How do you type a tab in a bash here-document?

The definition of a here-document is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_document

How can you type a tab in a here-document? Such as this:

cat > prices.txt << EOF
coffee\t$1.50
tea\t$1.50
burger\t$5.00
EOF

UPDATE:

Issues dealt with in this question:

1. Expanding the tab character
2. While not expanding the dollar sign
3. Embedding a here-doc in a file such as a script

You can embed your here doc in your script and assign it to a variable without using a separate file at all:

#!/bin/bash
read -r -d '' var<<"EOF"
coffee\t$1.50
tea\t$1.50
burger\t$5.00
EOF

Then printf or echo -e will expand the \t characters into tabs. You can output it to a file:

printf "%s\n" "$var" > prices.txt

Or assign the variable's value to itself using printf -v:

printf -v var "%s\n" "$var"

Now var or the file prices.txt contains actual tabs instead of \t.

You could process your here doc as it's read instead of storing it in a variable or writing it to a file:

while read -r item price
do
    printf "The price of %s is %s.\n" $item $price    # as a sentence
    printf "%s\t%s\n" $item $price                  # as a tab-delimited line
done <<- "EOF"
    coffee $1.50    # I'm using spaces between fields in this case
    tea $1.50
    burger $5.00
    EOF

Note that I used <<- for the here doc operator in this case. This allows me to indent the lines of the here doc for readability. The indentation must consist of tabs only (no spaces).