Technique: Hand Ground Coffee

I recently decided to replace our beloved coffee grinder - Tom Servo.  Actually, I'm the only one that ever showed any love for Tom Servo, everyone else radiated frustration and despise in his general direction.  Tom Servo is based on an old school coffee maker design.  According to KitchenAid, that model was originally designed in 1937 and was the world's first electric coffee grinder.  Our Tom Servo isn't 70+ years old though, at some point KitchenAid resurrected the model and I was attracted to his retro design.

I know he had his problems.  Most people seem to want their freshly ground coffee collected in some sort of container and presented to them.  Tom Servo doesn't play that way.  He has a spout on his side.  I suspect that his designers imagined coffee would issue forth from this spout and the force of gravity would then collect ground coffee in a waiting glass jar beneath.  Perhaps modern 200 watt motors are more powerful than back in 1937, because in practice Tom Servo ejects a beam of ground coffee out of his side at a surprising velocity and it takes awhile for gravity to catch up.  The unsuspecting and uninitiated operator typically flips his switch and is surprised to find they are standing point blank in front of a geyser of ground coffee that will deflect off of them in to the kitchen at large.  

Over the years I've devised some tools and techniques to help tame Tom Servo.  Primary of which is a flexible plastic wall I set up around his spout when I grind to help direct most of the grounds downwards.  But he has never been fully civilized and domesticated.  In his solid cast iron frame still whirls a feral motor that would just as soon turn gravel into flour as operate on something so dainty as coffee.  

The chances are that given that task of replacing a belligerent coffee grinder designed in 1937 most people would look for something a bit more modern.  Perhaps even a grinder designed in the current century.  Bah! You disgust me most people.  Instead of looking forward I decided to look even further back - and I opted to replace Tom Servo with a hand crank manual coffee maker.  

You see, in our household coffee is either about convenience or luxury.  I brew our weekday morning coffee at the office, so the home coffee makers or called into service when we really need a cup of coffee in the evening or on the weekends.  When convenience is the primary motivator we have a single cup Keurig brewer that quickly and efficiently serves up a decent cup of coffee with minimal effort.  When time and effort or not limiting factors we opt for luxury and we brew via a French press. 

 (I really like that French press in the link. It's a replaceable glass beaker the fits into a rubber and polycarbonate sleeve.  The sleeve does a good job insulating the beaker while the glass beaker is replaceable if we ever drop it.  Most importantly, the plunger is all metal construction so the whole thing is pretty rugged.) 

One of the things that drew me towards a manual grinder is the ability to control the coarseness of the grind.  Most electric grinders give you some latitude when comes to coarseness, but I think they generally expect you to brew using a drip coffee maker and most of them don't grind coffee as coarse as I would like it for our French Press.

The new manual coffee grinder has a huge range of coarseness values that need expiration with.  Instead of a number setting, the coarseness of the grind is controlled via a threaded washer.  To try and record and replicate grinds I've decided to measure how far the inner section of the grinding mechanism protrudes from the outer section on the bottom on the grinder.  I first started with a measurement of about 1/4".  This proved to actually a bit too coarse.  I reduced it to ~3/16" and that seems to be a pretty good setting.  The resulting coffee is robust and favorable without being bitter.

The other nice thing about the manual grinder is its ability to handle oily beans.  Different roasting methods can produce oily beans.  I used to avoid oil beans because after awhile they tended to gunk up Tom Servo and require more frequent cleaning.  The manual grinder seems to handle the oily beans with greater ease.  I suspect this may be a good thing, being that oil on freshly roasted beans may well carry flavors I usually opt out of (or so I hope).  Did I mention that there is now a coffee shop that roasts beans on the premises not a mile from my house?

Current coffee recipe:
Grind beans with ~3/16" setting.
Steep in hot water for 5 minutes in French press.

Technique: Powderfication

This in an interesting technique pulled from the realm of molecular gastronomy to alter the texture of pastes and liquids with a high fat content (think peanut butter, Nutella, and such).  Maltodextrin is added to the paste to form a flavored very fine powder.  When the feathery powder hits the saliva in your mouth it reverts back into a paste.

