abooja
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Posts posted by abooja
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I just tried the pour over method using the filter basket from the Technivorm, the finest of the medium grind options on the Infinity, and 199 degree spring water. I closed the stopper, poured in a bit of water, stirred, let it steep for thirty seconds, then opened the stopper to half while pouring in the rest. The result? Exactly the same as before.
I'm sure I'm just accustomed to weak coffee, but what has been consistent about all of my experimentation is that I require far more cream and sugar -- just to make it drinkable -- than I typically do for a cup of coffee of equal volume.
Perhaps that's because I'm now measuring more precisely. In the past, I would buy a bag of ground coffee -- invariably Dunkin' Donuts -- and measure out a scoop for every cup of water, plus one for good measure, as my parents used to do. Who knows what size scoop? Over the years, it may have been the one accompanying the coffee machine, or the coffee can, or just a measuring spoon. I never weighed coffee before two weeks ago. From what I can gather, my 50 grams of coffee-to-1 liter of water ratio -- by most standards, a weak to average strength cup -- is somewhat stronger than the the higher end of Technivorm's suggestion of 5 to 6 scoops (theirs) per 1.25 liters of water. That's about 40 to 48 grams of coffee per liter.
What's even more maddening is that, even if I work out a good ratio for one type of coffee, it will likely change when I change to another type of coffee. This is like relearning how to bake. Each flour has a different weight per volume, different properties, and is better suited to one task or another. Silly me. I thought making coffee would be easy.
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I bet you've never tasted really good I've cream.
Make that vanilla ice cream.
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I appreciate all of your detailed advice. I am taking every bit of it into consideration. As I struggle to find the language to describe what I'm tasting, I feel a bit like a blind man trying to describe a painting. Thank you for bearing with me.
Regarding the pour over suggestion: I wondered how that would be an advantage over the Technivorm, since the major selling point of that machine is precise temperature control. I measured the temperature of the water with a Thermapen as it dripped into the filter basket and, depending on where along the probe the water hit, it fluctuated between 195 and 205, which is supposed to be spot on. I'll give this suggestion a shot anyway, for curiosity's sake, grinding more finely this time.
As for simply purchasing a bag of Intelligentsia, I'm just being cheap. From all I've read about it, I'm sure it's fantastic, but I didn't want to fall in love with $25 per pound (once shipping is factored in) coffee, and only be able to have it every once in a while. The home roasting idea is my attempt at having good coffee at a more reasonable price. Should I try Intelligentsia once to set a gold standard for my home roast, or is that just madness? I was thinking their El Gallo breakfast blend might be a good option for me.
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I was going to smoke some pork spare ribs and make some mac and cheese for today, but since I already smoked a pork shoulder two days ago (and was too lazy to clean the smoker), I went with crab cakes, a simple tossed salad, homemade cherry pie and vanilla I've cream for my husband, and a (gluten free) brownie sundae for myself.
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By strong, I meant leaning towards bitter. I tend to prefer coffee on the mellow (i.e. weak) side, always with sugar and milk or half and half. The cup that I described as both strong and insipid was more aptly described by my brother as bitter, yet completely lacking in body.
Since getting the burr grinder, I have primarily used the middle range of the medium coarseness setting, because I'm brewing drip, and in an effort to be consistent while other variables change.
By the way, I agree that I'm using crappy coffee. (I use bottled spring water.) Still waiting on those Sweet Maria green beans, I bought a bag of Eight O'Clock Colombian beans, which were actually a bit better than their red bag "Original", but far from fantastic. I still think it tastes way too strong. I've been using 50 grams of beans for every liter of water. I'm sure most of you would prefer to bathe in an infusion that weak.
Oh, and I never got around to my French press experiment. It cost significantly less than the Technivorm, so I'm inclined to try to make that work first.
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Are you following the brewing instructions at Sweet Maria's?
Absolutely. I use a paper filter in the Technivorm, so I pre-wet it, close the drip stop switch to allow the coffee to bloom, weigh my coffee, etc. I will now test drive their French press instructions.
