Brought to Europe from the New World by Spanish explorers, the lowly potato gave rise to modern industrial agriculture
When potato plants bloom, they send up five-lobed flowers that spangle fields like fat purple stars. By some accounts, Marie Antoinette liked the blossoms so much that she put them in her hair. Her husband, Louis XVI, put one in his buttonhole, inspiring a brief vogue in which the French aristocracy swanned around with potato plants on their clothes. The flowers were part of an attempt to persuade French farmers to plant and French diners to eat this strange new species.
Today the potato is the fifth most important crop worldwide, after wheat, corn, rice and sugar cane. But in the 18th century the tuber was a startling novelty, frightening to some, bewildering to others—part of a global ecological convulsion set off by Christopher Columbus.
About 250 million years ago, the world consisted of a single giant landmass now known as Pangaea. Geological forces broke Pangaea apart, creating the continents and hemispheres familiar today. Over the eons, the separate corners of the earth developed wildly different suites of plants and animals. Columbus’ voyages reknit the seams of Pangaea, to borrow a phrase from Alfred W. Crosby, the historian who first described this process. In what Crosby called the Columbian Exchange, the world’s long-separate ecosystems abruptly collided and mixed in a biological bedlam that underlies much of the history we learn in school. The potato flower in Louis XVI’s buttonhole, a species that had crossed the Atlantic from Peru, was both an emblem of the Columbian Exchange and one of its most important aspects.
Compared with grains, tubers are inherently more productive. If the head of a wheat or rice plant grows too big, the plant will fall over, with fatal results. Growing underground, tubers are not limited by the rest of the plant. In 2008 a Lebanese farmer dug up a potato that weighed nearly 25 pounds. It was bigger than his head.
Many researchers believe that the potato’s arrival in northern Europe spelled an end to famine there. (Corn, another American crop, played a similar but smaller role in southern Europe.) More than that, as the historian William H. McNeill has argued, the potato led to empire: “By feeding rapidly growing populations, [it] permitted a handful of European nations to assert dominion over most of the world between 1750 and 1950.” The potato, in other words, fueled the rise of the West.
Equally important, the European and North American adoption of the potato set the template for modern agriculture—the so-called agro-industrial complex. Not only did the Columbian Exchange carry the potato across the Atlantic, it also brought the world’s first intensive fertilizer: Peruvian guano. And when potatoes fell to the attack of another import, the Colorado potato beetle, panicked farmers turned to the first artificial pesticide: a form of arsenic. Competition to produce ever-more-potent arsenic blends launched the modern pesticide industry. In the 1940s and 1950s, improved crops, high-intensity fertilizers and chemical pesticides created the Green Revolution, the explosion of agricultural productivity that transformed farms from Illinois to Indonesia—and set off a political argument about the food supply that grows more intense by the day.
In 1853 an Alsatian sculptor named Andreas Friederich erected a statue of Sir Francis Drake in Offenburg, in southwest Germany. It portrayed the English explorer staring into the horizon in familiar visionary fashion. His right hand rested on the hilt of his sword. His left gripped a potato plant. “Sir Francis Drake,” the base proclaimed,
disseminator of the potato in Europe
in the Year of Our Lord 1586.
Millions of people
who cultivate the earth
bless his immortal memory.
The statue was pulled down by Nazis in early 1939, in the wave of anti-Semitic and anti-foreign measures that followed the violent frenzy known as Kristallnacht. Destroying the statue was a crime against art, not history: Drake almost certainly did not introduce the potato to Europe. And even if he had, most of the credit for the potato surely belongs to the Andean peoples who domesticated it.
Geographically, the Andes are an unlikely birthplace for a major staple crop. The longest mountain range on the planet, it forms an icy barrier on the Pacific Coast of South America 5,500 miles long and in many places more than 22,000 feet high. Active volcanoes scattered along its length are linked by geologic faults, which push against one another and trigger earthquakes, floods and landslides. Even when the land is seismically quiet, the Andean climate is active. Temperatures in the highlands can fluctuate from 75 degrees Fahrenheit to below freezing in a few hours—the air is too thin to hold the heat.
From this unpromising terrain sprang one of the world’s great cultural traditions. Even as Egyptians built the pyramids, Andeans were erecting their own monumental temples and ceremonial plazas. For millennia, contentious peoples jostled for power from Ecuador to northern Chile. Most famous today are the Inca, who seized much of the Andes in a violent flash, built great highways and cities splendid with gold, then fell to Spanish disease and Spanish soldiers. The mountain cultures differed strikingly from one another, but all were nourished by tuber and root crops, the potato most important.
Wild potatoes are laced with solanine and tomatine, toxic compounds believed to defend the plants against attacks from dangerous organisms like fungi, bacteria and human beings. Cooking often breaks down such chemical defenses, but solanine and tomatine are unaffected by heat. In the mountains, guanaco and vicuña (wild relatives of the llama) lick clay before eating poisonous plants. The toxins stick—more technically, “adsorb”—to the fine clay particles in the animals’ stomachs, passing through the digestive system without affecting it. Mimicking this process, mountain peoples apparently learned to dunk wild potatoes in a “gravy” made of clay and water. Eventually they bred less-toxic potatoes, though some of the old, poisonous varieties remain, favored for their resistance to frost. Clay dust is still sold in Peruvian and Bolivian markets to accompany them.
Edible clay by no means exhausted the region’s culinary creativity. To be sure, Andean Indians ate potatoes boiled, baked and mashed, as Europeans do now. But potatoes were also boiled, peeled, chopped and dried to make papas secas; fermented in stagnant water to create sticky, odoriferous toqosh; and ground to pulp, soaked in a jug and filtered to produce almidón de papa (potato starch). Most ubiquitous was chuño, which is made by spreading potatoes outside to freeze on cold nights, then thawing them in the morning sun. Repeated freeze-thaw cycles transform the spuds into soft, juicy blobs. Farmers squeeze out the water to produce chuño: stiff, styrofoam-like nodules much smaller and lighter than the original tubers. Cooked into a spicy Andean stew, they resemble gnocchi, the potato-flour dumplings in central Italy. Chuño can be kept for years without refrigeration—insurance against bad harvests. It was the food that sustained Inca armies.
Even today, some Andean villagers celebrate the potato harvest much as their ancestors did in centuries past. Immediately after pulling potatoes from the ground, families in the fields pile soil into earthen, igloo-shaped ovens 18 inches tall. Into the ovens go the stalks, as well as straw, brush, scraps of wood and cow dung. When the ovens turn white with heat, cooks place fresh potatoes on the ashes for baking. Steam curls up from hot food into the clear, cold air. People dip their potatoes in coarse salt and edible clay. Night winds carry the smell of roasting potatoes for what seems like miles.
The potato Andeans roasted before contact with Europeans was not the modern spud; they cultivated different varieties at different altitudes. Most people in a village planted a few basic types, but most everyone also planted others to have a variety of tastes. (Andean farmers today produce modern, Idaho-style breeds for the market, but describe them as bland—for yahoos in cities.) The result was chaotic diversity. Potatoes in one village at one altitude could look wildly unlike those a few miles away in another village at another altitude.
In 1995, a Peruvian-American research team found that families in one mountain valley in central Peru grew an average of 10.6 traditional varieties—landraces, as they are called, each with its own name. In adjacent villages Karl Zimmerer, an environmental scientist now at Pennsylvania State University, visited fields with up to 20 landraces. The International Potato Center in Peru has preserved almost 5,000 varieties. The range of potatoes in a single Andean field, Zimmerer observed, “exceeds the diversity of nine-tenths of the potato crop of the entire United States.” As a result, the Andean potato is less a single identifiable species than a bubbling stew of related genetic entities. Sorting it out has given taxonomists headaches for decades.
The first Spaniards in the region—the band led by Francisco Pizarro, who landed in 1532—noticed Indians eating these strange, round objects and emulated them, often reluctantly. News of the new food spread rapidly. Within three decades, Spanish farmers as far away as the Canary Islands were exporting potatoes to France and the Netherlands (which were then part of the Spanish empire). The first scientific description of the potato appeared in 1596, when the Swiss naturalist Gaspard Bauhin awarded it the name Solanum tuberosum esculentum (later simplified to Solanum tuberosum).
Unlike any previous European crop, potatoes are grown not from seed but from little chunks of tuber—the misnamed “seed potatoes.” Continental farmers regarded this alien food with fascinated suspicion; some believed it an aphrodisiac, others a cause of fever or leprosy. The philosopher-critic Denis Diderot took a middle stance in his Encyclopedia (1751-65), Europe’s first general compendium of Enlightenment thought. “No matter how you prepare it, the root is tasteless and starchy,” he wrote. “It cannot be regarded as an enjoyable food, but it provides abundant, reasonably healthy food for men who want nothing but sustenance.” Diderot viewed the potato as “windy.” (It caused gas.) Still, he gave it the thumbs up. “What is windiness,” he asked, “to the strong bodies of peasants and laborers?”
With such halfhearted endorsements, the potato spread slowly. When Prussia was hit by famine in 1744, King Frederick the Great, a potato enthusiast, had to order the peasantry to eat the tubers. In England, 18th-century farmers denounced S. tuberosum as an advance scout for hated Roman Catholicism. “No Potatoes, No Popery!” was an election slogan in 1765. France was especially slow to adopt the spud. Into the fray stepped Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the potato’s Johnny Appleseed.
Trained as a pharmacist, Parmentier served in the army during the Seven Years’ War and was captured by the Prussians—five times. During his multiple prison stints he ate little but potatoes, a diet that kept him in good health. His surprise at this outcome led Parmentier to become a pioneering nutritional chemist after the war ended, in 1763; he devoted the rest of his life to promulgating S. tuberosum.
Parmentier’s timing was good. After Louis XVI was crowned in 1775, he lifted price controls on grain. Bread prices shot up, sparking what became known as the Flour War: more than 300 civil disturbances in 82 towns. Parmentier tirelessly proclaimed that France would stop fighting over bread if only her citizens would eat potatoes. Meanwhile, he set up one publicity stunt after another: presenting an all-potato dinner to high-society guests (the story goes that Thomas Jefferson, one of the guests, was so delighted he introduced French fries to America); supposedly persuading the king and queen to wear potato blossoms; and planting 40 acres of potatoes at the edge of Paris, knowing that famished commoners would steal them.
In exalting the potato, Parmentier unwittingly changed it. All of Europe’s potatoes descended from a few tubers sent across the ocean by curious Spaniards. When farmers plant pieces of tuber, rather than seeds, the resultant sprouts are clones. By urging potato cultivation on a massive scale, Parmentier was unknowingly promoting the notion of planting huge areas with clones—a true monoculture.
The effects of this transformation were so striking that any general history of Europe without an entry in its index for S. tuberosum should be ignored. Hunger was a familiar presence in 17th- and 18th-century Europe. Cities were provisioned reasonably well in most years, their granaries carefully monitored, but country people teetered on a precipice. France, the historian Fernand Braudel once calculated, had 40 nationwide famines between 1500 and 1800, more than one per decade. This appalling figure is an underestimate, he wrote, “because it omits the hundreds and hundreds of local famines.” France was not exceptional; England had 17 national and big regional famines between 1523 and 1623. The continent simply could not reliably feed itself.
The potato changed all that. Every year, many farmers left fallow as much as half of their grain land, to rest the soil and fight weeds (which were plowed under in summer). Now smallholders could grow potatoes on the fallow land, controlling weeds by hoeing. Because potatoes were so productive, the effective result, in terms of calories, was to double Europe’s food supply.
“For the first time in the history of western Europe, a definitive solution had been found to the food problem,” the Belgian historian Christian Vandenbroeke concluded in the 1970s. By the end of the 18th century, potatoes had become in much of Europe what they were in the Andes—a staple. Roughly 40 percent of the Irish ate no solid food other than potatoes; the figure was between 10 percent and 30 percent in the Netherlands, Belgium, Prussia and perhaps Poland. Routine famine almost disappeared in potato country, a 2,000-mile band that stretched from Ireland in the west to Russia’s Ural Mountains in the east. At long last, the continent could produce its own dinner.
It was said that the Chincha Islands gave off a stench so intense they were difficult to approach. The Chinchas are a clutch of three dry, granitic islands 13 miles off the southern coast of Peru. Almost nothing grows on them. Their sole distinction is a population of seabirds, especially the Peruvian booby, the Peruvian pelican and the Peruvian cormorant. Attracted by the vast schools of fish along the coast, the birds have nested on the Chincha Islands for millennia. Over time they covered the islands with a layer of guano up to 150 feet thick.
