Food, recipes, and techniques
Tonight, my Kitchenaid Classic Plus stand mixer (13 years old, according to the serial number) started to really heck up in some really obnoxious ways, to the extent that I thought I might need to buy a new mixer. But it turns out that there’s just some simple maintenance tasks that need to be performed, and that all of the issues I was having are very common!
Okay, so, a lot has been said about espresso tonic. But there are other interesting combinations of espresso with carbonated beverages.
One fairly obvious one would be an espresso kola, namely espresso and a cola-type beverage. It’s okay with Coca-Cola but really good when using Q Kola.
Earlier this year, Morgan Eckroth won the US Barista Championship with a signature drink that involved lime extract, mango purée, and orange blossom water (among other things). And those flavors have a profile pretty similar to Q’s tropical ginger beer, so I figured…
Bookmarked: Dish Dragon
Dish Dragon is an interesting site where you tell it one or more ingredients that you have available and it recommends recipes to make with it. Pretty handy if, like me, you tend to accumulate a lot of ingredients with good intention but then never know what to actually cook for dinner. Great for meal planning and so on.
A pretty simple recipe for a very nice cold drink.
Lately on Facebook I’ve seen a lot of ads for a knife sharpening system, particularly one being advertised as by “Wasabi knives.” I was interested in the product, but not $120 interested… but it turns out that all of them are just rebrands of the one by Ruixin Pro, which is a much more palatable price. I paid around $30 for mine, but the price has further dropped to $20, although it seems to vary a lot over time.
Anyway. After a couple of ordering issues (due to my payment not going through) and then a bit of a wait for shipping direct from China, my sharpener finally arrived.
I’ve sharpened all my knives with it now, and I think it’s pretty good! There’s a few things to watch out for, though.
Update: See the update to this post.
I’m still learning how to do good espresso, and my current technique seems to generate better, more repeatable results than before.
Let your beans outgas before grinding them
Inspired, as usual, by a James Hoffmann video, I’ve started doing this much more regularly after noticing that super-fresh-roasted beans keep on resulting in horrible channeling. So now when I get a new bag of beans I put it into my countertop storage and let it sit there while I finish off the previous bag.
Relatedly, rather than keeping my current beans in an airtight container, I’m actually using the hopper on my grinder instead of single-dosing stuff.
Target 15g of ground espresso
I’ve settled on a 15-gram dose. Since I’m now using the hopper instead of single-dosing, I’m continuously adjusting my grind timer; I first tare my scale with the dosing cup, then put the dosing cup under the grinder, run it for my set time, then weigh the ground beans and then adjust the timer based on targeting 15 grams (for example, if my grind time is set to 4.5 seconds and I get 13 grams ground, I adjust the timer to \(4.5s \times 15g/13g = 5.19s\)), and then also grind a bit more until I get to 15 grams. If my initial grind was too much I just go ahead and use a larger dose.
Sideways-tap level, then WDT, then sideways-tap again
I’m no longer using the spinny-spinny leveler, unless I’m having a really difficult time getting the puck level before tamping. I am using a WDT for declumping. I’m still using the crappy WDT but I will someday get around to printing one of the acupuncture-needle ones that everyone’s in love with now.
Calibrated tamper, but go extra
Instead of trying to get a precise pressure-based tamp, I’m using the calibrated tamper by Decent to indicate the minimum force to pack it down by. Apparently it’s easy to undertamp a puck but pretty much impossible to overtamp, and the depth-based tamping I was doing before was way too inconsistent, especially when using lighter roasts (which tend to grind denser).
(If you don’t want to pay the premium for the Decent tamper, this one on Amazon looks pretty okay.)
Extract based on time, not ratio
This is a thing that’s made a huge difference to the quality of my output. Instead of targeting a 1:2 in:out ratio and adjusting the grind to get it closer to 25 seconds, I brew for 25 seconds and then adjust the grind to get it closer to a 1:2 ratio. Extraction time is the primary driver of flavor profile, and a 25-second extraction seems to get pretty close to the peak. So if my grind is too fine I might get a 1:1 ristretto, or if it’s too coarse I might get a 1:3 lungo, but either way I’ll end up with some pretty good-tasting espresso (although a lungo will tend to be a bit more bitter than I like).
For the last few months (since mid-July) I’ve been going through a lot of upgrades and troubleshooting on my coffee setup, especially as far as espresso is involved. I’m finally at the point where I’m happy with both the equipment and technique I have… or at least I think I am.
Here are the products I currently use, and the techniques I’ve found to get the most out of them. As usual, I have affiliate links for many of the products on display, but feel free to search for the best deal or the vendors you prefer.
The Caffe Pompeii Circe (which is labeled as “Gusto” on the pod envelope) is one of the pods that Podhead sent me as a sample. Being fully-caffeinated I was hesitant to drink it (as caffeine hecks me up something fierce), so for the sake of this review I only did a single 16g shot.
This time I used my standard portafilter, so I don’t know whether there was channeling. However, the resulting coffee tasted smooth and well-balanced, and I definitely recommend this one wholeheartedly if you want an ESE pod to brew and don’t have any reason to avoid caffeine.
An hour later I had jitters and a panic attack, as expected. Oh well.
When I ordered a bunch of ESE pods for this ongoing ESE pod experiment, PODhead sent me a few samples of a few other pods. This is one of them. Oddly, I couldn’t find this particular one anywhere on their website, although a websearch turned it up, so it’s probably just something weird about their site navigation.
Also, given some of the extraneous slug text on the link, I worry about whether the links will remain active in the long term as their stock changes. If anyone from PODhead wants to let me know about what’s going on with that, it’d be greatly appreciated!
Anyway, they only gave me two pods, so I can only do a two-shot evaluation. For my first shot I went with a lungo, which I managed to get exactly 21g out. Yay me! The shot pulled cleanly and there was no channeling. Some slight bitter notes, maybe a little bit burned, but nothing unpleasant. Good texture. Left behind some sweet notes on my palate.
For my second shot I opted to go with a standard shot, and got 15g out. Just like with the Cremissimo arabica decaf I paradoxically got something more bitter and overextracted. So, this stuff definitely wants a shot on the longer side. It was still decently drinkable though.
This seems like a decent starter espresso for someone who just wants something simple and no-nonsense, and is somewhat forgiving to overextraction. Someone who doesn’t care about the fiddly details of espresso, or extraction ratios or channeling or texture, someone who has never heard of WDT or calibrated tamping or puck prep or any of the debates about 3 bar vs. 9 bar vs. 15 bar.
I used to be like that.
Sometimes I miss those days.
This coffee is fine.
