink grapefruit and yuzu.
In keeping with the “green” theme, try pairing the R-Cookie Coffee with a slice of chocolate pistachio cake (VND60,000++). Layers of chocolate and vanilla sponge cake are sandwiched between rich, nutty pistachio cream, making for a sweet, but not too sweet, delight. Even the health conscious can indulge because almost 90 percent of the fat found in pistachios is the healthy mono- and polyunsaturated fats.
If edible packaging is the future of food science, then welcome to a brave, new (and very delicious) world.
The Renaissance Riverside Hotel Saigon is at 8-15 Ton Duc Thang, D1.
* Text by James Pham, Michael Arnold, and NPD Khanh
* Images by Ngoc Tran, Neil Featherstone