Guano, the dried remains of birds’ semisolid urine, makes excellent fertilizer—a mechanism for giving plants nitrogen, which they need to make chlorophyll, the green molecule that absorbs the sun’s energy for photosynthesis. Although most of the atmosphere consists of nitrogen, the gas is made from two nitrogen atoms bonded so tightly to each other that plants cannot split them apart for use. As a result, plants seek usable nitrogen-containing compounds like ammonia and nitrates from the soil. Alas, soil bacteria constantly digest these substances, so they are always in lesser supply than farmers would like.
In 1840, the organic chemist Justus von Liebig published a pioneering treatise that explained how plants depend on nitrogen. Along the way, he extolled guano as an excellent source of it. Sophisticated farmers, many of them big landowners, raced to buy the stuff. Their yields doubled, even tripled. Fertility in a bag! Prosperity that could be bought in a store!
Guano mania took hold. In 40 years, Peru exported about 13 million tons of it, the great majority dug under ghastly working conditions by slaves from China. Journalists decried the exploitation, but the public’s outrage instead was largely focused on Peru’s guano monopoly. The British Farmer’s Magazine laid out the problem in 1854: “We do not get anything like the quantity we require; we want a great deal more; but at the same time, we want it at a lower price.” If Peru insisted on getting a lot of money for a valuable product, the only solution was invasion. Seize the guano islands! Spurred by public fury, the U.S. Congress passed the Guano Islands Act in 1856, authorizing Americans to seize any guano deposits they discovered. Over the next half-century, U.S. merchants claimed 94 islands, cays, coral heads and atolls.
From today’s perspective, the outrage—threats of legal action, whispers of war, editorials on the Guano Question—is hard to understand. But agriculture was then “the central economic activity of every nation,” as the environmental historian Shawn William Miller has pointed out. “A nation’s fertility, which was set by the soil’s natural bounds, inevitably shaped national economic success.” In just a few years, agriculture in Europe and the United States had become as dependent on high-intensity fertilizer as transportation is today on petroleum—a dependency it has not shaken since.
Guano set the template for modern agriculture. Ever since von Liebig, farmers have treated the land as a medium into which they dump bags of chemical nutrients brought in from far away so they can harvest high volumes for shipment to distant markets. To maximize crop yields, farmers plant ever-larger fields with a single crop—industrial monoculture, as it is called.
Before the potato (and corn), before intensive fertilization, European living standards were roughly equivalent to those in Cameroon and Bangladesh today. On average, European peasants ate less per day than hunting-and-gathering societies in Africa or the Amazon. Industrial monoculture allowed billions of people—in Europe first, and then in much of the rest of the world—to escape poverty. The revolution begun by potatoes, corn and guano has allowed living standards to double or triple worldwide even as human numbers climbed from fewer than one billion in 1700 to some seven billion today.
The name Phytophthora infestans means, more or less, “vexing plant destroyer.” P. infestans is an oomycete, one of 700 or so species sometimes known as water molds. It sends out tiny bags of 6 to 12 spores that are carried on the wind, usually for no more than 20 feet, occasionally for half a mile or more. When the bag lands on a susceptible plant, it breaks open, releasing what are technically known as zoospores. If the day is warm and wet enough, the zoospores germinate, sending threadlike filaments into the leaf. The first obvious symptoms—purple-black or purple-brown spots on the leaves—are visible in about five days. By then it is often too late for the plant to survive.
P. infestans preys on species in the nightshade family, especially potatoes and tomatoes. Scientists believe that it originated in Peru. Large-scale traffic between Peru and northern Europe began with the guano rush. Proof will never be found, but it is widely believed that the guano ships carried P. infestans. Probably taken to Antwerp, P. infestans first broke out in early summer 1845, in the West Flanders town of Kortrijk, six miles from the French border.
The blight hopscotched to Paris by that August. Weeks later, it was destroying potatoes in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and England. Governments panicked. It was reported in Ireland on September 13, 1845. Cormac O Grada, an economist and blight historian at University College, Dublin, has estimated that Irish farmers planted about 2.1 million acres of potatoes that year. In two months P. infestans wiped out the equivalent of one-half to three-quarters of a million acres. The next year was worse, as was the year after that. The attack did not wind down until 1852. A million or more Irish people died—one of the deadliest famines in history, in the percentage of population lost. A similar famine in the United States today would kill almost 40 million people.
Within a decade, two million more had fled Ireland, almost three-quarters of them to the United States. Many more would follow. As late as the 1960s, Ireland’s population was half what it had been in 1840. Today the nation has the melancholy distinction of being the only country in Europe, and perhaps the world, to have fewer people within the same boundaries than it did more than 150 years ago.
Despite its ghastly outcome, P. infestans may be less important in the long run than another imported species: Leptinotarsa decemlineata, the Colorado potato beetle. Its name notwithstanding, this orange-and-black creature is not from Colorado. Nor did it have much interest in potatoes in its original habitat, in south-central Mexico; its diet centered on buffalo bur, a weedy, spiny, knee-high potato relative. Biologists believe that buffalo bur was confined to Mexico until Spaniards, agents of the Columbian Exchange, carried horses and cows to the Americas. Quickly realizing the usefulness of these animals, Indians stole as many as they could, sending them north for their families to ride and eat. Buffalo bur apparently came along, tangled in horse manes, cow tails and native saddlebags. The beetle followed. In the early 1860s it encountered the cultivated potato around the Missouri River and liked what it tasted.
For millennia the potato beetle had made do with the buffalo bur scattered through the Mexican hills. By comparison, an Iowa farm, its fields solid with potatoes, was an ocean of breakfast. Because growers planted just a few varieties of a single species, pests like the beetle and the blight had a narrower range of natural defenses to overcome. If they could adapt to potatoes in one place, they could jump from one identical food pool to the next—a task made easier than ever thanks to inventions like railroads, steamships and refrigeration. Beetles spread in such numbers that by the time they reached the Atlantic Coast, their glittering orange bodies carpeted beaches and made railway tracks so slippery as to be impassable.
Desperate farmers tried everything they could to rid themselves of the invaders. Eventually one man apparently threw some leftover green paint on his infested plants. It worked. The emerald pigment in the paint was Paris green, made largely from arsenic and copper. Developed in the late 18th century, it was common in paints, fabrics and wallpaper. Farmers diluted it with flour and dusted it on their potatoes or mixed it with water and sprayed.
To potato farmers, Paris green was a godsend. To chemists, it was something that could be tinkered with. If arsenic killed potato beetles, why not try it on other pests? If Paris green worked, why not try other chemicals for other agricultural problems? In the mid-1880s a French researcher discovered that spraying a solution of copper sulfate and lime would kill P. infestans. Spraying potatoes with Paris green, then copper sulfate would take care of both the beetle and the blight. The modern pesticide industry had begun.
As early as 1912 beetles began showing signs of immunity to Paris green. Farmers didn’t notice, though, because the pesticide industry kept coming up with new arsenic compounds that kept killing potato beetles. By the 1940s growers on Long Island found they had to use ever-greater quantities of the newest variant, calcium arsenate. After World War II an entirely new type of pesticide came into wide use: DDT. Farmers bought DDT and exulted as insects vanished from their fields. The celebration lasted about seven years. The beetle adapted. Potato growers demanded new chemicals. The industry provided dieldrin. It lasted about three years. By the mid-1980s, a new pesticide in the eastern United States was good for about a single planting.
In what critics call the “toxic treadmill,” potato farmers now treat their crops a dozen or more times a season with an ever-changing cavalcade of deadly substances. Nonetheless, the pests keep coming back. Researchers were dismayed in the 1980s to discover that new types of P. infestans had found their way to Europe and America. They were more virulent—and more resistant to metalaxyl, the chief current anti-blight treatment. No good substitute has yet appeared.
In 2009, potato blight wiped out most of the tomatoes and potatoes on the East Coast of the United States. Driven by an unusually wet summer, it turned gardens into slime. It destroyed the few tomatoes in my New England garden that hadn’t been drowned by rain. Accurately or not, one of my farming neighbors blamed the attack on the Columbian Exchange. More specifically, he said blight had arrived on tomato seedlings sold in big-box stores. “Those tomatoes,” he said direly, “come from China.”
Adapted with permission from 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, by Charles C. Mann. Copyright © 2011 Charles C. Mann.
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Friday, December 23, 2011
Coffee
How can I keep drinking coffee and prevent my teeth from getting stained? Tooth stains from coffee are caused by numerous polyphenols found in coffee which adhere to the outside of your teeth. Ironically, polyphenols due confer protection to your teeth from acids and make give coffee the complex flavors many people enjoy, so you need to find a balance you are comfortable with.
Here is a list ways you can limit the staining effects of the coffee you drink:
Drink your coffee with high fat animal milk (and no it isn't because milk is white). Animal milk proteins bind polyphenols (at least until the coffee reaches your stomach) and bind better the higher the fat content of the milk. Soy milk, etc. will not reduce staining.
Drink coffee made from 100% Arabica Beans that were dry processed (Robusta beans have more polyphenols....and more caffeine).
Select a brewing method that extracts less polyphenols. This also means less caffeine unfortunately. This is a longer discussion point so here is a link to the details: http://www.freysmiles.com/blog/v...
Decrease contact of the coffee with your teeth (already covered by Danish Qadri). You can do this by drinking it very quickly (much easier with espresso), or by drinking with a straw aimed at the back of your tongue (not super comfy). Rinsing also
Aside from reducing the staining impact from the coffee itself, you can (and will still have to) treat the effects of the coffee.
Use a Sonicare toothbrush. Studies have shown that using a Sonicare will reduce stain formation on teeth. Plaque has a tendency to imbibe stains and keeping your teeth clean will slow stain formation. I wouldn't brush immediately after drinking coffee because your teeth may still be "soft" from the acidity in the coffee, as long as you thoroughly clean your teeth 1 to 2 times a day this will take care of the plaque. Also do not use whitening toothpastes (see the post What is the best toothpaste?)
Whiten your teeth occasionally. This is best done through your dentist since they can provide you with bleaching agents (either trays or in office treatments) that provide the best color stability (your teeth will be whiter longer), and also can administer additional treatment to whiten teeth safely. I need to stress that you definitely should not whiten too much, it strips your teeth of its natural protective protein coating. Take at least a couple months off in between whitening cycles for maximal tooth health.
What is the finest coffee bean in the world? The finest coffee bean is undoubtedly sourced from the Arabica species. Also since Colombian Arabica beans are traded in a class of their own and attract a higher price than any other coffee bean class on world markets, I guess Columbian Arabica beans are considered by the market as the finest. However, there are gems to be found throughout the world with some just confined to specific estates. The following are generally considered the finest coffees in their country and quite possibly, the world:
Ankola: One of the world's best and most famous Arabica coffees grown around the northern port of Padang in west-central Sumatra. It is noted for its deep richness, full body and long finish together with just enough interesting acidity. Ankola coffee beans are often associated with the market name Mandheling. They are both grown at altitudes of 2,500 to 5,000 feet and are dry processed but the dried husk are removed with a hot water process which many believe contributes to its unique flavour characteristics.
Antigua: Is the market name for one of the best and most distinctively flavored coffees of the world. It is grown in the valley surrounding Antigua, which is the old capital of Guatemala.
Arona: One of Papua New Guinea’s most famous brand of Arabica coffee beans. It is grown in the Arona Valley in the Eastern Highlands Province. It is noted for its full body and its deep almost smoky like taste.
Barahona: Is the market name for a high grown coffee in the southwest of the Dominican Republic. Named after the city and province that bears the same name. It is considered by many to be the best coffee of the Dominican Republic and is identified by its increased acidity yet heavier-bodied cup.
Bogota: This as a brand of coffee beans grown in the eastern mountainous (cordillera) region of Colombia. Considered by some to be one of Colombia's finest coffees and it is definitely one of its most famous. It takes its name from the capital Bogota from which it is marketed.
Bourbon Santos: Also marketed under the name of just ‘Santos’. It refers to a category of high-quality coffees from Brazil that are usually shipped through the port of Santos and that are grown in the state of São Paulo or the southern part of the State of Minas Gerais. The term properly describes the finest grade of Brazilian coffee produced from the Bourbon cultivar of Arabica. This cultivar tends to produce a softer, fruitier, smoother flavor with a medium body and more acidity than other varieties grown in Brazil.
Bugishu: Is the market name for an Arabica coffee grown from the slopes of Mt. Elgon in Uganda near Kenya. It is considered by some to be the best coffee Uganda has to offer in contrast to the Robusta coffee which makes up most of Uganda’s coffee bean production.