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I thought, perhaps, that I'm just not a coffee person, but I have had many good cups of coffee over the years, just none that I have brewed myself. No one else seems to like it either, my brother included. It drives me nuts that I have to serve my tasty, homemade baked goods with bad coffee. I will eventually break down and ask my brother exactly what he does (blend, amounts, etc.), but my competitive nature would prefer to figure it out on my own, then wow him one day with my home roasted brew. Absurd, I know.
I'm going to try brewing some of the Wegmans Guatemalan coffee in a French press and see if that makes a difference. If I still don't like it, then I can at least assume that the Technivorm isn't the problem, and that it's likely that particular bean that I dislike.
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How many different varieties of coffee have you tried? Do you know whether you prefer a darker or lighter roast (in general)? If you liked the eight o'clock/Kona blend at your brother's, have you tried making the exact same thing at home?
I'm honestly not sure what I like. I have tried straight-up Eight O'Clock, original roast, that was not very good. (It was a month away from its use-by date, so I guess that meant it was eleven months past the roasting date.) Besides the Wegmans stuff (the aforementioned, plus one of their city roasts -- weak stuff, and their breakfast blend, which I don't recall at all), I have only ever brewed Dunkin' Donuts and Luzianne ground coffee with chicory. (I remembered once liking Community coffee, and thought it would be the same. It wasn't.) I realize that's not a wide variety, but I'm reluctant to buy any supermarket coffee ever again, and I don't know of any decent shops in the area that are roasting their own.
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I can't seem to make a decent cup of coffee to save my life.
Some background: I am by no means a connoisseur. In the past, I drank a lot of Starbucks mocha, primarily to disguise the flavor of their coffee. When I couldn't brew a decent cup at home, I bought a Technivorm Moccamaster. When that still didn't work, I resorted to Folger's Singles with hot cocoa mixed in. I then switched to tea.
Recently, I had what I thought to be a great cup of coffee at my brother's house. He grinds his own, but brews a blend of Eight O'Clock and Kona style coffee from Costco.
So, I dedicated the old blade grinder to grinding nuts (there's another for spices), and purchased a Capresso Infinity burr grinder. I ordered some green beans from Sweet Maria's, and a recommended popcorn popper from Amazon. While waiting for the beans to arrive, I'm experimenting with different supermarket coffees, coffee-to-water ratios, and methods of optimizing the Technivorm. I'm grinding immediately prior to brewing. I bought what I believed to be the most recently roasted beans from Wegmans, their "Single Origin Organic Guatemalan", which claims to be a medium roast, with medium body and full flavor. No matter how much or how little coffee I use, I hate it. It's either too strong/bitter, or strong and insipid at the same time. I haven't even used the popcorn popper yet, and I'm already looking to buy a heat gun and try that method of roasting instead.
All this for a decent cup of coffee, that my culinarily challenged sister-in-law can crank out in her Mr. Coffee without a second thought. What am I doing wrong?
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Good luck at your new job!
And many thanks for all you have done for this community.
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Whatever you do, don't eat a Wendy's BLT Cobb Salad and think that will change your mind. It didn't for me. It just irked me that the taste of perfectly good bacon was spoiled by those tiny blue cheese crumbles. I'm sure they use crap blue cheese, and perhaps that didn't help, but it was not the transcendent experience I was hoping it would be. Silly, I know.
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Over at Food 52 Alice Medrich's New Classic Coconut Macaroons. I made these for a gluten-free friend at work and there was practically a stampede. It was a fun technique and I was certainly happy with the response - nothing left except the plate.
I made these yesterday, and enjoyed them so much that I mail ordered three pounds of coconut chips. Thanks!
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I made some pesto yesterday, using the quick blanch-and-shock method and Marcella Hazan's recipe, and it came out great. I left about 20% of the basil leaves out of the blanching water, to preserve their fresh flavor. It's still nice and bright green today. It went quite well with my homemade (gluten-free) gnocchi. Even the husband, who instinctively shuns any food that is green, claimed to enjoy it.
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I am a repeat offender. My only saving grace is that most guests are ultimately impressed with the quality, if not sheer quantity, of the food I serve them. For years, my family has insisted that they would prefer I spend time with them, sitting and chatting, rather than endlessly whirling about the kitchen. One sister-in-law often jokes that, "next time", we order pizzas.
