Kostverlorenvaart

Thanks to the editorial staff of Daily Coffee News for featuring this item on their news site ! --- Roasted lupin seed, photo by http://www.lupinfood.eu Food Design Two young product & food designers, Johanna Lundberg (SWE) en Lydeke Bosch (NL) visited me to roast sweet lupin seeds for 'coffee' preparation. Their thesis project for the HKU University of the Arts in Utrecht, The Netherlands is an exploration of the many possibilities for sweet lupin seed in the food industry. Not Poisonous Most lupin flowers that we find in gardens and parks carry poisonous seeds and the few people that have consumed lupin seeds only know them as pickled snacks that have been soaking in salted water for days to remove the bitter taste. The sweet lupin variety however is quite edible and can be used as a major ingredient to bake a cake, make a salad or prepare soup. Roast Profile I had found some basic numbers about roast temperatures for lupin and we used my Fracino Roasti...

A friend of mine, a psychiatrist, writes me: The new psychobabble word I hear is "trigger." I suppose it may have some genuine use in PTSD where intrusive thoughts are instigated by particular sensory inputs, smells often or sounds, and these "triggers" are reproducible. I think they should probably be called false reminders . The treatment of course is to seek out more and more of these triggers and learn how to not be reactive. However I hear the word trigger now from patients to mean "something else, not I, made me feel this way." Someone who had many affairs told me today when he is out with his wife he "gets triggered" in a restaurant where he met a woman he has slept with. Or his latest lover works at the same place, just the shift after him so he sees her still, and certainly is a "trigger" he needs to "work on." I think he means he gets reminded or feels guilty or horny or gets a hard-on. But "trigger"...

I found it very revealing to watch the video (see below) of Jeremy Challender telling the story of him and his colleagues struggling for years to begin to understand how their roasters influence the taste and extraction rate of their coffee. He explains how the VSTlabs refractometer enabled them to measure the extraction rate and this possibility pushed them on a course to see how a different water quality could improve their extractions. Then they moved to bigger burr grinders to see how much that would help get better coffee in the cup. And they tried all sorts of fashionable tamper shapes. Still, their coffee proved to be  under extracted , time and time again. They tried, as many have done years ago, updosing , up to a triple dose for a single espresso to get that   boost in taste at the cost of even more severely under extracted coffee. Today, no one at the 'cutting edge' of specialty coffee plays with these high doses anymore. Eventually they figured out that so...

A friend brought me a few kilograms of green beans. Mandheling from Sumatra. Indonesian beans are not for everyone but I am fascinated by the tones that people call 'earthy'. This origin, if harvested and processed well, reminds me of the spice tea aroma that I delighted in at the Seattle Pike Place Market in 1976 (It may or may not smell like that there today, probably different). Plus something of licorice and bay leaves. The beans that I received needed a lot of sorting though. A good number of them had been cracked and dented by the washing mills that take the fruit pulp off the coffee cherries, others had dark and broken ends, some were tiny as pin heads, had minuscule dark holes bored by insects or pale spots from moisture. Unsorted beans Sorting through these beans again and again is time consuming but very pleasant once one has let go of the notion that time is money. I thought of the women workers who usually do this in the countries of origin, sorting throug...

It has been in the making since last summer and was announced months ago. A new style tamper which allows 'nutating' better and deeper than most tampers. Straight walled tampers help you to tamp straight down but nutating, the soft rolling around of the tamper base to get a better leveled puck, is not so easy with the straight walls. With this new tamper you need to watch carefully and make sure your tamp is level als when it is, the extraction can be delightful (of course also depending on beans, grind and timing). Below are some photos of the unpacking and a first espresso:

[A big thankyou to the editors of Daily Coffee News for writing a feature about this blog:  http://dailycoffeenews.com/2015/03/05/could-steam-poaching-be-the-next-big-thing-in-eggspresso-perfection/ ] One for the series ' Hey I Did Not Know You Could Do THAT With An Espresso Machine' ... Sometimes I use a small heat proof plastic container to quickly make myself apple sauce from sliced apple, or I warm up a small Asian meal in it by inserting the espresso machine steam wand through a hole in the lid. Now I found that it is very easy to prepare an absolutely delicious 'steam poached' egg in the same way. An egg poached in water can taste a bit watery but this way the egg keeps its own clean quality. A sprinkle of salt and pepper help to enhance the pure simple joyful treat. Small speciality coffee places could easily offer this lunch bite without the need for any kitchen equipment. I use the powerful LONDINIUM I home lever but any other professional machine sh...

In august last year I posted a blog about the difference, if any, between flat based tampers an convex based tampers: http://kostverlorenvaart.blogspot.nl/2014/08/tamper-base-flat-or-convex.html My conclusion then was that I could not detect a significant difference. I do like my little effective Londinium Button tamper but I mostly use it to tamp a puck absolutely flat in order to measure the roast color with the Tonino device . For extractions I mostly use the Intelligentsia Black Cat convex . I have ordered the latest Londinium button tamper which allows 'nutating' of the coffee puck so I can't wait to test that. This morning I noticed a tweet by R. Justin Sheperd reporting a dramatic "mind blowing' difference between flat and convex tampers: I had not thought to test the difference with a refractometer and I have the VSTlabs TDS meter at hand so I set out to see if I can replicate the Sheperd results. Shepard did not specify his method, wh...