Celebes Toraja: Is a market name for one of the world’s finest coffees from Celebes (now known as Sulawesi) in Indonesia.
Coban: Is a market name for a respected high-grown coffee from north-central Guatemala. Noted as one of world’s best and most distinctively flavored coffees.
Grand Lares: Along with Yauco Selecto it is one of the world’s great coffee beans supplied by Puerto Rico. Grown in the south central part of the country it is noted for its balanced body, bright acidity and fruity aroma.
Harar/Harrar: A Ethiopian Arabica bean that is grown at 4,800-7,500 feet in the northern part of state. The state produces two distinct varieties, the Longberry Harar which is considered to be the more desirable taste to the second shortberry variety. It is garden grown and cultivated from the species obtained from the south-west of the state. They are considered to be one of the world’s most prized coffees because they possess a complex medium to light acidity with full body and a unique winey/fruit wild-blueberry-like aroma. The beans are dry processed and have a slightly yellowish-green coloring.
Jamaican Blue Mountain: Is a single-origin coffee grown above 3,000 feet in the Blue Mountain District of Jamaica. It is noted for its exceptionally rich, complex and bouillon-like flavour. This balanced, classic coffee contains a rich flavor, full body and a smooth yet vibrant acidity. This exceptional taste quality coupled with its short supply, has made it one of the world's most celebrated coffees.
Kona: A single-origin coffee from the Kona coast of the Island of Hawaii. The best Kona coffee displays a classic balance between a medium body, a good acidity and culminating in a rich complex aroma and flavor.
Lintong: Market name for the most admired coffee of the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. This coffee grows in the Lake Toba area toward the northern end of the island. Whilst it is a term used to describe a broader group of coffee beans, it properly only describes coffees grown in a relatively small region just southwest of Lake Toba in the Kecamatan or the district of Lintongnihuta. Small plots of coffee producers are scattered over the high, undulating plateau of fern-covered clay and is grown without shade or chemicals of any kind.
Mandheling: Is a more comprehensive designation that refers to both Lintong coffees and to any coffees grown under similar conditions in the region of Diari, north of Lake Toba, Sumatra, Indonesia. It is recognised as one of the world’s most famous coffees. It is also the name of a Coffea canephora variety that was cultivated in the same area of Indonesia.
Mattari: The Market name for one of the most admired coffees from Yemen. Grown in the Bani Mattar area west of the capital city of Sana'a, it is usually a winier, fruitier and sharper version of the Yemen chocolatey style. This coffee is dry processed.
Mérida: Is the market name for one of the most respected and most characteristic Venezuela coffees. It is described as delicate and sweet in the cup yet full bodied with a mellow rich flavor.
Ocoa: The market name for one of the better-respected, well balanced coffees from the Dominican Republic. It is a wet-processed coffee that is noted for its sweetness. Most of this coffee is exported to European markets.
Tarrazu: Coffee named after the town of San Marcos de Tarrazu. It is the market name for one of the Costa Rica’s and in fact the world’s better coffees. It is grown in rich volcanic soil in the south of the state at elevations of between 3,900 – 5,000 feet.
Yauco Selecto: This is an Arabica (var. Bourbon) coffee bean from a region of Puerto Rico and is grown high in the mountains above 3,000 feet. It is one of the finest coffees of the Caribbean but it can be subject to some commercial inconsistency. Often likened to the balanced perfection of the Jamaica Blue Mountain because of its deep, vibrant, yet restrained acidity and gently rich flavor. Two famous estates in the region include Hecienda San Pedro and Santa Ana.
Yirgacheffe/Yirga Cheffe: The market name for one of the most famous Ethiopian washed Arabica coffee bean gardens grown at 5,000-7,500 feet in the south central Sidamo region near the boarder with Kenya and the village of Yirga Ch'efe. Regarded by many as the ‘cream of the crop’ of all coffees grown in the horn of Africa. It has unparalleled fruity aroma and is distinguished by its lemon/fruit-like and distinct tart bite floral acidity. The body is light and elegant whilst the flavour is complex leaving a rich floral finish and an almost menthol aftertaste. It is believed that these trees were cultivated from the varieties of the south-west of the state. Sometimes spelled "Yirgacheffe".
What are the best practices for tamping ground coffee when making espresso?
Best practices for tamping ground coffee when making espresso include:
ensure that the process does no put undue pressure on the wrist because Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) can occur over time if the wrist is engaged in the pressure tamping.
exert sufficient pressure to ensure that the ground coffee does not move in the process of engaging the portafilter with the group head. The 'screw-up' pressure on the grounds as the portafilter engages tightly with the group head will exert far more pressure on the grounds than the tamp ever will.
make sure all lose coffee grains have been removed from the portafilter edge so that an impenetrable seal is formed with the group head (i.e. no loss of pump pressure through the ground coffee) and so that there is minimal wear and tear on the rubber seal.
tip, tap or shake lose grains from the coffee filled portafilter to minimize the amount that gets caught in the group head shower screen in the extraction process.
choose the appropriate tamper. while the two-handed separate bench-tamper is safer for RSI it creates inefficiencies in a busy espresso making environment as compared with the on-grinder 'lift & tamp'.
check the spent coffee puck after extraction to ensure no pit-holes, no side cavities, the group head screw imprint is visible in the grounds and the puck that is dry, solid and removes easily in one piece from the portafilter with a single firm tap. This usually means you got the whole extraction process 'about right'.
Of all the variables involved in extracting the perfect espresso, I have found that tamping makes the least significant contribution.
The other variables all play a much more significant role in getting that perfect extraction of espresso. These other variables are:
coffee bean species (Arabica)
bean quality/grade (AA, SHB, Supremo)
roast (mid-dark)
freshness (less than 2 weeks for beans, less than 15 minutes ground)
grinder/grind (commercial conical, fine powder)
dose size (maximum for the filter that the machine will allow)
filter & shower head (spotless)
portafilter seal with group head (non-penetrable under 10 bar pressure)
water quality (filtered & demineralized),
temperature (94 degrees) and
run time (20-25 seconds)
Because I fill my portafilter to the maximum amount, I use the tamping process to simply work the pack of mound coffee into a usable form that is shaped slightly higher at the edges than the middle. This properly and neatly shaped ground coffee in the portafilter can then be more easily connected with the espresso machine without causing spillage and interfeering with the very important need to have a tight non-penetrable seal between the portafilter and the group. The arm pressure action of screw tightening the portafilter up firmly against the shower head in the group, packs the ground coffee anyway, and at a pressure that I believe is in excess of what any previous wrist tamping processes could apply. Note: The connection lugs on the side of the portafilter are ramp-shaped to force the ground coffee up against the group shower head as you tighten it. This action also pushes the raised coffee at the edge (as shaped by the tampa) into the middle to ensure there is no place for the pressured hot water to go except through the finely ground coffee in order to extract only the highly desirable 'coffee oils'.
So, I see tamping as a necessary part of the espresso making process but I don't believe that varying the wrist tamping pressure contributes in any significant way to the extraction of the perfect espresso.
The most significant thing to be concerned about in the tamping process, from my point of view, is the workplace issue that Darryl Lin raises - i.e. the potential for Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) caused by incorrect technique and posture while repeatedly placing tamping pressure strain on a wrist that was not structurally designed for this type of work.
How does a shot of espresso compare to a cup of coffee in terms of caffeine?
According to the respected espresso coffee industry leader illy coffee http://www.illy.com/wps/wcm/conn...
The average cup of espresso has 78mg of caffeine
According to the United Kingdom's Food Standards Agency - http://www.food.gov.uk/science/s...
The average cup of instant coffee has 75mg of caffeine
The average cup of brewed, percolated and drip coffee has 100mg
All the analysis I have read constantly identifies brewed, percolated and drip coffee as having more caffeine than espresso coffee (up to 125mg) and that's comparing it with a 30ml espresso extraction which I think is 5ml more than ideal.
Some research believes that it is the length of time that the hot water comes in contact with the ground coffee that produces the extra caffeine content. In espresso it is about 20-25 seconds while it is much longer in the brewed, percolated and drip coffee methods.
Interestingly the better quality beans (Arabica) have about half the caffeine content of the cheaper ones (Robusta). So, I reckon that a 25ml shot of espresso made on 100% Arabica beans is a good option for reducing your caffeine intake while still enjoying that 'elixir of the gods
Why does an espresso in almost any Italian coffee shop taste so much better than an espresso anywhere else in Europe (or the world for that matter)?
Philipp M. W. Hoffmann got it about right when he identified that the experience of the average Italian barista is many times greater than that of the baristas making espresso in popular cafe chains in other parts of the world who all stand behind Italian made or Italian designed espresso machines and grinders. Let's face it, the Italians have been passionate about espresso for over 100 years - the rest of us are just playing 'catch-up'. The average age of Italian baristas is 45 ... so, you can taste the experience in every cup.
I guess the fact that Italians have a rich history of inventions in pursuit of the perfect espresso, also has a lot to do with their mastery of this particular process. These Italians include:
Angelo Moriondo who patented a bulk coffee brewer in 1885, capable of producing fifty cups and was first to separate the steam and water into two distinct functions in the espresso making process.
Luigi Bezzera whose espresso coffee machine invention named the ‘Tipo Gigante’ in 1901, made espresso just ‘one cup at a time’.
M. Cremonesi who developed the piston pump in 1928, which significantly improved the espresso coffee making process and taste.
Francesco Illy who in 1935 invented the first automatic coffee machine called the "illetta", that substituted compressed air for steam in the espresso extraction process.
Achilles Gaggia who with a machine called the “Crema Caffe” in 1947, perfected espresso coffee making by introducing a piston lever that extracted the perfect espresso via the application of intense pressure to the ground coffee beans.
Ernesto Valente, the father of the Faema brand of espresso machines, who in the 1960's produced the first pump driven espresso machine called the "Faema E61". This design concept remains the benchmark for espresso coffee machines even up till today.
Also, Italians generally drink their coffee in its purest form ... espresso. Espresso (short black) provides the barista with no opportunity to mask a poorly extracted espresso coffee with milk, cream, powders and flavor additives as they do in other parts of the world. So, baristas in Italy keep their jobs by constantly providing their Italian customers with the flavorsome coffee oils which they expertly derive from each perfectly extracted shot of espresso.
From the smallest Italian railway station to the historic cafes of Caffe Florian, Baratti & Milano Caffe, Pedrocchi Coffee House and Caffe Greco, we tourists are simply the beneficiaries of all this experience ... this masterful know-how ... this peculiar Italian passion for the perfect espresso.
Why did coffee become a popular beverage worldwide?
Coffee became a popular global beverage due to a series of unique historic events. These events built one upon the other to eventually create what we have today where coffee is the 2nd most traded commodity in the world, beaten only by oil.
Here's how it happened:
Its discovery - in 600 the legend claims coffee's discovery by the goat herder Kaldi in Abyssinia (present day Ethiopia).
Its use in medicine - in 1000 Avicenna, Mahommedan physician and philosopher, and other Arabian physicians are using coffee, which they call bunchum, for its medicinal properties.
Roasting discovered - in 1200 the Turkish people discover the flavor enhancements achieved by roasting the coffee beans.
Cultivation begins - in 1300 the people of Yemen see a buck in cultivating coffee and selling it to Arabian traders.
The Koran - in 1400 alcohol is declared forbidden by the Koran, so coffee then becomes the replacement stimulant drink for Muslims.
Coffee shops concept - in 1453 the first known coffee shop is opened in Constantinople (later called Istanbul) and called “Kiva Han”. Coffee as a beverage begins it's journey to commercialization.
Europe imports - in the 1500’s European travelers to Arabia discover the coffee beverage and traders start selling coffee into Europe from the ports of Alexandria and Smyrna.
The Pope decrees - in the 1600’s Pope Clement VIII baptizes coffee drinking, making it an acceptable beverage for Christians. Coffee's future is secured with the two greatest religions in the world accepting its consumption.
India cultivates - in 1650 a Muslim pilgrim from India named Baba Budan was the first to sneak some fertile seeds out of Arabia and into India. So begins the coffee plant spread from the 1,000 year monopolistic control of coffee by the Arabian states.
Coffeehouses proliferate - in 1652 the first coffeehouse is opened in Oxford England and the concept quickly proliferates throughout England.
France adopts it - in 1669 the Ambassador of the Turkish Ottoman Empire to the court of Louis XIV in Paris brought coffee into fashion in Parisian High Society.
The Dutch trade - in 1690 the Dutch smuggled live coffee plants from the Arabian port of Mocha, and cultivate coffee commercially, in Ceylon and in their East Indian colony of Java. In the Dutch golden age of the 1700's, their merchant fleets trade with all parts of the globe carrying the coffee beverage and beans with them.