Two days ago, my side of the family visited our new home for the first time in the year since we moved here. While I could not bring myself to serve middling pizza from Vito's a couple of miles away, I did scale back and serve homemade pizza. By the time our guests arrived, the pizzas would already be made -- baked and everything, since I didn't want the oven still blasting at 500 degrees while they were here, especially on 85+ degree day. Dessert, an elaborate ice cream cake and some chocolate glazed shortbread cookies, was prepared the previous day. There would be some nosh material. I had already blanched the green beans for one of two salads, and intended to prep the rest of the salad ingredients before they arrived.
That's where things went array. Despite the fact that my family showed up nearly an hour late (they are my family, after all), I still managed to be late with the meal. I had to first participate in the house tour, show my father where he would be sleeping (our bedroom on the first floor), describe each plant in my vegetable garden, then I would set about finishing off the salads while they waited. By that time, more than an hour had passed, and my once-perfect pizzas were starting to over-brown during the reheat. A simple green salad was less than spectacular because I had to rush through the vinaigrette mixing while my sister-in-law watched. (I loathe cooking while talking to anyone other than myself.) What should have been an easy-breezy meal turned into the usual clock-watching stressfest. I simply cannot win.
Thank god for dessert.
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I just made a batch of Olive Oil and Maple Granola, and it is so delicious. Every word of her poetic waxings about this are true. It's good warm. Good at room temperature by itself. Good on yogurt. And, in a stroke of genius on the part of the boyfriend, good with Coconut Häagen-Dazs and chunks of fresh pineapple. If you like granola, make it now.
I just made a batch of this granola -- my first stab at any granola. It's really delicious. I had it warm. I had it at room temperature. All by itself. Stuffed myself with it. Thanks for the recipe!
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Oh my god. WOW. This is the most delicious sounding thing I've heard about in looooong time. You had me at the salted caramel ice cream, and then once I heard toasted coconut I nearly started to cry. Going to go look forlornly in our freezer now...
Why, thank you! I thought it had potential, and it didn't disappoint.
I decided to take a photograph last night, and it was a terrible one, but here it is anyway:
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After toying with the idea for years, and then reading about it here, I finally made myself an ice cream birthday cake. It was a four-layer affair -- two layers of chocolate chiffon cake in between a layer of salted butter caramel ice cream, and a layer of toasted coconut (Tahitian vanilla) ice cream with toasted almonds and dark chocolate stracciatella. I frosted it with hot fudge. (Many thanks to David Lebovitz and Rose Levy Beranbaum for their recipes.) I guessed right that a chiffon cake would work well in an ice cream cake. My husband's recollection of once witnessing the tip of a knife break off in someone's homemade brownie ice cream cake was a stern warning to steer in the opposite direction.
No photo because it looked a mess. I didn't freeze the cake long enough before coating it with fudge.
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Resuscitating an old thread...
I recently baked a red velvet cake with PDX, and was wondering if anyone had any suggestions as to what went wrong.
Some background: After reading this thread around a year ago, I managed to make some pretty darn good low-sugar ice creams for my husband. I use scott123's ratio of 1 cup of PDX, 4 tablespoons erythritol, 4 tablepoons xylitol, and around 20 drops of liquid Splenda for every cup of sugar in a recipe.
I realized that my use of sugar substitutes is limited to ice cream, and that I should give low-sugar baking another shot. The only other time I tried, I baked low-sugar, gluten free brownies that were okay, but not to-die-for. I have no way of knowing if it was due to the sugar substitutes, the gluten free flours, or some evil symbiosis of both.
So, I went ahead and did it again. I baked a gluten free, low-sugar red velvet cake, based on Jaymes' excellent recipe, the original of which I've baked and loved. It was red and moist, rose well, and was topped with full sugar cream cheese icing, so that might have helped convince my husband that it was good, but I thought it tasted...burnt. I had to bake it a bit longer than the recipe states, since I made it in a 9" x 13" sheet pan, but it didn't actually burn. It just tasted that way.