Maltodextrin is a modified food starch (polysaccharide) that stabilizes fatty substances.  You combine maltodextrin with flavor substance at a ratio of 40:60 and blend in food processor until integrated.  A 40:60 ratio makes it sound like you'll be adding more flavor substance than maltodextrin, and by weight that true, but by volume you'll have way more maltodextrin than other thing.  So I recommend you start weighing out the maltodextrin first, then add the paste second, so you don't overfill your container.  (Voice of experience talking).

Further reading here and here.

My source for maltodextrin was here.

Nitro Powered Infusions

I bought a new toy this week, an iSi Creative Whip.  Ostensibly the Creative Whip is for making whip cream via gas cartridges, but even the gadget's creators recognize that its capable of additional tricks such as "cold espumas, foams, creams, soups, sauces, desserts, batters, dips, toppings, and fizzy garnishes."  I look forward to exploring some of these many uses in the future.  (I've already had it produce a chocolate mousse in a matter of minutes with a pretty amazing texture).  Tonight I was more interested in the possibility of using the gadget to facilitate flavor infusions instead of producing cream or foams.  This has been a hot topic in a couple of food blogs lately.

The key to the technique is to overlook the gadget's ability to produce whips and foams and focus on the fact that it's really just a pressurized canister that you can chunk ingredients into.  According to the Khymos blog:

The science behind this is quite simple: in the pressurized canister nitrous oxide (N2O) dissolves and penetrates the food. When the pressures is suddently released (and it is important to release pressure as fast as possible) the sudden pressure drop causes the dissolved gas to nucleate and form bubbles which expand and disrupt cells, thereby releasing flavor compounds. The physical phenomenon is known as cavitation.

To experiment with this technique I decided to try and infuse a liquid with a couple of different herbs and spices I had laying around the house.  I wanted to go with something neutral to appraise exactly how effective the infusion technique was, so I decided to try it with vodka.  Normally I despise vodka.  I don't really see the point of a liquor that is praised for it's ability to taste like nothing.  However in this case it's inherent blandness was an asset.

Dawn supervised the experiment and helped provide tasting notes.  We selected following items to try and infuse the vodka with: basil, lemongrass, anise, juniper berries, and cacao nibs.  We also decided that we'd prepare the basil two ways - with a pressurized infusion and with a more conventional non-pressurized muddling (kind of like you'd do with mint in a mojito).  At first we tried to infuse the basil under pressure for a minute (the amount of time suggested in one of the blogs above) but we found the resulting infusion to be weak and hardly worth the effort.  We were using both a different sized iSi whipper and different volume of liquid than the aforementioned blog, so that may have made a difference.  Once we increased the infusion time things started to get a bit more interesting.  In the end we opted to go with 50 ml of vodka infused under pressure for 3 minutes.

Here are our tasting notes for our 6 different infusions.

Basil, fresh (muddled: non-pressurized)
A strong basil aroma.  The darkest infusion in terms of color and also a bit cloudy.  Tastes strongly of basil, this could be considered a good thing or perhaps a bit harsh.

Basil, fresh (pressurized)
A fainter basil aroma than the muddled version.  The color is considerably lighter.  The flavor is much more delicate but still definitely basil.

Lemongrass, fresh (pressurized)
A very pleasant lemongrass aroma.  The color is the lightest of all the infusions attempted, almost completely clear.  To spite little change in appearance, the vodka has taken on a very pleasing lemongrass flavor.

Anise, dried (pressurized)
The vodka definitely smells like anise.  The color was in the middle of the pack - darker than the lemongrass infusion but lighter than the muddled basil.  The vodka has been infused with a definite anise flavor but it wasn't nearly as strong as traditional anise flavored liquors such as ouzo, raki, or absinthe.

Junpier Berry, dried (pressurized)
Almost no discernible aroma.  The color was nearly as dark as the muddled basil infusion, but the juniper was clear instead of cloudy.  The vodka acquired a pronounced and pleasing juniper flavor.  I was wondering if we could use this technique to turn boring old vodka into exciting gin.  Not quite.  The infusion was missing gin's other herbal notes.  However, the resulting infusion was very tasty.  Dawn, who dislikes gin, declared that it was happy and "better than gin."

Cacao Nibs (pressurized)
A very faint aroma, I'm not sure I'd be able to place it if I smelled it without knowing it was suppose to be cacao.  The color was by far the most interesting of the infusions we created.  It was pink and rose and almost hinting at violet.  I had read that this was a good infusion, but I was still surprised at just how good it was.  It had a definite chocolate flavor, but it wasn't bitter, or sweet, or creamy.  Just chocolate.  It was quite unlike any chocolate liquor we've ever tasted (probably because it wasn't sweet and creamy).   I find it to be superior to other chocolate liquors.