The one plant - in 1714 the Burgomaster of Amsterdam gave King Louis XIV of France a seedling coffee plant from the Amsterdam Botanical Gardens as a gift. In 1720 Chevalier Gabriel Mathiew de Clieu, removes a coffee plant from the King's glass house and takes it with him to Martinique in the Caribbean. He establishes a plantation in Martinique that eventually becomes the source for 90 percent of the world's coffee plantations.
"The Boston Tea Party" - in 1773 America changed from drinking (English) tea to coffee which was seen at the time as their patriotic duty.
Brazilian excess - in the late 1800’s Brazil's coffee plantations expand excessively turning coffee from a drink only for the elite into an everyday drink for the people, due to the price drop generated from the oversupply.
Instant coffee invented - in 1906 George Constant Washington, an English chemist living in Guatemala, invents instant coffee and creates the first mass-produced instant coffee called Red E Coffee.
Prohibition promotes it - in the 1920s prohibition goes into effect in the United States which only serves to create a boom in coffee sales and consumption.
Illy commercializes espresso - in 1933 Dr. Ernest Illy develops the first automatic espresso machine which opens the way for the commercially viable sale of espresso coffee
Nescafé solves Brazil's problems - in 1938 the Nestlé company developed its own freeze dried instant coffee to assist the Brazilian government in solving its coffee surplus problem.
American globalization - America exports it culture (including coffee drinking) to the world via the golden age of Hollywood (1927- 1945) and with the American soldier's issue of instant Maxwell House coffee in their WW2 ration kits.
... and TV does the rest - the advent of TV in the 1950 coinciding with coffee's abundant supply (low cost), it's global acceptance, innovative product (instant) and a company like Nestles to exploit the medium and the product with advertisments. Coffee ads generated an instant use as an accompanyment to the TV experience. Nestle's + TV + Instant coffee completes the global phenomenon that is the coffee drink.
Coffee today, in 2011, is regarded as one of the world's most popular beverage with more than 450 billion cups being consumed each year, but it may never have happened if any of the key historical links above had not each played their part in bringing it about.
What are the most common coffee faults, and how do you detect them?
The most common coffee faults are usually detected and removed long before the extract from the ground coffee beans are enjoyed by us at our favorite cafe or at our home espresso maker. Still, in spite of the scrutiny, a few common faults make it through the grading processes at the farm, processing center, importing agent and roaster and so end up in the consumer's roasted coffee bean mix.
Green bean coffee faults
Green coffee bean faults or defects are usually caused by natural and human failures in the picking, processing, drying, sorting, storage, or transportation stages of the green coffee bean production. Further human failures can create coffee faults at the roaster and in the distribution and storage of the roasted coffee beans.Discoloration in the green beans is created from the oxidation of the damaged areas of the bean and off-flavors will result. Discolored beans roast unevenly, age rapidly, and even just a few are capable of significantly reducing the overall coffee taste.
The most common discoloration is identified by the black, deep blue, or dark brown surface areas on the green bean. Green beans with more than 25% of this discoloration are known as Black Beans (on the New York Coffee Exchange) and are considered to have a significant detrimental effect on the coffee taste.
'Black Beans' and other types of discolorations are typically caused by:
harvesting immature coffee cherries
harvesting dead cherries that fell naturally from the trees.
exposure to water and heat at the wrong time in the process
wet processed beans that have been cut or bruised by the machinery during the pulping stage
beans that were dried too rapidly causing them to fade in color
faulty fermentation, improper washing, over drying, or by harvesting over-ripe coffee cherries creating a brown or rust color on the green coffee bean
uneven drying during processing causing blotchy discolorations.
green bean that have been left too long in the fermentation tanks under the natural fermentation method and have become discolored by putrefactive bacteria which attacks the proteins causing the beans to sour. These are often identified by their yellow or redish brown color.
picking over ripe coffee cherries that become 'stinkers' and produce an unpleasant or even foul taste. One or two stinker beans can spoil a whole batch of coffee.
Common green bean defects caused by natural failures that can also produce poor tasting coffee include:
insect-damage i.e. Coffee Berry Borer (CBB) is one of the most significant pest problems for coffee farmers.
disease damaged coffee beans mostly caused by fungus (mold). i.e. Coffee Leaf Rust (CLR), Coffee Berry Disease (CBD)
Grading is the simplest way to identify faulty coffee beans
All stakeholders in the coffee industry are interested in a grading process that is able to identify and separate quality beans from those with taste faults because the grading standard has a direct impact on their prices and profits. So by the time the coffee bean has progressed through all the stages and on to the consumer, the grading of the coffee has been pretty well defined. So getting to know your grading codes and names is one of the easiest ways to identify the quality beans from those that have been determined as having taste faults. Sadly, there is no uniform global standard on grading names/codes so you will need to learn the country specific grading names and codes.
The SCAA (Specialty Coffee Association of America) does have specific standards for grading coffee beans. These are:
Specialty Grade Green Coffee (1) - no more than 5 full defects per 300 grams
Premium Coffee Grade (2): no more than 8 full defects in 300 grams.
Exchange Coffee Grade (3): no more than 9-23 full defects in 300 grams.
Below Standard Coffee Grade (4): 24-86 defects in 300 grams.
Off Grade Coffee (5): More than 86 defects in 300 grams.
Note: Given that there are about 2,000 coffee beans in 300 grams, it only takes 4% of the coffee beans (86) to be sour/stinker/quakers (defective) to render the entire batch 'Off-grade coffee'.
Roasted bean coffee faults
As a roasted coffee buyer, for my many espresso coffee outlets over the years, I look for or mitigate the following coffee faults in roasted coffee beans:
The roasted beans not being fresh - I believe that roasted coffee beans are at their best within a few weeks after roasting. After that they start to lose some of their most delicate flavors. One way to test if your coffee beans have been roasted in the past few weeks is to take a sample and seal them in an air-tight plastic bag like a coin bag. If the bag puffs up over 24hrs then the beans were roasted within the past couple of weeks, if not then they are not as fresh as they could be. This is because roasted coffee beans exhaust CO2 for up to three weeks after roasting.
The roasted beans being stored incorrectly - If the roasted beans were not stored in an airtight, cool, dry, sunlight and aroma free environment then they will have possibly started to sweat and/or absorb moisture and aromas from the air. When beans sweat the oils created in the roasting process come to the surface of the bean increasing the chances of taste distortion via the oxidation process. Oils can also be brought to the surface during the roasting process as well but as good as it looks, I am no fan of the oil covered surface on roasted coffee due to the flavor killing oxidization process.
Not an even roast - This can be caused by poor roasting or bean blending techniques that allow parts of the batch to roast unevenly and thereby produce a range of quality coffee extractions. This is pretty easy to detect - look for inconsistent color in the roast coffee beans.
No 'black beans' - When I review a batch of roasted coffee beans I go looking for the number of 'black beans' that may have escaped the grading systems. These will be identified as very light colored roasted beans in the batch, beans with borer holes, beans that look wrinkled and beans that are just outer shells or have been roasted as broken beans. The more of these in your mix, the lower the taste quality outcome. Remember, just 4% of the batch will render it "Off-grade".
By converse, the fault-free (perfect) roasted espresso coffee bean batch for me would be:
roasted in the past few weeks
100% arabica species - See What are some ways to visually differentiate between the Arabica and Robusta coffee bean?
large bean size (15-19)
top grade beans - dense, mountain grown on a renown estate
an even dark brown roast color across the entire batch - zero light colored beans
speckled amounts of surface oil only
no hollow shells
perfectly shaped beans with no wrinkles or malformations
no broken roasted coffee bean bits
Why does Britain prefer tea to coffee?
I went to a short talk last week by Henrietta Lovell, founder of the Rare Tea Company (http://www.rareteacompany.com). She was talking about some of the history of tea here. When it first started being imported tea was one of the most coveted, valuable items in the household of those rich enough to afford it. The tea would be kept in a locked chest, with the key worn round the neck of the lady of the house so the servants couldn't steal it. This tea would have been bought from china and brewed very delicately, served black, with no milk. Black tea was imported because it kept its flavour better on long journeys than a more delicate green tea.
Tea was so expensive at first because the Chinese would only sell it to us for gold or silver - we couldn't trade or barter with any other item. The British government got tired of seeing their gold resources dwindling, so In the 19th century our government started sending opium from India and Afghanistan into China so that desperate addicts would sell us tea for opium, causing Chinese life expectancy to fall. In the 19th century we also sent in a spy named Robert Fortune, a British man who disguised himself to look Chinese (incidentally, one of Henrietta's ancestors!). He learned the secrets of tea production and smuggled a few plants out to India, where the British had colonies. We were then able to start making tea ourselves more cheaply in India. Yep, our ancestors were lovely people. These actions made tea more affordable here, although it was still a premium product compared to now.
Milk started being added around the time of the second world war. We were surrounded by German u-boats, so importing tea got a little tricky. Because tea was so important for national morale, the government took over tea importation, adding it to rationing and importing lower quality tea from Africa. As rationing continued to the 1950s, we got used to drinking lower quality black tea here, which was higher in tannins. This caused the need to add milk to sweeten, and since then we have continued doing so.
So we have a history with tea, but there are some signs that our love of tea is dwindling here. Recently there have been news stories about espresso cups outselling mugs: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fooda.... Walk around high streets and you will see an emphasis on coffee shops, where people can order all sorts of fancy coffee combinations. Tea choices tend to be more limited. But at my work people still mostly go for tea, not coffee. I don't know why historically we might have preferred tea to coffee, but personally I prefer it because of the lower caffeine content (though tea contains more caffeine than coffee (by dry weight), a cup of tea usually contains much less caffeine than a cup of coffee, as tea is generally brewed much weaker), which leaves me feeling less shaky. It's also not a diuretic, unlike coffee.
What qualities make for a good cup of coffee?
You can think about the process of how coffee comes together and work forwards (somewhat simplified in order to avoid duplicate qualities for differing reasons):
Starting with good beans → robust and interesting flavor (maybe complex, maybe not).
Competent roasting → the coffee isn't too acidic (too light) or too oily or burnt tasting (too dark).
Brewing after CO2 has dissipated → the coffee doesn't have too many grinds as excess CO2 causes coffee to bloom up during brewing and grounds can overflow into the cup.
Brewing fresh grounds → the coffee hasn't lost all or some of its flavors since the gas contained in the grounds represents a lot of the flavor, which escapes quickly after grinding.
Brewing with good water → it doesn't taste like chemicals like chlorine or others found in poor water.
Brewing at the right concentration ("strength" in coffee terms, meaning coffee/water ratio) → the flavor isn't too strong or too watery.
Brewing at the right water temperature → the flavor isn't too sour (too cold) or too bitter (too hot).
I realize these aren't good qualities, they're more like the lack of bad qualities. But I think that's a great thing about coffee — as long as it doesn't suck (for the outlined reasons) your personal preferences will guide you. I think
Coffee: Why did coffee become a popular beverage worldwide?
Coffee became a popular global beverage due to a series of unique historic events. These events built one upon the other to eventually create what we have today where coffee is the 2nd most traded commodity in the world, beaten only by oil.
Here's how it happened:
Its discovery - in 600 the legend claims coffee's discovery by the goat herder Kaldi in Abyssinia (present day Ethiopia).
Its use in medicine - in 1000 Avicenna, Mahommedan physician and philosopher, and other Arabian physicians are using coffee, which they call bunchum, for its medicinal properties.
Roasting discovered - in 1200 the Turkish people discover the flavor enhancements achieved by roasting the coffee beans.
Cultivation begins - in 1300 the people of Yemen see a buck in cultivating coffee and selling it to Arabian traders.
The Koran - in 1400 alcohol is declared forbidden by the Koran, so coffee then becomes the replacement stimulant drink for Muslims.
Coffee shops concept - in 1453 the first known coffee shop is opened in Constantinople (later called Istanbul) and called “Kiva Han”. Coffee as a beverage begins it's journey to commercialization.
Europe imports - in the 1500’s European travelers to Arabia discover the coffee beverage and traders start selling coffee into Europe from the ports of Alexandria and Smyrna.
The Pope decrees - in the 1600’s Pope Clement VIII baptizes coffee drinking, making it an acceptable beverage for Christians. Coffee's future is secured with the two greatest religions in the world accepting its consumption.
India cultivates - in 1650 a Muslim pilgrim from India named Baba Budan was the first to sneak some fertile seeds out of Arabia and into India. So begins the coffee plant spread from the 1,000 year monopolistic control of coffee by the Arabian states.
