If your cup of joe is your favorite part of breakfast, good news — Starbucks just came up with an at-home coffee selection that’s engineered to help you get the best out of your morning meal. The new Starbucks Perfect Pairings collection does exactly what it says on the tin: It offers a bunch of Starbucks K-Cups designed to pair with specific breakfast foods. The coffee giant worked with consulting chefs from the Culinary Institute of America in order to create the perfect pairing lineup, so whether you make yourself an omelet every day or just grab a yogurt on your way to the office each morning, there’s something here for you.
Launched on July 12, the Starbucks Perfect Pairings collection comes in three varieties, each intended to be enjoyed with a different family of foods. If you like pastries, yogurt, and cereal, for example, you’ll want to try the Sweet Mornings Blend; a medium roast, it carries notes of dusted chocolate and dried fruit, making it the perfect accompaniment to breakfasts that fall on the sweeter end of the spectrum. If you’re more of an eggs, bacon, and avocado toast kind of person, however, the Savory Mornings Blend might be up your alley. Like the Sweet Mornings Blend, it’s a medium roast coffee; however, its notes are herb-y, rather than fruity or chocolatey.
And if you straight-up like to eat dessert for breakfast, there’s the Dessert Blend. Like its (perhaps a tiny bit more responsible) siblings, it’s a medium roast coffee, but its notes of candied ginger and orange zest are meant to bring out the best in chocolate, cheesecake, fruit pies, or any other dessert you can think of. And, I mean, to be fair, a lot of “desserts” are really just breakfast foods in slightly different forms — is there really that much of a difference between, say, a Danish and a pie? — so, y’know, if dessert-for-breakfast is your jam, go for it.
If you’re curious about the origins of each blend, the Savory Mornings Blend consists of coffees from Asia-Pacific and Latin America, while the Sweet Mornings and Dessert blends both comprise beans from Africa-Arabia and Latin America.
According to the Daily Meal, K-Cups of all three blends clock in at around $9.99 per package; however, the Starbucks Perfect Pairings collection is available as ground coffee, as well — so if you, like myself, aren’t really a coffee pod kind of person (or you'd rather stick reusable pods in your Keurig), you can still pick up a bag or two to enjoy. You can find out which retailers near you carry each variety via the Starbucks At Home product locator.
Of course, while the Starbucks Perfect Pairing collection is designed to boost your breakfast up to the next level, any of these coffees can also be enjoyed with whatever food you choose to pair with them, or at any time of day. What makes a good coffee and food pairing, after all, is highly unique. Suggested “rules” for matching up brews with nibbles include mirroring flavors, choosing foods that will complement the specific kind of acidity in your coffee, or going for the whole “opposites attract” thing (have you ever wondered why black coffee goes so well with sweets?); however, you also don’t have to abide by any rules at all if you don’t want to. As Jan Komarek, a coffee expert and buyer for Northern Ireland-based coffee roaster Bailies Coffee, told the Independent Coffee Guide in 2018, “The only thing I know that pairs well with all coffees — regardless of flavor, body or acidity — is good company.”
Even so, though, it can be fun to experiment with different coffee-and-food pairings — and if you’re a novice at it, the Starbucks Perfect Pairings collection might be a good place to start. Starbucks even has suggested recipes on each of the individual blends' pages that will likely suit that particular drink. Find out more about them all here. Happy kaffeeklatsching!
