A new kind of coffee blend

I was chatting with my friend Dan at the Mudhouse, one of Charlottesville's coffee Institutions, the other day. A thought had occurred to me which seemed a bit obvious in retrospect, and as Dan is the person I know who is Most Serious About Coffee, I ask him about all my crazy coffee thoughts.

In this case, I was asking about hand-pour coffee. The question was whether people separate out the various parts of the brewing process and try them separately, so that, for example, you have three cups of coffee instead of one. The first cup represents the first 1/3 of the water that goes through the coffee grounds, the second the second 1/3, and the last the third 1/3. Dan told me that he hadn't done that with the hand pour, but it was part of his training program on espresso for new baristas. Then he gave me a sample.

The first part of the espresso shot tastes like every espresso you'll get in Italy, because italian espresso uses about 1/6 to 1/20 the water that you'll get from just about anywhere in the U.S. It's packed full of flavor, not really any bitterness. The second and third thirds don't have much flavor at all, but they do carry most of the body of the espresso, and I'm not entirely sure what makes up the body of espresso, so I'm going to have to do some research. Note to self. I'm pretty sure it's not collagen, though.

Right now, in artisanal coffee circles, hand-pour coffee is one of the darling techniques, because it allows for a lot of control and you can get a coffee cup full of flavor and nuance in a way that is different from all of the other techniques. It's not a replacement for other coffee brewing methods, naturally, it's just a way of tasting coffee very differently from what you'd get in, say, a French Press. It's especially good for single origin coffees, where you want to know all the nuances of a particular bean.

To hand-pour coffee, you essentially have a filter with ground coffee above a cup. You pour some hot water over the ground coffee, and coffee fills the cup. Very simple method, lots of things to do to get it right.

Here's what I can imagine: divide the hand-pour process into 10 equal pours. Call the resulting parts of the coffee "slices 1 to 10". If some were really, really serious about coffee experimentation, I could see that person saying "For this bean, you want to use slices 2-4, 7, and 9. For that blend, 1-3, 5-8" and so on. Take out the parts of the extraction that don't work for that bean to enhance or reduce whatever aspects aren't right. Of course, just like my explanation of the hand-pour process, if something like that would work it would be much more involved to get it right. 

Even more so, a very fast, very meticulous, essentially crazy person might brew slices of different single-origin coffees and blend them together into a single super cup. Such a coffee would either be: a) indistinguishable from other coffees; or b) the most amazing coffee ever. Either way, it would be terribly expensive to do right. Still, fun to imagine.

How the Cookie Crumbles

It's always good to get to see presentations about cookie techniques, because either it will help to solidify something in my mind or, even better, will teach me something new. A problem I never really considered before was a crumbling cookie. If you make a cookie that has to travel some distance, you'll find that your average cookie recipe will leave you with something that cannot survive bumps and jolts without turning from a round confection to a pile of crumbs and bits.

I was watching an IACP presentation by Shirley Corriher, author of BakeWise and CookWise , and also Food Scientist Extraordinaire on Good Eats. During her presentation, she talked about how to keep cookies from crumbling. The problem comes in because all of the sugar in the cookies absorbs all of the water, keeping the water from combining with the flour to make gluten. Exacerbating that lack of water due to sugar is a literal lack of water, as most cookie recipes have very little water-type liquid added to them. To make matters worse, all of the butter in the cookies will coat the flour, thus preventing whatever water may have been added which had not already joined up with the sugar unable to get to the flour. It makes for a crumbly cookie, because there are no long chains of gluten to ensure a structure that can hold up under pressure.

The solution is devilishly simple: take a cup of the flour that is in your cookie recipe and, before anything else, mix it with a few tablespoons of water until it forms a dough (exact amount of water depends on the type of flour and so on, but just add as much as you need and no more). Make your cookies as normal, but add this dough in at the end. Depending on how much you kneaded the dough, you will give extra strength and body to your cookies, and you will be able to control the texture by kneading it more if you want more chewiness to the cookie.

One of the added benefits of this method is that, because the water is all tied up making gluten in the flour, it's not going to throw off your cookie recipe's balance. The water isn't going to be released into the cookie, so you only have to worry about how much extra body you are giving your cookie and not wether the cookies will become a soggy mess.

Of course, you don't want to do this with a shortbread cookie, because the very definition of a shortbread cookie is that you don't have long gluten chains. I mean, you can make what would be a shortbread cookie with this recipe, but it won't be shortbread any more.