Coffeehouses proliferate - in 1652 the first coffeehouse is opened in Oxford England and the concept quickly proliferates throughout England.
France adopts it - in 1669 the Ambassador of the Turkish Ottoman Empire to the court of Louis XIV in Paris brought coffee into fashion in Parisian High Society.
The Dutch trade - in 1690 the Dutch smuggled live coffee plants from the Arabian port of Mocha, and cultivate coffee commercially, in Ceylon and in their East Indian colony of Java. In the Dutch golden age of the 1700's, their merchant fleets trade with all parts of the globe carrying the coffee beverage and beans with them.
The one plant - in 1714 the Burgomaster of Amsterdam gave King Louis XIV of France a seedling coffee plant from the Amsterdam Botanical Gardens as a gift. In 1720 Chevalier Gabriel Mathiew de Clieu, removes a coffee plant from the King's glass house and takes it with him to Martinique in the Caribbean. He establishes a plantation in Martinique that eventually becomes the source for 90 percent of the world's coffee plantations.
"The Boston Tea Party" - in 1773 America changed from drinking (English) tea to coffee which was seen at the time as their patriotic duty.
Brazilian excess - in the late 1800’s Brazil's coffee plantations expand excessively turning coffee from a drink only for the elite into an everyday drink for the people, due to the price drop generated from the oversupply.
Instant coffee invented - in 1906 George Constant Washington, an English chemist living in Guatemala, invents instant coffee and creates the first mass-produced instant coffee called Red E Coffee.
Prohibition promotes it - in the 1920s prohibition goes into effect in the United States which only serves to create a boom in coffee sales and consumption.
Illy commercializes espresso - in 1933 Dr. Ernest Illy develops the first automatic espresso machine which opens the way for the commercially viable sale of espresso coffee
Nescafé solves Brazil's problems - in 1938 the Nestlé company developed its own freeze dried instant coffee to assist the Brazilian government in solving its coffee surplus problem.
American globalization - America exports it culture (including coffee drinking) to the world via the golden age of Hollywood (1927- 1945) and with the American soldier's issue of instant Maxwell House coffee in their WW2 ration kits.
... and TV does the rest - the advent of TV in the 1950 coinciding with coffee's abundant supply (low cost), it's global acceptance, innovative product (instant) and a company like Nestles to exploit the medium and the product with advertisments. Coffee ads generated an instant use as an accompanyment to the TV experience. Nestle's + TV + Instant coffee completes the global phenomenon that is the coffee drink.
Coffee today, in 2011, is regarded as one of the world's most popular beverage with more than 450 billion cups being consumed each year, but it may never have happened if any of the key historical links above had not each played their part in bringing it about.
What would the world be like without coffee?
Taking the hypothetical case that some alien force in an instant destroyed all coffee trees and all currently available green, roasted and instant coffee on the planet, then the following would occur:
Whole countries and economies would be affected ....
52 countries of the would lose export income with the loss of sales from their 130 million 60-kilogram bags of coffee export each year.
The top 4 coffee producing countries that between them produce 40% of the world's coffee supply would lose a significant export earner. They are Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia and Indonesia.
15 of the poorest countries of the world that depend on coffee as a vital contributor to foreign exchange earnings and also account for a significant proportion of tax income and gross domestic product would be severely affected. These include Burundi, Ethiopia Uganda, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.
Coffee as the second most commonly traded commodity in the world (measured by monetary volume) would financially devastate all the stakeholders in the supply chain including: producers, intermediaries, processors, government agencies, exporters, dealers/brokers, roasters, retailers and cafes if the industry disappeared in an instant.
Jobs would be lost ...
The 60 million people globally that earn some or all of their income from coffee would be severely affected.
The 25 million directly employed by the industry would be out of work.
10 million small peasant coffee farmers (incorporating 25 million family members) who dependent on coffee sales for their primary source of income would be devastated. These small peasant farmers, each cultivating on less than 25 acres, produce about 70% of the world’s coffee supply.
Consumers would be bewildered ....
The 54% of the overall American adult population that partake daily in the consumption of coffee beverages are going to be mightily peeved.
The 1,100,000,000 missed coffee cups on the first day from the 400 billion consumed annually on the planet, is going to create one hell of a 'mass coffee headache'. No work place would be sustainable.
The missed 400 million cups of coffee on the first day in the United States as the leading consumer of coffee in the world, is going to surly start the American Revolution II.
... and business would need to revisit their business models.
Starbuck's 16,680 stores worldwide are going to struggle and will need a whole new approach to their business and marketing. I wonder if they could destroy hot chocolate as comprehensively as they have destroyed the art and taste of fine espresso coffee?
Kraft, Philip Morris, Nestlé, Proctor and Gamble and Sara Lee/Douwe Egberts who between them 'own' the global coffee trade are going to have to find another lucrative 'screw the poor - sell to the rich' business model to replace the billions they make each year from controlling the haves & have-nots of the coffee trade.
Should coffee beans be stored in the freezer?
No, an airtight container is the best storage for coffee. The cold temperatures and lack of controlled humidity tends to affect the flavor of the coffee (not to mention flavors from other food).
Good airtight containers are easy to come by (most kitchen stores should have them in glass or stainless steel).
What is the difference between coffee, cappuccino, espresso & frappuccino?
Definitions of each can vary depending on the country where the question is asked. Having established and operated over 20 outlets in Australia serving coffee, I would identify the differences in the following way:
Coffee: Is a term often used to describe a hot beverage made from roasted coffee beans. Various methods can be used to make a hot coffee beverage and include the espresso, Turkish, percolated, instant, drip or plunger (French press) method.
Espresso: This can describe (1) one method of making coffee that consist of forcing hot pressured water through finely ground coffee beans in an espresso machine to extract the coffee oils/essence that form the basis of various drinks or (2) a specific coffee drink that is also known as a 'short black' and served in a demitasse cup/glass. Italians refer to a coffee drink consisting of simply the expressed oils from the ground coffee beans via an espresso coffee machine as - espresso.
Cappuccino: Is a specific hot coffee drink made using the espresso method and consists of espresso essence/extract, hot steamed milk, topped with velvet milk foam and finished with a sprinkle of chocolate powder.
Frappuccino: Frappuccino is a blended coffee beverages developed and sold by Starbucks who have trademarked the name. It is an iced or chilled cappuccino that may be topped with whipped cream. It generally consists of espresso coffee, milk, sugar, ice, whipped cream and other sweeteners.
Coffee: How many cups of coffee is safe to drink per day?
Caffeine is a stimulant, and an overdose can be lethal. As for other side effects, caffeine is similar to other stimulants. If you do not regularly consume caffeine, I would avoid taking more than 2 cups in any 4 hour period.
The median lethal dose of caffeine is anywhere between 150 and 200 milligrams per kg of body weight in a human. A cup of coffee has around 100 milligrams of caffeine.
So, you would need around 2x your bodyweight in kilograms of cups of coffee to kill yourself. There have been no known instances of lethal caffeine overdoses from drinking coffee alone. Probably because drinking that much coffee would be impractical for even the most dedicated person.
Now, even at lower doses, there can be severe adverse side effects, and these are probably what you're interested in.
Overdosing on caffeine can result in palpitations, twitching, and nervousness as well as increasing your heart rate. But since caffeine is a drug easily adapted to, its hard to determine what dosage would result in significant side effects for a given individual.
Caffeine operates by binding to the adenosine receptors without activating them, stopping adenosine from activating them. Adenosine has an inhibitory effect on the central nervous system. Taking caffeine regularly will cause your body to increase the number of adenosine receptors - thus blunting its effect.
Coffee: What are all the different types of coffee drinks?
The following are the different types of coffee drinks that you may find in a cafe that prepares coffee using the espresso coffee making method:
Affogato: This is a term that literally means 'drowned'. It is the description of a shot of separately served espresso that is later poured over a the top of a scoop of vanilla ice cream or gelato. This beverage is usually served in a short drink glass and is a Italian desert favourite. Popular Affogatos include Vanilla Affogato, Mocha Affogato, and Peppermint Affogato.
Babycino: A cappuccino styled drink served in an up-market café typically for children. It consists of warm milk in a small cup and topped with milk froth and chocolate powder. No espresso coffee essence is added.
Breve: A term in Italian that means short and is used to describe an espresso coffee drink made with a half-and-half light cream or semi-skim milk instead of full fat milk
Caffe' Freddo: Chilled, sweetened espresso served in a tall glass, often on ice.
Caffe Latte or “Latte”: A ‘premium milk coffee experience’. Freshly steamed milk without foam served in a tall glass with a shot of espresso coffee.
Caffe Mocha: A combination of chocolate syrup and a shot of espresso, topped with steamed milk and a layer of micro-foam. Finished with a sprinkled of chocolate.
Cappuccino Chiaro: (AKA Wet or Light cappuccino): Cappuccino prepared with more milk than usual.
Cappuccino Scuro: (AKA Dry or Dark cappuccino) Cappuccino prepared with less milk than usual.
Cappuccino: “Cap”: A ‘traditional morning heart starter’. Steamed foamed velvety milk poured over one shot (1) of coffee oil extract made from 12gm of freshly ground beans producing 38ml of essence. Finished by topping with foam and a sprinkle of chocolate powder. Served in a pre heated vitrified ceramic cup.
Con panna: Like the beverage "macchiato", but whipped cream is substituted for steamed milk.
Corretto: Espresso "corrected" with a touch of grappa, cognac, sambuca, or other spirit.
Doppio: Italian term for double. Double Espresso or twice the amount of coffee and twice the amount of water. Basically it describes two shots of espresso in one demitasse container.
Espresso con Panna: A variation of the macchiato by substituting a dollop of whipped cream for the milk froth. Basically a Starbucks invention. Means in Italian "espresso with cream”.
Espresso Lungo: American term where a shot is extracted longer for a bit of extra espresso. Tends to maximizes the caffeine but will mostly produce a more bitter cup.
Espresso Romano: Espresso served with a lemon peel on the side. Whilst not a typical accompaniment in Italy it is commonly served with the espresso beverage in America.
Flat White: “White Coffee” - ‘uncompromising taste’.Steamed microfroam milk poured through and under the espresso crème produced from one shot (1) of coffee extract made on 12gm of freshly ground coffee producing 38ml of essence. Served in a pre heated vitrified ceramic cup. A common espresso coffee order in Australia/New Zealand. Great for latte art!
Hammerhead: A coffee drink only served in the USA. It is an American term for a shot of espresso in a coffee cup that is topped up with drip-filtered coffee.
Latte Macchiato: Steamed milk served in a tall glass rather than a cup that is “stained” by a shot of espresso coffee.
Long Black: Often called the “American”. It is the ‘benchmark coffee without milk’. It is pure coffee made from one & one half shots of coffee extract made on 16gm of fresh ground beans producing 50ml of essence blended with steamed water. Served in a pre heated vitrified ceramic cup with the essence floated over the top of a cup filled with hot/boiling water. It is a standard espresso (Short Black) but lengthened by the addition of hot/boiling water.
Lungo: An espresso made by purposely allowing more water to flow through the ground coffee than usual. (sometimes called an Americano or ‘long’).
Macchiato: Meaning “stained” - Described as ‘strong, marked or stained’. A touch of steamed foamed milk added to a double shot of coffee extract made from 24gm of fresh ground beans producing 75ml of essence. Served in glass.
Mazagran: A French drink composed of cold coffee and seltzer water. First created by the French soldiers in 1840 in the town of Argelia. A variation includes iced coffee made with maraschino.
Quad: An espresso drink made with four shots of coffee.
Ristretto: (Ristretto in Italian means "restricted, shrunk or short”) It is the richest and most concentrated espresso drink where less water but the same amount of coffee is used to make the beverage and creates a less bitter espresso. The extraction time is shortened producing as little as 3 oz of liquid per serving. Pure and intense espresso served in a demitasse cup.
Short Black: A ‘pure intense Italian favourite with a biting crème head. Contains 75ml of pure double shot (2) coffee essence made from 24gm of fresh ground coffee beans. Traditionally served in glass and is referred to as Espresso by European customers.
Viennese Coffee: Brewed black coffee of any roast or origin topped and served with whipped cream.
Here is a list ways you can limit the staining effects of the coffee you drink:
Drink your coffee with high fat animal milk (and no it isn't because milk is white). Animal milk proteins bind polyphenols (at least until the coffee reaches your stomach) and bind better the higher the fat content of the milk. Soy milk, etc. will not reduce staining.
Drink coffee made from 100% Arabica Beans that were dry processed (Robusta beans have more polyphenols....and more caffeine).
