Jump to content

MGLloyd

participating member
  • Posts

    631
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by MGLloyd

  1. 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.

  2. Over the weekend I finished up another version of my gas grill roaster. It's maybe $10 worth of parts tossed together and stuck on the rotisserie in the grill. The current version holds about 1 1/2 lbs of unroasted beans and it finally got a latch that is easy to open and close. I think I'm about out of ideas for this design, maybe it's time to work on a cooling system. I'll post some pics if anyone is interested.

    Post! Post! Post!

  3. 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.

  4. Do you carry citric acid at Beecher's? I was thinking of organizing a mozarella-making gathering...

    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).

  5. Good article in the Independent.

    http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/food_an...sp?story=467119

    I've made mincemeat over many Xmases and this is pretty much the same as I've done - it tastes good - maybe I add more liquor. :blink: If you make it without the meat in it, the mincemeat will keep and improve in flavour. Make it weeks or months in advance.

    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.

  6. I noticed to my delight and horror that they sell Top Pot doughnuts now at the cafeteria at the west end of the UW medical school, which is mere feet from my office. I'm doomed. In fact, they're all over campus, at all the espresso carts. When US News and World Report does a story on students at UW gaining 27 pounds, you'll know why.

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

  7. At coffee bars in the USA it seems that double espresso is the norm. Is a double espresso really an espresso? The experience of drinking one is certainly different. To me a double is more like a big cup of strong coffee as compared to the burst of flavor you get in taking in the sip or two that constitutes the Italian espresso experience.

    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.

  8. 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.

  9. Bob makes an excellent point. The manual Zassenhaus mills at $60 or $70 will beat the pants off any electric burr or blade grinder under $100. IMHO they will perform as well or better than the $150 Solis Maestro Plus but with the distinct advantage of havign much better durability on the burr assemblies and most likely a far longer working life.

    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.

  10. just nitices that Kenneth Davids has a new revised edition of Home Coffee Roasting: Romance & Revival coming out this month......

    hmmmm maybe i should suggest it for purchase at work

    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.

  11. 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.

  12. 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.

  13. 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.

  14. Liek one of the other posters here - I take my coffee seriously, do my own roasting at home and have a serious espresso setup. That said....  with a $1500 espresso setup I can produce espresso, capas and lattes better than I've ever had in a restaurant.  Keep in mind that it's not all about the equipment. I use a $10 Proctor-Silex drip maker, a $20 whirly-blade grinder and a $6 Wal-Mart carafe to make my drip coffee. It blows away anything I've ever had in a restaurant and rivals the best cafe coffee that I've ever had.

    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.

  15. 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.

  16. 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.

  17. Fried chicken in the pressure cooker? I want to know more about this, please. What kind of pc do you have, Howard?

    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!

  18. Homemade vanilla extract sounds fairly economical. Well, the two-bean version does, at least.

    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.

×
×
  • Create New...