Learning to Cook

It was many years before I finally learned to cook. Which is not to say that I couldn't make food and to follow a recipe, but I was always at the mercy of the recipes that were available to me. Sure, variations in the flavor of the recipe were pretty easy to do, but  serious changes to the recipe were unheard of. Sometimes these might be items of preference, but sometimes they were necessary because the recipe was just incorrect.

I like to tell this story of shortly before I started really trying to understand what this food and cooking thing was really all about. I watch The Big Chili episode of Good Eats, where he talks about how to make chili in a pressure cooker. I wanted to make this chili, but had no pressure cooker, so I checked the episode for these directions:

You put the chili in the bowl. You put the spoon in the chili. You put the chili in your mouth. That's it.

R: But Paw!
GG: Don't call me that, boy! It makes me feel ... old.

Now for you folks at home that ain't got one of them ...

GG: What'd you call that thing?
R: Pressure cooker. [continues to point out service options in the background]

... pressure cooker, don't despair. Just get yourself a nice, big, heavy Dutch oven. Preferably one that's cast iron. And do your meat browning in there, and add all your ingredients, bring it to a boil, clamp on that lid, and toss it in a 350 degree oven for anywhere from 6 to, I don't know, 24 hours, depending on what you like.

From the Good Eats Fan Page archives. Emphasis mine.

Six hours as a minimum seemed an awfully long time to be cooking something. So I re-watched that part of the episode three or four times on the Tivo, but it always said the same thing. So I checked the Food Network recipe, but it just had the pressure cooker instructions. So… I cooked it for about six hours in a 350° oven. And all but two chunks of chili were turned into charcoal. It should be said that the remaining two chunks of chili were the best I'd had before or since, but that's a lot of trouble to go through for two chunks of chili.

What is truly sad is what never occurred to me: chili is just a beef stew. There are millions of beef stew recipes available. Heck, there are millions of chili recipes available. I could have found another, maybe a few, compared cooking times, and just gone with that. And it's not as though, generally, I am stupid. It's just that I didn't think about cooking the right way. I didn't think, "Hey, there are only a few ways to cook food, and most recipes are just variations on those themes." Every recipe was always it's own, completely different thing, and trying to alter it could cause trouble.

Of course, now I know differently. But that's one of the most important things to learn about cooking: the technique. Learn how the meat or vegetable cooks, and the flavor variations are simple and relatively risk-free. There are maybe 10 major methods for cooking meats and vegetables. Learn those, and you never need char a pot of chili just because someone made a joke on television.

Incidentally, Alton Brown has finally managed to fix the recipe in his book, Good Eats 2: The Middle Years. The chefs don't have direct control over the Food Network recipes, so he couldn't fix it there, but when the book with the episode came out, the proper directions were put in. Go on, get the book. It's well worth it, even if you know how to make chili.

Baking in a Storm

I was perusing the King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion [affiliate link] and I came across a tip about humidity and baking. It started out with the relatively common advice that, in more humid weather, flour will absorb more liquid and will consequently need less added for any given recipe. However, tucked away under that was another hint that I'd never heard before.

One of the common symptoms of rainy weather is lower atmospheric pressure. The thing I'd never considered is that the lower pressure will affect cooking. It'll have a small effect on the temperature needed to bake, which the King Arthur folk didn't mention because it's probably pretty negligible. This is the same thing that happens to high-altitude bakers and the opposite of what happens in a pressure cooker.

The important thing is that your cake/bread/whatever will rise higher because there isn't as much pressure on it. It's obvious when you think about it, and I'm sure bakers who have travelled to different elevations to practice their craft have noticed the difference, but it's news to me.

What I wonder is if there's anyone who would want an oven that could control its pressure. Not necessarily to pressure-cooker levels, but for people living near the edge of the atmosphere (I'm looking at you, Colorado), they could keep it at 1 ATM. For those who just want the tallest souffles ever, they could dial down the pressure just a smidge.

There's a problem that happens with chemically leavened products like muffins and quick breads. If you put too much leavener in, the quick bread will collapse before it's done baking. This happens because there's not enough structure in the confection to hold it up. Specifically, the atmospheric pressure is pushing it down when the tiny amount of gluten isn't ready to hold it up.

With the fancy atmospherically-controlled oven, you might be able to dial back the pressure enough to allow the structure to set before removing the pressure. There will be limits, of course; a soufflé is going to fall eventually, and if you make your structure too delicate, no amount of reduced pressure is going to help unless you're going to somehow eat it in the reduced pressure. Which seems unlikely.

Still, I'd bet someone talented to could work some magic with a system like that. I doubt it would end up being useful, certainly not compared with the work of actually creating such a device, but I wouldn't have really figured out any good uses for the anti-griddle either, so who can say for sure?