Select a brewing method that extracts less polyphenols. This also means less caffeine unfortunately. This is a longer discussion point so here is a link to the details: http://www.freysmiles.com/blog/v...
Decrease contact of the coffee with your teeth (already covered by Danish Qadri). You can do this by drinking it very quickly (much easier with espresso), or by drinking with a straw aimed at the back of your tongue (not super comfy). Rinsing also
Aside from reducing the staining impact from the coffee itself, you can (and will still have to) treat the effects of the coffee.
Use a Sonicare toothbrush. Studies have shown that using a Sonicare will reduce stain formation on teeth. Plaque has a tendency to imbibe stains and keeping your teeth clean will slow stain formation. I wouldn't brush immediately after drinking coffee because your teeth may still be "soft" from the acidity in the coffee, as long as you thoroughly clean your teeth 1 to 2 times a day this will take care of the plaque. Also do not use whitening toothpastes (see the post What is the best toothpaste?)
Whiten your teeth occasionally. This is best done through your dentist since they can provide you with bleaching agents (either trays or in office treatments) that provide the best color stability (your teeth will be whiter longer), and also can administer additional treatment to whiten teeth safely. I need to stress that you definitely should not whiten too much, it strips your teeth of its natural protective protein coating. Take at least a couple months off in between whitening cycles for maximal tooth health.
What is the finest coffee bean in the world? The finest coffee bean is undoubtedly sourced from the Arabica species. Also since Colombian Arabica beans are traded in a class of their own and attract a higher price than any other coffee bean class on world markets, I guess Columbian Arabica beans are considered by the market as the finest. However, there are gems to be found throughout the world with some just confined to specific estates. The following are generally considered the finest coffees in their country and quite possibly, the world:
Ankola: One of the world's best and most famous Arabica coffees grown around the northern port of Padang in west-central Sumatra. It is noted for its deep richness, full body and long finish together with just enough interesting acidity. Ankola coffee beans are often associated with the market name Mandheling. They are both grown at altitudes of 2,500 to 5,000 feet and are dry processed but the dried husk are removed with a hot water process which many believe contributes to its unique flavour characteristics.
Antigua: Is the market name for one of the best and most distinctively flavored coffees of the world. It is grown in the valley surrounding Antigua, which is the old capital of Guatemala.
Arona: One of Papua New Guinea’s most famous brand of Arabica coffee beans. It is grown in the Arona Valley in the Eastern Highlands Province. It is noted for its full body and its deep almost smoky like taste.
Barahona: Is the market name for a high grown coffee in the southwest of the Dominican Republic. Named after the city and province that bears the same name. It is considered by many to be the best coffee of the Dominican Republic and is identified by its increased acidity yet heavier-bodied cup.
Bogota: This as a brand of coffee beans grown in the eastern mountainous (cordillera) region of Colombia. Considered by some to be one of Colombia's finest coffees and it is definitely one of its most famous. It takes its name from the capital Bogota from which it is marketed.
Bourbon Santos: Also marketed under the name of just ‘Santos’. It refers to a category of high-quality coffees from Brazil that are usually shipped through the port of Santos and that are grown in the state of São Paulo or the southern part of the State of Minas Gerais. The term properly describes the finest grade of Brazilian coffee produced from the Bourbon cultivar of Arabica. This cultivar tends to produce a softer, fruitier, smoother flavor with a medium body and more acidity than other varieties grown in Brazil.
Bugishu: Is the market name for an Arabica coffee grown from the slopes of Mt. Elgon in Uganda near Kenya. It is considered by some to be the best coffee Uganda has to offer in contrast to the Robusta coffee which makes up most of Uganda’s coffee bean production.
Celebes Toraja: Is a market name for one of the world’s finest coffees from Celebes (now known as Sulawesi) in Indonesia.
Coban: Is a market name for a respected high-grown coffee from north-central Guatemala. Noted as one of world’s best and most distinctively flavored coffees.
Grand Lares: Along with Yauco Selecto it is one of the world’s great coffee beans supplied by Puerto Rico. Grown in the south central part of the country it is noted for its balanced body, bright acidity and fruity aroma.
Harar/Harrar: A Ethiopian Arabica bean that is grown at 4,800-7,500 feet in the northern part of state. The state produces two distinct varieties, the Longberry Harar which is considered to be the more desirable taste to the second shortberry variety. It is garden grown and cultivated from the species obtained from the south-west of the state. They are considered to be one of the world’s most prized coffees because they possess a complex medium to light acidity with full body and a unique winey/fruit wild-blueberry-like aroma. The beans are dry processed and have a slightly yellowish-green coloring.
Jamaican Blue Mountain: Is a single-origin coffee grown above 3,000 feet in the Blue Mountain District of Jamaica. It is noted for its exceptionally rich, complex and bouillon-like flavour. This balanced, classic coffee contains a rich flavor, full body and a smooth yet vibrant acidity. This exceptional taste quality coupled with its short supply, has made it one of the world's most celebrated coffees.
Kona: A single-origin coffee from the Kona coast of the Island of Hawaii. The best Kona coffee displays a classic balance between a medium body, a good acidity and culminating in a rich complex aroma and flavor.
Lintong: Market name for the most admired coffee of the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. This coffee grows in the Lake Toba area toward the northern end of the island. Whilst it is a term used to describe a broader group of coffee beans, it properly only describes coffees grown in a relatively small region just southwest of Lake Toba in the Kecamatan or the district of Lintongnihuta. Small plots of coffee producers are scattered over the high, undulating plateau of fern-covered clay and is grown without shade or chemicals of any kind.
Mandheling: Is a more comprehensive designation that refers to both Lintong coffees and to any coffees grown under similar conditions in the region of Diari, north of Lake Toba, Sumatra, Indonesia. It is recognised as one of the world’s most famous coffees. It is also the name of a Coffea canephora variety that was cultivated in the same area of Indonesia.
Mattari: The Market name for one of the most admired coffees from Yemen. Grown in the Bani Mattar area west of the capital city of Sana'a, it is usually a winier, fruitier and sharper version of the Yemen chocolatey style. This coffee is dry processed.
Mérida: Is the market name for one of the most respected and most characteristic Venezuela coffees. It is described as delicate and sweet in the cup yet full bodied with a mellow rich flavor.
Ocoa: The market name for one of the better-respected, well balanced coffees from the Dominican Republic. It is a wet-processed coffee that is noted for its sweetness. Most of this coffee is exported to European markets.
Tarrazu: Coffee named after the town of San Marcos de Tarrazu. It is the market name for one of the Costa Rica’s and in fact the world’s better coffees. It is grown in rich volcanic soil in the south of the state at elevations of between 3,900 – 5,000 feet.
Yauco Selecto: This is an Arabica (var. Bourbon) coffee bean from a region of Puerto Rico and is grown high in the mountains above 3,000 feet. It is one of the finest coffees of the Caribbean but it can be subject to some commercial inconsistency. Often likened to the balanced perfection of the Jamaica Blue Mountain because of its deep, vibrant, yet restrained acidity and gently rich flavor. Two famous estates in the region include Hecienda San Pedro and Santa Ana.
Yirgacheffe/Yirga Cheffe: The market name for one of the most famous Ethiopian washed Arabica coffee bean gardens grown at 5,000-7,500 feet in the south central Sidamo region near the boarder with Kenya and the village of Yirga Ch'efe. Regarded by many as the ‘cream of the crop’ of all coffees grown in the horn of Africa. It has unparalleled fruity aroma and is distinguished by its lemon/fruit-like and distinct tart bite floral acidity. The body is light and elegant whilst the flavour is complex leaving a rich floral finish and an almost menthol aftertaste. It is believed that these trees were cultivated from the varieties of the south-west of the state. Sometimes spelled "Yirgacheffe".
What are the best practices for tamping ground coffee when making espresso?
Best practices for tamping ground coffee when making espresso include:
ensure that the process does no put undue pressure on the wrist because Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) can occur over time if the wrist is engaged in the pressure tamping.
exert sufficient pressure to ensure that the ground coffee does not move in the process of engaging the portafilter with the group head. The 'screw-up' pressure on the grounds as the portafilter engages tightly with the group head will exert far more pressure on the grounds than the tamp ever will.
make sure all lose coffee grains have been removed from the portafilter edge so that an impenetrable seal is formed with the group head (i.e. no loss of pump pressure through the ground coffee) and so that there is minimal wear and tear on the rubber seal.
tip, tap or shake lose grains from the coffee filled portafilter to minimize the amount that gets caught in the group head shower screen in the extraction process.
choose the appropriate tamper. while the two-handed separate bench-tamper is safer for RSI it creates inefficiencies in a busy espresso making environment as compared with the on-grinder 'lift & tamp'.
check the spent coffee puck after extraction to ensure no pit-holes, no side cavities, the group head screw imprint is visible in the grounds and the puck that is dry, solid and removes easily in one piece from the portafilter with a single firm tap. This usually means you got the whole extraction process 'about right'.
Of all the variables involved in extracting the perfect espresso, I have found that tamping makes the least significant contribution.
The other variables all play a much more significant role in getting that perfect extraction of espresso. These other variables are:
coffee bean species (Arabica)
bean quality/grade (AA, SHB, Supremo)
roast (mid-dark)
freshness (less than 2 weeks for beans, less than 15 minutes ground)
grinder/grind (commercial conical, fine powder)
dose size (maximum for the filter that the machine will allow)
filter & shower head (spotless)
portafilter seal with group head (non-penetrable under 10 bar pressure)
water quality (filtered & demineralized),
temperature (94 degrees) and
run time (20-25 seconds)
Because I fill my portafilter to the maximum amount, I use the tamping process to simply work the pack of mound coffee into a usable form that is shaped slightly higher at the edges than the middle. This properly and neatly shaped ground coffee in the portafilter can then be more easily connected with the espresso machine without causing spillage and interfeering with the very important need to have a tight non-penetrable seal between the portafilter and the group. The arm pressure action of screw tightening the portafilter up firmly against the shower head in the group, packs the ground coffee anyway, and at a pressure that I believe is in excess of what any previous wrist tamping processes could apply. Note: The connection lugs on the side of the portafilter are ramp-shaped to force the ground coffee up against the group shower head as you tighten it. This action also pushes the raised coffee at the edge (as shaped by the tampa) into the middle to ensure there is no place for the pressured hot water to go except through the finely ground coffee in order to extract only the highly desirable 'coffee oils'.
So, I see tamping as a necessary part of the espresso making process but I don't believe that varying the wrist tamping pressure contributes in any significant way to the extraction of the perfect espresso.
The most significant thing to be concerned about in the tamping process, from my point of view, is the workplace issue that Darryl Lin raises - i.e. the potential for Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) caused by incorrect technique and posture while repeatedly placing tamping pressure strain on a wrist that was not structurally designed for this type of work.
How does a shot of espresso compare to a cup of coffee in terms of caffeine?
According to the respected espresso coffee industry leader illy coffee http://www.illy.com/wps/wcm/conn...
The average cup of espresso has 78mg of caffeine
According to the United Kingdom's Food Standards Agency - http://www.food.gov.uk/science/s...
The average cup of instant coffee has 75mg of caffeine
The average cup of brewed, percolated and drip coffee has 100mg
All the analysis I have read constantly identifies brewed, percolated and drip coffee as having more caffeine than espresso coffee (up to 125mg) and that's comparing it with a 30ml espresso extraction which I think is 5ml more than ideal.
Some research believes that it is the length of time that the hot water comes in contact with the ground coffee that produces the extra caffeine content. In espresso it is about 20-25 seconds while it is much longer in the brewed, percolated and drip coffee methods.
Interestingly the better quality beans (Arabica) have about half the caffeine content of the cheaper ones (Robusta). So, I reckon that a 25ml shot of espresso made on 100% Arabica beans is a good option for reducing your caffeine intake while still enjoying that 'elixir of the gods
Why does an espresso in almost any Italian coffee shop taste so much better than an espresso anywhere else in Europe (or the world for that matter)?
Philipp M. W. Hoffmann got it about right when he identified that the experience of the average Italian barista is many times greater than that of the baristas making espresso in popular cafe chains in other parts of the world who all stand behind Italian made or Italian designed espresso machines and grinders. Let's face it, the Italians have been passionate about espresso for over 100 years - the rest of us are just playing 'catch-up'. The average age of Italian baristas is 45 ... so, you can taste the experience in every cup.
I guess the fact that Italians have a rich history of inventions in pursuit of the perfect espresso, also has a lot to do with their mastery of this particular process. These Italians include:
Angelo Moriondo who patented a bulk coffee brewer in 1885, capable of producing fifty cups and was first to separate the steam and water into two distinct functions in the espresso making process.