Verdict
Of the six infusions we made we decided that three had promise.  The lemongrass, juniper, and cacao nibs infusions were both tasty and unlike other liquors we've previously tasted.  The basil infusions were interesting but lacking.  We decided that they needed an additional ingredient to help round them out.

I'm not completely sure the technique is worth the effort for ingredient that easy to muddle (like basil).  I suppose it will produce more delicate flavors and clearer liquid.  It seems to have definite advantage of being able to quickly infuse flavors of difficult to incorporate ingredient such as things that are dried or naturally hard.  (I've tried to make lemongrass martinis in the past with very little success achieving discernible lemongrass notes.)

And no, we did not end up finishing all the infusions we made.  It wasn't that kind of evening.

Technique: Sous Vide

Sous vide is a fancy French word that means "under vacuum".   The cooking technique gets the name because food is normally vacuum sealed in a plastic bag and then placed in precisely controlled water bath.  Though sous vide has been utilized in high-end restaurants for a few decades, it's a relative new method of cooking available to the home cook.

I'm almost embarrassed to even call this a technique, truth be told it's actually pretty hard to screw up cooking sous vide.  Can you put food in a bag?  If so, congratulation!  You are an expert sous vide practitioner.

The only real skill required for successful results is planning.  Sous vide cooking is slow.  You better be thinking ahead if you want to have food ready at a certain time.  Cooking sous vide can take anywhere from 3 to 24 hours.  As a general rule, the thicker the thing you're trying to cook is, the longer it's going to take to cook.

As a method of cooking, sous vide offers a couple of really impressive benefits.  First and foremost, meat comes out moist and tender.  Like, super tender.  The most tender cut of meat you've ever had (trust me, I'm not over selling this).  That's because you set the water bath to the internal temperature of perfectly cooked meat and plunk the bag in there and wait until the entire cut of meat reaches that temperature.  Have you ever had a 2 inch thick fillet mignon medium rare from edge-to-edge?  I have - it's a transcending experience, truly sublime.

You can't overcook food using sous vide.  While it may take awhile for the contents of your bag to reach your target temperature, there is no way the contents of the bag are going to get hotter than the water bath.  This makes sous vide a pretty forgiving method of cooking.  If you start a bit early and end up leaving your steaks in there for five or six hours instead of four they're still going to come out perfectly cooked.  It's no big deal.

Since the food is vacuum sealed in plastic no flavors get out and no flavors get in.  This is kind of a double edge sword.  Whereas most cooking methods rely on chemical changes at high temperatures to add new flavors to food (a.k.a. maillard reactions), sous vide does not reach high temperatures and therefore gets no benefit from those changes. On the other hand, nothing drips away and is lost either.  Whatever you put in the bag is going to have a long slow intimate cook time with your food.  We're talking truer flavors and literally cooking in their own juices because they got nowhere else to go.

Speaking of the juices.  After cooking meat sous vide there are often juices that are naturally released but captured in the plastic bag.  Under no circumstances should these juices be discarded!  It turns out in addition to tender meat, sous vide makes small quantities of super broth.  Taking a moment to turn these juices into a gravy is a very wise thing to do.  Very wise indeed.

It's not all upside.  Turns out that a lot of food benefits greatly from maillard reactions, so sous vide is not a recommended way to cook everything.  Meat, seafood, and eggs are the most obvious candidates.  However  anything that  benefits from precision might be worth a try via sous vide.

If something is not the same without a bit of searing, you can always do a quick sear after the meat has been cooked via sous vide.  I'm especially interested in what happens when you cook meat sous vide, then chill it back down, and use the searing step to warm the meat back up.  More experimentation is required.

There are a few recipe souces for sous vide dishes, but as of yet, they are not all that extensive - meaning if you get a sous vide you probably should expect to do a bit of your own recipe adaptation and/or inventing.

There is a pretty heavy initial investment in equipment up front.  First you need to buy a sous vide (or a commercial immersion circulater if you got really deep pockets), then you've got to buy some means of vacuum sealing.  These are the two that I have, and thus far, I've been pleased with them:

Sous Vide Supreme
FoodSaver V2240