Evil Mad Science Wednesday: Asteroids (the edible kind)

Another bit of brilliance from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, who I clearly have a crush on. Take some chocolate graham crackers that you can make, cut them into clever shapes, do a little piping, and give homage to one of the classiciest of classic video games.

Asteroids (the edible kind):

Pew Pew Pew!!! Nom Nom Nom!!!

Gems you can find in the post: the recipe for the graham crackers and how to make your own cookie cutters. They ended up cutting these by hand (well, knife), but they could have made custom cookie cutters if they had wanted to.

(Via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.)

Cleaning trout

One of the great things about our trip to Asheville was that we got some hands-on experience with a few parts of our trip. The biggie was definitely the Cooking Competition that we all participated in, but that's a story for another time. One of the first things that I did when I arrived was to go to a sustainable trout farm, Sunburst Trout Farm.

The first part of our visit to Sunburst was learning what it really means for a trout farm to be sustainable instead of a breeding ground for more diseases than trout. By and large, it's what you'd think: don't overpack the fish, keep predators away, keep things clean.

One of the things you might not expect is that water temperature is vital. The trout farm itself is on a hill with a lake above them and a stream below them, and they get a decent amount of cooling from the lake waters joining the river. If the weather is particularly uncooperative, then they break out the liquid oxygen. There's a huuuuge tank on property that helps to drop the temperature when it's needed. A lot of mischief could be made with that much liquid oxygen, and it's just the thing you need to help deal with a 2000-series terminator.

After feeding us a breakfast that consisted of about 40 things you can do with trout, all delicious (especially the biscuits and smoked trout sausage gravy), they let us don the garb of the trout cleaner and get to cleaning some trout. The traditional outfit is a hair-cap, apron, gloves, and boots. We all looked particularly sexy in the protective gear.

The first of us to remove the innards from the trout was Jaden Hair of Steamy Kitchen. She may not fully appreciate this, but I did get a video of the process, and it teaches the important first lesson of cleaning trout: trout are slippery.

Jaden cleans trout from Brian Geiger on Vimeo.

Sadly, I couldn't get a good video of the machine that removes the spine from the trout. In general terms, it started out as a monorail for the emptied trout and gave us back two fillets minus a skeletal structure. Very impressive.

If you need farmed trout, talk to your fishmonger and ensure that the trout is farmed sustainably. There are a lot of things that can go badly with any farmed animal, so finding a reputable farm is important.

Dealing with living food

One of the interesting things about vegetables and fruits is that they're still alive when you're storing them. In fact, unless you cook them, they're still alive when you eat them. Raw food vegans had better be quite comfortable with their life choices knowing the sheer number of living beings that they consume just to live. I'm not judging, I merely mention because it's just occurred to me.

The problem with the plants being alive is that they continue doing whatever it is that they would normally do under the circumstances. In some cases this means turning sugars into starches, in others starches to sugars. Colors may fade, cells might degrade. Life goes on.

In some cases, life going on is great. Bananas, for example. Bananas are all well and good as a fresh fruit, but while they're green, they're tasteless, and only as the continue to age do they turn starches into sugars. Take it too far, and they become brown and generally unappealing. Of course, in the specific they become better, because brown and mushy bananas are perfect for banana bread. So it's great for the whole living thing to keep going on.

Sometimes you'll slow down the living processes by reducing the molecular activity by slowing down all of the molecules. Though this sounds complex, I'm really just talking about putting something in the refrigerator or freezer. After all, temperature is just the average speed of molecules in any given substance, so to slow down chemical processes, you make it colder.

Freezing is much more effective at slowing the processes than cooling, but that doesn't make it a good idea in all cases. After all, freezing will create ice crystals in the cells, and as they expend, it will rip through the membranes and cell walls of your plant, which will cause the cells to leak upon thawing. This is fine in some cases, but not in others, so use caution with the freezing. A general rule is that if you don't see it in the freezer aisle, it probably doesn't freeze well.

Another useful rule is for whether to refrigerate a fruit or vegetable. The the plant in question lives in through cold weather, it's fine with the cold. If it's a tropical plant, it would be happier on the counter. Because the plants are still alive, if they hit some weather that they're not ready to deal with, then they don't know what to do and the chemical factories that keep them going will often fail.

There are times when you really want to stop whatever's going on within the plant, and that usually means halting enzymatic actions. Enzymes are proteins that facilitate chemical reactions, and are one of the lower-level functions of a living system. If you can stop the enzymes from doing their thing, then you can stop the aging process. They way to do that is with heat.