Luigi Bezzera whose espresso coffee machine invention named the ‘Tipo Gigante’ in 1901, made espresso just ‘one cup at a time’.
M. Cremonesi who developed the piston pump in 1928, which significantly improved the espresso coffee making process and taste.
Francesco Illy who in 1935 invented the first automatic coffee machine called the "illetta", that substituted compressed air for steam in the espresso extraction process.
Achilles Gaggia who with a machine called the “Crema Caffe” in 1947, perfected espresso coffee making by introducing a piston lever that extracted the perfect espresso via the application of intense pressure to the ground coffee beans.
Ernesto Valente, the father of the Faema brand of espresso machines, who in the 1960's produced the first pump driven espresso machine called the "Faema E61". This design concept remains the benchmark for espresso coffee machines even up till today.
Also, Italians generally drink their coffee in its purest form ... espresso. Espresso (short black) provides the barista with no opportunity to mask a poorly extracted espresso coffee with milk, cream, powders and flavor additives as they do in other parts of the world. So, baristas in Italy keep their jobs by constantly providing their Italian customers with the flavorsome coffee oils which they expertly derive from each perfectly extracted shot of espresso.
From the smallest Italian railway station to the historic cafes of Caffe Florian, Baratti & Milano Caffe, Pedrocchi Coffee House and Caffe Greco, we tourists are simply the beneficiaries of all this experience ... this masterful know-how ... this peculiar Italian passion for the perfect espresso.
Why did coffee become a popular beverage worldwide?
Coffee became a popular global beverage due to a series of unique historic events. These events built one upon the other to eventually create what we have today where coffee is the 2nd most traded commodity in the world, beaten only by oil.
Here's how it happened:
Its discovery - in 600 the legend claims coffee's discovery by the goat herder Kaldi in Abyssinia (present day Ethiopia).
Its use in medicine - in 1000 Avicenna, Mahommedan physician and philosopher, and other Arabian physicians are using coffee, which they call bunchum, for its medicinal properties.
Roasting discovered - in 1200 the Turkish people discover the flavor enhancements achieved by roasting the coffee beans.
Cultivation begins - in 1300 the people of Yemen see a buck in cultivating coffee and selling it to Arabian traders.
The Koran - in 1400 alcohol is declared forbidden by the Koran, so coffee then becomes the replacement stimulant drink for Muslims.
Coffee shops concept - in 1453 the first known coffee shop is opened in Constantinople (later called Istanbul) and called “Kiva Han”. Coffee as a beverage begins it's journey to commercialization.
Europe imports - in the 1500’s European travelers to Arabia discover the coffee beverage and traders start selling coffee into Europe from the ports of Alexandria and Smyrna.
The Pope decrees - in the 1600’s Pope Clement VIII baptizes coffee drinking, making it an acceptable beverage for Christians. Coffee's future is secured with the two greatest religions in the world accepting its consumption.
India cultivates - in 1650 a Muslim pilgrim from India named Baba Budan was the first to sneak some fertile seeds out of Arabia and into India. So begins the coffee plant spread from the 1,000 year monopolistic control of coffee by the Arabian states.
Coffeehouses proliferate - in 1652 the first coffeehouse is opened in Oxford England and the concept quickly proliferates throughout England.
France adopts it - in 1669 the Ambassador of the Turkish Ottoman Empire to the court of Louis XIV in Paris brought coffee into fashion in Parisian High Society.
The Dutch trade - in 1690 the Dutch smuggled live coffee plants from the Arabian port of Mocha, and cultivate coffee commercially, in Ceylon and in their East Indian colony of Java. In the Dutch golden age of the 1700's, their merchant fleets trade with all parts of the globe carrying the coffee beverage and beans with them.
The one plant - in 1714 the Burgomaster of Amsterdam gave King Louis XIV of France a seedling coffee plant from the Amsterdam Botanical Gardens as a gift. In 1720 Chevalier Gabriel Mathiew de Clieu, removes a coffee plant from the King's glass house and takes it with him to Martinique in the Caribbean. He establishes a plantation in Martinique that eventually becomes the source for 90 percent of the world's coffee plantations.
"The Boston Tea Party" - in 1773 America changed from drinking (English) tea to coffee which was seen at the time as their patriotic duty.
Brazilian excess - in the late 1800’s Brazil's coffee plantations expand excessively turning coffee from a drink only for the elite into an everyday drink for the people, due to the price drop generated from the oversupply.
Instant coffee invented - in 1906 George Constant Washington, an English chemist living in Guatemala, invents instant coffee and creates the first mass-produced instant coffee called Red E Coffee.
Prohibition promotes it - in the 1920s prohibition goes into effect in the United States which only serves to create a boom in coffee sales and consumption.
Illy commercializes espresso - in 1933 Dr. Ernest Illy develops the first automatic espresso machine which opens the way for the commercially viable sale of espresso coffee
Nescafé solves Brazil's problems - in 1938 the Nestlé company developed its own freeze dried instant coffee to assist the Brazilian government in solving its coffee surplus problem.
American globalization - America exports it culture (including coffee drinking) to the world via the golden age of Hollywood (1927- 1945) and with the American soldier's issue of instant Maxwell House coffee in their WW2 ration kits.
... and TV does the rest - the advent of TV in the 1950 coinciding with coffee's abundant supply (low cost), it's global acceptance, innovative product (instant) and a company like Nestles to exploit the medium and the product with advertisments. Coffee ads generated an instant use as an accompanyment to the TV experience. Nestle's + TV + Instant coffee completes the global phenomenon that is the coffee drink.
Coffee today, in 2011, is regarded as one of the world's most popular beverage with more than 450 billion cups being consumed each year, but it may never have happened if any of the key historical links above had not each played their part in bringing it about.
What are the most common coffee faults, and how do you detect them?
The most common coffee faults are usually detected and removed long before the extract from the ground coffee beans are enjoyed by us at our favorite cafe or at our home espresso maker. Still, in spite of the scrutiny, a few common faults make it through the grading processes at the farm, processing center, importing agent and roaster and so end up in the consumer's roasted coffee bean mix.
Green bean coffee faults
Green coffee bean faults or defects are usually caused by natural and human failures in the picking, processing, drying, sorting, storage, or transportation stages of the green coffee bean production. Further human failures can create coffee faults at the roaster and in the distribution and storage of the roasted coffee beans.Discoloration in the green beans is created from the oxidation of the damaged areas of the bean and off-flavors will result. Discolored beans roast unevenly, age rapidly, and even just a few are capable of significantly reducing the overall coffee taste.
The most common discoloration is identified by the black, deep blue, or dark brown surface areas on the green bean. Green beans with more than 25% of this discoloration are known as Black Beans (on the New York Coffee Exchange) and are considered to have a significant detrimental effect on the coffee taste.
'Black Beans' and other types of discolorations are typically caused by:
harvesting immature coffee cherries
harvesting dead cherries that fell naturally from the trees.
exposure to water and heat at the wrong time in the process
wet processed beans that have been cut or bruised by the machinery during the pulping stage
beans that were dried too rapidly causing them to fade in color
faulty fermentation, improper washing, over drying, or by harvesting over-ripe coffee cherries creating a brown or rust color on the green coffee bean
uneven drying during processing causing blotchy discolorations.
green bean that have been left too long in the fermentation tanks under the natural fermentation method and have become discolored by putrefactive bacteria which attacks the proteins causing the beans to sour. These are often identified by their yellow or redish brown color.
picking over ripe coffee cherries that become 'stinkers' and produce an unpleasant or even foul taste. One or two stinker beans can spoil a whole batch of coffee.
Common green bean defects caused by natural failures that can also produce poor tasting coffee include:
insect-damage i.e. Coffee Berry Borer (CBB) is one of the most significant pest problems for coffee farmers.
disease damaged coffee beans mostly caused by fungus (mold). i.e. Coffee Leaf Rust (CLR), Coffee Berry Disease (CBD)
Grading is the simplest way to identify faulty coffee beans
All stakeholders in the coffee industry are interested in a grading process that is able to identify and separate quality beans from those with taste faults because the grading standard has a direct impact on their prices and profits. So by the time the coffee bean has progressed through all the stages and on to the consumer, the grading of the coffee has been pretty well defined. So getting to know your grading codes and names is one of the easiest ways to identify the quality beans from those that have been determined as having taste faults. Sadly, there is no uniform global standard on grading names/codes so you will need to learn the country specific grading names and codes.
The SCAA (Specialty Coffee Association of America) does have specific standards for grading coffee beans. These are:
Specialty Grade Green Coffee (1) - no more than 5 full defects per 300 grams
Premium Coffee Grade (2): no more than 8 full defects in 300 grams.
Exchange Coffee Grade (3): no more than 9-23 full defects in 300 grams.
Below Standard Coffee Grade (4): 24-86 defects in 300 grams.
Off Grade Coffee (5): More than 86 defects in 300 grams.
Note: Given that there are about 2,000 coffee beans in 300 grams, it only takes 4% of the coffee beans (86) to be sour/stinker/quakers (defective) to render the entire batch 'Off-grade coffee'.
Roasted bean coffee faults
As a roasted coffee buyer, for my many espresso coffee outlets over the years, I look for or mitigate the following coffee faults in roasted coffee beans:
The roasted beans not being fresh - I believe that roasted coffee beans are at their best within a few weeks after roasting. After that they start to lose some of their most delicate flavors. One way to test if your coffee beans have been roasted in the past few weeks is to take a sample and seal them in an air-tight plastic bag like a coin bag. If the bag puffs up over 24hrs then the beans were roasted within the past couple of weeks, if not then they are not as fresh as they could be. This is because roasted coffee beans exhaust CO2 for up to three weeks after roasting.
The roasted beans being stored incorrectly - If the roasted beans were not stored in an airtight, cool, dry, sunlight and aroma free environment then they will have possibly started to sweat and/or absorb moisture and aromas from the air. When beans sweat the oils created in the roasting process come to the surface of the bean increasing the chances of taste distortion via the oxidation process. Oils can also be brought to the surface during the roasting process as well but as good as it looks, I am no fan of the oil covered surface on roasted coffee due to the flavor killing oxidization process.
Not an even roast - This can be caused by poor roasting or bean blending techniques that allow parts of the batch to roast unevenly and thereby produce a range of quality coffee extractions. This is pretty easy to detect - look for inconsistent color in the roast coffee beans.
No 'black beans' - When I review a batch of roasted coffee beans I go looking for the number of 'black beans' that may have escaped the grading systems. These will be identified as very light colored roasted beans in the batch, beans with borer holes, beans that look wrinkled and beans that are just outer shells or have been roasted as broken beans. The more of these in your mix, the lower the taste quality outcome. Remember, just 4% of the batch will render it "Off-grade".
By converse, the fault-free (perfect) roasted espresso coffee bean batch for me would be:
roasted in the past few weeks
100% arabica species - See What are some ways to visually differentiate between the Arabica and Robusta coffee bean?
large bean size (15-19)
top grade beans - dense, mountain grown on a renown estate
an even dark brown roast color across the entire batch - zero light colored beans
speckled amounts of surface oil only
no hollow shells
perfectly shaped beans with no wrinkles or malformations
no broken roasted coffee bean bits
Why does Britain prefer tea to coffee?
I went to a short talk last week by Henrietta Lovell, founder of the Rare Tea Company (http://www.rareteacompany.com). She was talking about some of the history of tea here. When it first started being imported tea was one of the most coveted, valuable items in the household of those rich enough to afford it. The tea would be kept in a locked chest, with the key worn round the neck of the lady of the house so the servants couldn't steal it. This tea would have been bought from china and brewed very delicately, served black, with no milk. Black tea was imported because it kept its flavour better on long journeys than a more delicate green tea.
Tea was so expensive at first because the Chinese would only sell it to us for gold or silver - we couldn't trade or barter with any other item. The British government got tired of seeing their gold resources dwindling, so In the 19th century our government started sending opium from India and Afghanistan into China so that desperate addicts would sell us tea for opium, causing Chinese life expectancy to fall. In the 19th century we also sent in a spy named Robert Fortune, a British man who disguised himself to look Chinese (incidentally, one of Henrietta's ancestors!). He learned the secrets of tea production and smuggled a few plants out to India, where the British had colonies. We were then able to start making tea ourselves more cheaply in India. Yep, our ancestors were lovely people. These actions made tea more affordable here, although it was still a premium product compared to now.
