MGLloyd

Noting that the drum is made of wire mesh pencil cups from an office supply store, my old chemistry and healthcare background prompts me to ask if you know what the mesh and the coating is made of? My only concern is if the materials are food-safe and most particularly if the coating of the wire mesh does not degrade with heat and agitation to release toxic byproducts.

Post! Post! Post!

After the I-Roast has been out for a while, I may well pick one up just for grins. Although I do currently have two Caffe Rostos, I am now roasting about 85% of my coffee using a heat gun and a stainless steel dog bowl. Details can be found on coffeegeek.com. If someone is looking to get into roasting inexpensively, you would want to try a popcorn popper or the heat gun method. Given some of the Alps problems, and the difficulty of monitoring the roast, it would not be my first choice for a novice roaster.

FYI, you can usually find bulk citric acid at soapmaking, winemaking and homebrew supply stores. You can also occasionally find it at health food stores, but it is usually much more expensive. I use it in espresso machine cleaning. If you are buying it for food purposes, make certain that the citric acid is at least 'food grade'. Don't buy anything less, and don't pay the extra money for 'reagent grade'. You can also buy it over the Internet, but the shipping costs will more than eat up anything you save over local buying in bulk. Noting that you are in the North End, as am I, I usually get my citric acid at Zenith Supplies (63rd and Roosevelt) or the Cellar (144th and Greenwood).

I can second the fact that this region is producing some very, very nice late harvest and ice wines.

I jsut carefully read the recipe and thought it looked pretty good. I do have a question however. What is in 'ground mixed spice'? I am unaware of the North American equivalent.

Either home-roasted Malabar Gold, which I get from the Coffee Project in LA, or home-roasted Liquid Amber from SM.

Some brisk walking through the endless corridors of the T-wing might help. Lord knows I clocked many a mile there.

And a tamper fitted to exactly match the, uh, receptacle.

I make double and triple espressos all the time. The key, of course, is using 7-8 grams of properly ground coffee per shot. Thus, my doubles are made with around 14 grams and my triples with 21 grams of coffee. Double espressos made from extracting two shots worth of water out of one shot worth of coffee are not worthy of the name.

Another possible source of green beans available locally, depending on where you are, is Costco. Many of the Seattle-area Costcos now have an inhouse coffee roasting setup. If the roasting people are not too busy, they will often put green beans in a bag for you and sell them at the same price as the roasted coffee ($ 3/pound). At any one time, the Costco by my house has Sumatra Mandheling, Costa Rican, Columbian and a House Blend. Due to personal preference, I usually just buy the Sumatra. These are good quality beans, bought from the same coffee wholesalers as used by Sweet Marias, Starbucks, Seattle's Best Coffee and the like.

I would only add that the Zassenhaus mills are excellent for french press and drip (the original issue posed), but they can be an exercise in frustration for use in espresso. It can be difficult to adjust them to grind finely enough, and you will usually spend many minutes grinding away to get enough for a double shot. Many people on Coffeegeek.com, however, use them for espresso while camping, traveling, or other situations in which their dedicated espresso grinder is not available.

The new second edition has been discussed on alt.coffee over the past few weeks. The consensus is, if you already have the first edition, don't bother to buy the second. There is not enough new information to warrant purchase. If you don't have the first edition, than the second edition is a wonderful introduction to coffee roasting.

I heartily endorse the maple bars, bismarcks, coconut cake and apple fritters. I was surprised at the beginning of this thread to see mention of the Frugal Gourmet. After his legal problems of a few years ago, I had thought he had left the Puget Sound area. Apparently not.

Woo hoo! Our own forum! We should also post a message on Coffeegeek pointing people to this venue as well.

I have recently started a new roasting technique to supplant my Caffe Rostos. Details can be found on coffeegeek.com in the home roasting talk forum, but I am using a heat gun and a stainless steel bowl. Using this technique, which has to be done outside, I am getting a tremendous throughput of roasted coffee. Excellent quality results that cannot be told from coffee done in the Rostos.