Of course, heating food is one way to cook it, and there are all sorts of other chemical processes that go on when you cook food. You might just want to stop the enzymatic stuff without seriously damaging the fresh taste or texture of a food. At this point, you're looking at a blanch.

Blanching is cooking something for a brief amount of time and then halting the cooking process quickly. Traditionally, this is done by briefly putting it into boiling water, then transferring the food to cold water. If you're French, it would be ice water, but room temperature water will do just about as well. After all, we only need to change the temperature quickly, we don't need to freeze the food, and water's heat transfer ability will work nearly as well at room temperature as it will at the freezing point.

If you're cooking a green vegetable, you may also take advantage of the blanching process to reduce the acidity a bit with some baking soda into the boiling water. This brightens up your greens. If it's a purplish vegetable, you would very much not want to do this, unless you want your vegetable to turn bright green. You could enhance the reddish-purple color by adding some acid, however.

Another trick blanching is good for is allowing you to use certain tropical fruits in gelatin dishes. Papaya, mango, and pineapple all have enzymes that break down certain connective tissues in meat. Because gelatin is based on a connective tissue, collagen, the enzymes in those fruits will break down the gelatin, thus taking what should be a nice mould and turning it into a sweet, sticky puddle with some fruit at the bottom.

As we know that blanching will stop enzymatic processes, though, we know that we could blanch the fruits before putting them into the gelatin, and we should have no troubles with the enzymatic baddies ruining the dessert treat.

Instructable Wednesday: Sugar Glass

This week's Instructable is on making sugar glass, which is a technique you've most likely seen on those cooking competitions where they're making a sculpture and everything has to be made from an edible material. Sugar glass is also used in the movies and probably on stage when someone needs hitting over the head with a bottle. The author of the Instructable posted a video of this technique…



…which, as you can see, has a million and one uses around the home.

This particular Instructable, while full of information, admits that it glosses over the process of making a mould for shaping the glass. However, on step 5 he links to another instructable on Two Part Silicone Casting which will give you the information you need for that.

Instructable Wednesday: Food Stencils

Instructable Wednesday is a weekly look at food and cooking related items from the site Instructables, a DIY site with a great community and all sorts of useful tutorials.

Today, let's look at the "I ♥ Accuracy" Brownies. It has long been a staple of people who love things everywhere to make a heart that has two bumpy bits at the top and a pointy bit at the bottom. That's all well and good, but what about those of us who are pretty sure that a heart doesn't look like that?

Not only is this a handy technique for the anatomically pedantic, but it's also good starting point for making stencils that will work for food. The technique can work with sweet confections such as the brownies, or you could adapt it with flour for bread. Using colored powders or edible spray-paint, you could take this technique to new heights for the stencil-ready foods. Let your imagination run wild.

Think of it like silk screening: anything that could go on a t-shirt could go on food. Not that you'd want everything that has gone onto t-shirts to go onto food, but it gives you an idea of the flexibility of the technique.

Italian Soffrito

A couple of days ago, I received a shipment of 6 liters of the greenest extra virgin olive oil* that you have ever seen. It was from Toscana Saporita, the cooking school my wife and I attended in Italy on our honeymoon. The cooking school is held on a working olive orchard, and the primary output of the estate is olive oil. So people who attend the school get a chance every year to order oil, which we did.

The arrival of the oil reminded me of one of the big lessons of the school: the soffrito. Soffrito is a terribly misunderstood technique, primarily because people don't realize that it is a technique. Raised on cooking television where the mire poix and trinity are common, people figure that the soffrito is the Italian word for mire poix, and so the assumption is that the soffrito is carrots and onion and celery, or perhaps only two of those.

In reality, soffrito means "softly fried", and it's actually the Italian version of "sweating", or cooking aromatic vegetables at a low temperature. It's used in the same way mire poix is, by being a flavorful base to just about anything savory.

The difference between mire poix and soffrito is that it doesn't really matter which aromatic vegetables you use in a soffrito. If you are missing carrots that day, don't fret. Use some more celery! If you have peppers, throw those in. The proportions are not key, the specifics are up to what you have handy when you're cooking. It's Italian: relax.

The technique is basically the same, though. Dice the aromatics into roughly equal-sized pieces, add some salt, andcook over medium-low heat in oil (or butter; whatever) until the vegetables show signs of being cooked. The signs include some increased transparency, being soft, deepening of color, depending on the vegetable.

There ya go. If you're making a soup, throw this together at the beginning for better flavor. If you're making a braise, throw this together for better flavor. Stews, casseroles, sauces, etc etc. Go for it. Don't fret about the specifics, just make sure you have some sort of base, and your food and diners will thank you for it.

*- or, as the Italians call it, "oil."