I think it was the food coloring. Last time, I used two full tablespoons of powdered red food coloring, which was probably overkill, but I never figured out how to convert liquid to powder measurements. Nevertheless, the cake did not taste bitter or burnt, just delicious. This time, I used less -- one slightly heaping tablespoon. My gluten free flours (brown rice, potato, and tapioca) were not rancid, and I used the same PDX ratio as above, just doubling the amount. I'm guessing that the sweetness of the cake was not enough to overpower the bitterness of the food coloring. What do you think?
By the way, I sifted the PDX, erythritol, and xylitol in with the other dry ingredients, and it incorporated beautifully.
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I thought it was the bottle of Chantaine orange marmalade that moved here with us nearly three months ago, but it's actually the bottle of Hebrew National deli mustard that expired in December 2009.
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Thinking about what to cook tomorrow. How do we feel about blintzes?
Love me some blintzes, but please make them potato.
Since you asked so nicely, I made potato blintzes for you and cheese blintzes for me. Then I forced myself to have both for dinner.
Why, thank you so much!
And such a fine job you did, too. My blintzes are often as big as an Oldsmobile, and my bletlach or blettle (thanks for the new words!) are clearly way, way too thick, based on your photos of properly made blintzes. Are they at all crunchy when you serve them? Howard thinks they shouldn't be, and he's probably right, but I like some crunch.Interesting that you cook your matzoh balls for so long. I always thought the Streit's recipe made for mushy balls, but perhaps I just like them a bit more al dente than most. I made matzoh ball soup yesterday, using up some odd chicken parts from the freezer, including an old hen and some chicken feet, but my broth never turns out as yellow and clear as the beautiful stuff you made upthread.
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I've not tried the oven method, but have found that the easiest way to achieve perfectly flat, chewy bacon in to make it the Cuisinart Griddler -- closed, of course. I hate dragging out the machine, and then cleaning it, but nothing beats it for bacon and pancakes.
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Thinking about what to cook tomorrow. How do we feel about blintzes?
Love me some blintzes, but please make them potato. I made a batch around a week ago to go with the leftover brisket from last Passover. This year's brisket was made with the second of two very expensive briskets absent their fat caps that I purchased for pastrami-blogging purposes. I am pleased to say it worked much better in a braise than in the smoker.
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Good Pesach to you, Pam! (Hope I said that right.) Great to see you blogging.
Generally speaking, I like the Israeli brands (King David and Yehuda are the most popular brands we sell). But I'm partial to the Streit's spelt matzo.
Interesting. I never know which brand to buy. Howard, who does not keep kosher, prefers egg matzoh and, ahem, chocolate covered matzoh. I like to buy Streit's, but will now check out one of the Israeli brands, assuming I can still find them.
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I warm plates as often as I get around to it, but have to be careful not to get them too hot, as we have a glass-topped dining table. I often resort to placing cheap, cork mats from Ikea under the dishes before placing them on the table. Not a good look.
Incidentally, my husband finds it very amusing that I bother to warm dishes at all. He says, "Who does that?", outside of a restaurant setting. I can now say, I know a whole bunch of people who do.
Sweet Maria's: Roasting successes and failures
in Coffee & Tea
Posted
I roasted my first ever batch of coffee just a few minutes ago using a West Bend Air Crazy popcorn popper and three ounces of Sweet Maria's Colombia "Dos Payasos de Tolima" beans. The roasted beans are sitting in a barely tightened half pint mason jar, to be ground and brewed tomorrow morning.
My first impressions are that this method produces a very uneven roast. Also, I should never again use the stopwatch function on my Android phone, because it switched screens on me at some point after four minutes, so I'm not at all certain how long this roast actually lasted. Because the beans were not turning over quite as much as I'd like during the roast, I shook the machine several times, then shut it off altogether, stirred, and restarted, confusing the timing even further. I'd say the roast lasted at least 4-1/2 minutes, and no longer than 5-1/2 minutes.
Some photos, so you can see for yourself:
The beans on the right are mine, and those on the left are Eight O'Clock Colombian:
The Eight O'Clock beans are a lot more oily, which I'm hoping is what contributes to my not liking them very much. I'm concerned, however, that my roast will not even be drinkable. Should I have roasted them longer? Should I discard the very light beans before grinding? I definitely heard some cracks, but because of the volume of the popper, could not tell if first crack had ended or if second crack ever began.
I'll let you know tomorrow about the taste.