Many homebrewing supply shops (Internet and bricks and mortar) carry this item or can order it. Be sure that you specify that you wish one to fit an actual beer keg; many homebrew setups are designed to fit a pressurized soda pop keg, and are thus too small for a beer keg.

Owen! Another Coffeegeek on this board and I note the same user ID on both. I am the earlier poster you mentioned: Pasquini Livia90 semi, Rocky doserless, Caffe Rosto or heatgun, more presses than I can count, Braun KF187 drip, KitchenAid whirlyblade. Like you, all of this is expensive but worth it.

A kindred soul! My wife is the wine geek while I am the beer, espresso and coffee geek. We are almost always disappointed by restaurant coffee or espresso. I have to admit our standards are high: since we have about $ 2000 worth of coffee, espresso and roasting equipment at home. I roast our own coffee and make our own espressos. It is difficult to beat coffee prepared by a dedicated hobbyist. But I would pay more if I was assured of quality, freshness and degree of roast, and proper preparation. But I suspect that the market segment willing to pay for this would be so small as to not make it an economically-viable proposition for the average restaurant.

The late and lamented Frederick's and Nelson's used to carry Cougar Gold. Alas. And I don't think the Frangos are the same any more, either.

Click on the link on my earlier post, or do a Google using the terms 'pressure cooker deep frying'. I have also read about the dangers of this in my five or six pressure cooker cookbooks. In a nutshell, the boiling oil is at a higher temperature and pressure than the water for which pressure cookers are designed. This has a nasty tendency to either make the pressure release valve explosively fail, the lid gasket to melt and release pressure or the lid to blow off. Any of these events are usually accompanied by copious amounts of boiling oil under pressure being released. I have heard of people successfully deep frying with a pressure cooker (not a pressure fryer), but then again I have heard of people successfully playing Russian roulette as well. I am also biased by my youthful experience as a firefighter during which I responded to a couple fires caused by this. So for me, the risk is simply not worth it, given that if I want pressure-fried chicken, there is a KFC, an Albertson's and a Safeway all offering this within a few miles of my house. I am, even as I type this, am making a pot roast in the pressure cooker. Reading these posts inspired me to get it out of the garage and use it tonight.

I have owned a FAGOR pressure cooker for many years, have several pressure cooker cookbooks and have bookmarked a variety of pressure cooker websites. All of these resources say the same thing: do not deep fry chicken (or anything else) in a pressure cooker not specifically designed for pressure frying. This presents serious safety hazards, most of which involve boiling oil exploding over the kitchen, the cook and any bystanders. Some words of wisdom can be found here: http://missvickie.com/howto/fry/frying.html You can only safely deep fry in a pressure cooker specifically designed as a pressure fryer. These models can usually be distinguished by having a bracket over the lid that clamps the lid down into place. This is different than the conventional pressure cooker with a lid that rotates and locks or clamps on one side. Danger, Will Robinson, danger! Do not try this at home!

I use the KitchenAid blade grinder for my drip and french press coffee and it works well, at least when I am doing the grinding. I use my Rancilio Rocky doserless for espresso, since no blade grinder can consistently produce a very good espresso grind.

In my opinion, the key to extracting the flavor components to the maximum in the minimum amount of time and cost, is to increase the surface area of the item being extracted. The more solids exposed to the solvent, the higher and faster the rate of extraction. Thus, my preference to slice and roughly chop the two vanilla beans I use in my recipe. I would think it would take quite a bit of time , quite a few vanilla beans and quite a bit of solvent to make vanilla extract from soaking whole beans. I am the first to admit that I have never made vanilla extract from soaking whole beans. I do not know if there is a quality difference. Although I have no actual knowledge and have done no research, I would bet that commercially-prepared vanilla extract is not made by soaking whole beans, just based on a SWAG on cost and time issues.