Milk started being added around the time of the second world war. We were surrounded by German u-boats, so importing tea got a little tricky. Because tea was so important for national morale, the government took over tea importation, adding it to rationing and importing lower quality tea from Africa. As rationing continued to the 1950s, we got used to drinking lower quality black tea here, which was higher in tannins. This caused the need to add milk to sweeten, and since then we have continued doing so.
So we have a history with tea, but there are some signs that our love of tea is dwindling here. Recently there have been news stories about espresso cups outselling mugs: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fooda.... Walk around high streets and you will see an emphasis on coffee shops, where people can order all sorts of fancy coffee combinations. Tea choices tend to be more limited. But at my work people still mostly go for tea, not coffee. I don't know why historically we might have preferred tea to coffee, but personally I prefer it because of the lower caffeine content (though tea contains more caffeine than coffee (by dry weight), a cup of tea usually contains much less caffeine than a cup of coffee, as tea is generally brewed much weaker), which leaves me feeling less shaky. It's also not a diuretic, unlike coffee.
What qualities make for a good cup of coffee?
You can think about the process of how coffee comes together and work forwards (somewhat simplified in order to avoid duplicate qualities for differing reasons):
Starting with good beans → robust and interesting flavor (maybe complex, maybe not).
Competent roasting → the coffee isn't too acidic (too light) or too oily or burnt tasting (too dark).
Brewing after CO2 has dissipated → the coffee doesn't have too many grinds as excess CO2 causes coffee to bloom up during brewing and grounds can overflow into the cup.
Brewing fresh grounds → the coffee hasn't lost all or some of its flavors since the gas contained in the grounds represents a lot of the flavor, which escapes quickly after grinding.
Brewing with good water → it doesn't taste like chemicals like chlorine or others found in poor water.
Brewing at the right concentration ("strength" in coffee terms, meaning coffee/water ratio) → the flavor isn't too strong or too watery.
Brewing at the right water temperature → the flavor isn't too sour (too cold) or too bitter (too hot).
I realize these aren't good qualities, they're more like the lack of bad qualities. But I think that's a great thing about coffee — as long as it doesn't suck (for the outlined reasons) your personal preferences will guide you. I think
Coffee: Why did coffee become a popular beverage worldwide?
Coffee became a popular global beverage due to a series of unique historic events. These events built one upon the other to eventually create what we have today where coffee is the 2nd most traded commodity in the world, beaten only by oil.
Here's how it happened:
Its discovery - in 600 the legend claims coffee's discovery by the goat herder Kaldi in Abyssinia (present day Ethiopia).
Its use in medicine - in 1000 Avicenna, Mahommedan physician and philosopher, and other Arabian physicians are using coffee, which they call bunchum, for its medicinal properties.
Roasting discovered - in 1200 the Turkish people discover the flavor enhancements achieved by roasting the coffee beans.
Cultivation begins - in 1300 the people of Yemen see a buck in cultivating coffee and selling it to Arabian traders.
The Koran - in 1400 alcohol is declared forbidden by the Koran, so coffee then becomes the replacement stimulant drink for Muslims.
Coffee shops concept - in 1453 the first known coffee shop is opened in Constantinople (later called Istanbul) and called “Kiva Han”. Coffee as a beverage begins it's journey to commercialization.
Europe imports - in the 1500’s European travelers to Arabia discover the coffee beverage and traders start selling coffee into Europe from the ports of Alexandria and Smyrna.
The Pope decrees - in the 1600’s Pope Clement VIII baptizes coffee drinking, making it an acceptable beverage for Christians. Coffee's future is secured with the two greatest religions in the world accepting its consumption.
India cultivates - in 1650 a Muslim pilgrim from India named Baba Budan was the first to sneak some fertile seeds out of Arabia and into India. So begins the coffee plant spread from the 1,000 year monopolistic control of coffee by the Arabian states.
Coffeehouses proliferate - in 1652 the first coffeehouse is opened in Oxford England and the concept quickly proliferates throughout England.
France adopts it - in 1669 the Ambassador of the Turkish Ottoman Empire to the court of Louis XIV in Paris brought coffee into fashion in Parisian High Society.
The Dutch trade - in 1690 the Dutch smuggled live coffee plants from the Arabian port of Mocha, and cultivate coffee commercially, in Ceylon and in their East Indian colony of Java. In the Dutch golden age of the 1700's, their merchant fleets trade with all parts of the globe carrying the coffee beverage and beans with them.
The one plant - in 1714 the Burgomaster of Amsterdam gave King Louis XIV of France a seedling coffee plant from the Amsterdam Botanical Gardens as a gift. In 1720 Chevalier Gabriel Mathiew de Clieu, removes a coffee plant from the King's glass house and takes it with him to Martinique in the Caribbean. He establishes a plantation in Martinique that eventually becomes the source for 90 percent of the world's coffee plantations.
"The Boston Tea Party" - in 1773 America changed from drinking (English) tea to coffee which was seen at the time as their patriotic duty.
Brazilian excess - in the late 1800’s Brazil's coffee plantations expand excessively turning coffee from a drink only for the elite into an everyday drink for the people, due to the price drop generated from the oversupply.
Instant coffee invented - in 1906 George Constant Washington, an English chemist living in Guatemala, invents instant coffee and creates the first mass-produced instant coffee called Red E Coffee.
Prohibition promotes it - in the 1920s prohibition goes into effect in the United States which only serves to create a boom in coffee sales and consumption.
Illy commercializes espresso - in 1933 Dr. Ernest Illy develops the first automatic espresso machine which opens the way for the commercially viable sale of espresso coffee
Nescafé solves Brazil's problems - in 1938 the Nestlé company developed its own freeze dried instant coffee to assist the Brazilian government in solving its coffee surplus problem.
American globalization - America exports it culture (including coffee drinking) to the world via the golden age of Hollywood (1927- 1945) and with the American soldier's issue of instant Maxwell House coffee in their WW2 ration kits.
... and TV does the rest - the advent of TV in the 1950 coinciding with coffee's abundant supply (low cost), it's global acceptance, innovative product (instant) and a company like Nestles to exploit the medium and the product with advertisments. Coffee ads generated an instant use as an accompanyment to the TV experience. Nestle's + TV + Instant coffee completes the global phenomenon that is the coffee drink.
Coffee today, in 2011, is regarded as one of the world's most popular beverage with more than 450 billion cups being consumed each year, but it may never have happened if any of the key historical links above had not each played their part in bringing it about.
What would the world be like without coffee?
Taking the hypothetical case that some alien force in an instant destroyed all coffee trees and all currently available green, roasted and instant coffee on the planet, then the following would occur:
Whole countries and economies would be affected ....
52 countries of the would lose export income with the loss of sales from their 130 million 60-kilogram bags of coffee export each year.
The top 4 coffee producing countries that between them produce 40% of the world's coffee supply would lose a significant export earner. They are Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia and Indonesia.
15 of the poorest countries of the world that depend on coffee as a vital contributor to foreign exchange earnings and also account for a significant proportion of tax income and gross domestic product would be severely affected. These include Burundi, Ethiopia Uganda, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.
Coffee as the second most commonly traded commodity in the world (measured by monetary volume) would financially devastate all the stakeholders in the supply chain including: producers, intermediaries, processors, government agencies, exporters, dealers/brokers, roasters, retailers and cafes if the industry disappeared in an instant.
Jobs would be lost ...
The 60 million people globally that earn some or all of their income from coffee would be severely affected.
The 25 million directly employed by the industry would be out of work.
10 million small peasant coffee farmers (incorporating 25 million family members) who dependent on coffee sales for their primary source of income would be devastated. These small peasant farmers, each cultivating on less than 25 acres, produce about 70% of the world’s coffee supply.
Consumers would be bewildered ....
The 54% of the overall American adult population that partake daily in the consumption of coffee beverages are going to be mightily peeved.
The 1,100,000,000 missed coffee cups on the first day from the 400 billion consumed annually on the planet, is going to create one hell of a 'mass coffee headache'. No work place would be sustainable.
The missed 400 million cups of coffee on the first day in the United States as the leading consumer of coffee in the world, is going to surly start the American Revolution II.
... and business would need to revisit their business models.
Starbuck's 16,680 stores worldwide are going to struggle and will need a whole new approach to their business and marketing. I wonder if they could destroy hot chocolate as comprehensively as they have destroyed the art and taste of fine espresso coffee?
Kraft, Philip Morris, Nestlé, Proctor and Gamble and Sara Lee/Douwe Egberts who between them 'own' the global coffee trade are going to have to find another lucrative 'screw the poor - sell to the rich' business model to replace the billions they make each year from controlling the haves & have-nots of the coffee trade.
Should coffee beans be stored in the freezer?
No, an airtight container is the best storage for coffee. The cold temperatures and lack of controlled humidity tends to affect the flavor of the coffee (not to mention flavors from other food).
Good airtight containers are easy to come by (most kitchen stores should have them in glass or stainless steel).
What is the difference between coffee, cappuccino, espresso & frappuccino?
Definitions of each can vary depending on the country where the question is asked. Having established and operated over 20 outlets in Australia serving coffee, I would identify the differences in the following way:
Coffee: Is a term often used to describe a hot beverage made from roasted coffee beans. Various methods can be used to make a hot coffee beverage and include the espresso, Turkish, percolated, instant, drip or plunger (French press) method.
Espresso: This can describe (1) one method of making coffee that consist of forcing hot pressured water through finely ground coffee beans in an espresso machine to extract the coffee oils/essence that form the basis of various drinks or (2) a specific coffee drink that is also known as a 'short black' and served in a demitasse cup/glass. Italians refer to a coffee drink consisting of simply the expressed oils from the ground coffee beans via an espresso coffee machine as - espresso.
Cappuccino: Is a specific hot coffee drink made using the espresso method and consists of espresso essence/extract, hot steamed milk, topped with velvet milk foam and finished with a sprinkle of chocolate powder.
Frappuccino: Frappuccino is a blended coffee beverages developed and sold by Starbucks who have trademarked the name. It is an iced or chilled cappuccino that may be topped with whipped cream. It generally consists of espresso coffee, milk, sugar, ice, whipped cream and other sweeteners.
Coffee: How many cups of coffee is safe to drink per day?
Caffeine is a stimulant, and an overdose can be lethal. As for other side effects, caffeine is similar to other stimulants. If you do not regularly consume caffeine, I would avoid taking more than 2 cups in any 4 hour period.
The median lethal dose of caffeine is anywhere between 150 and 200 milligrams per kg of body weight in a human. A cup of coffee has around 100 milligrams of caffeine.
So, you would need around 2x your bodyweight in kilograms of cups of coffee to kill yourself. There have been no known instances of lethal caffeine overdoses from drinking coffee alone. Probably because drinking that much coffee would be impractical for even the most dedicated person.
Now, even at lower doses, there can be severe adverse side effects, and these are probably what you're interested in.
Overdosing on caffeine can result in palpitations, twitching, and nervousness as well as increasing your heart rate. But since caffeine is a drug easily adapted to, its hard to determine what dosage would result in significant side effects for a given individual.
Caffeine operates by binding to the adenosine receptors without activating them, stopping adenosine from activating them. Adenosine has an inhibitory effect on the central nervous system. Taking caffeine regularly will cause your body to increase the number of adenosine receptors - thus blunting its effect.
Coffee: What are all the different types of coffee drinks?
The following are the different types of coffee drinks that you may find in a cafe that prepares coffee using the espresso coffee making method:
Affogato: This is a term that literally means 'drowned'. It is the description of a shot of separately served espresso that is later poured over a the top of a scoop of vanilla ice cream or gelato. This beverage is usually served in a short drink glass and is a Italian desert favourite. Popular Affogatos include Vanilla Affogato, Mocha Affogato, and Peppermint Affogato.
Babycino: A cappuccino styled drink served in an up-market café typically for children. It consists of warm milk in a small cup and topped with milk froth and chocolate powder. No espresso coffee essence is added.
Breve: A term in Italian that means short and is used to describe an espresso coffee drink made with a half-and-half light cream or semi-skim milk instead of full fat milk
Caffe' Freddo: Chilled, sweetened espresso served in a tall glass, often on ice.
Caffe Latte or “Latte”: A ‘premium milk coffee experience’. Freshly steamed milk without foam served in a tall glass with a shot of espresso coffee.
Caffe Mocha: A combination of chocolate syrup and a shot of espresso, topped with steamed milk and a layer of micro-foam. Finished with a sprinkled of chocolate.
Cappuccino Chiaro: (AKA Wet or Light cappuccino): Cappuccino prepared with more milk than usual.
Cappuccino Scuro: (AKA Dry or Dark cappuccino) Cappuccino prepared with less milk than usual.
Cappuccino: “Cap”: A ‘traditional morning heart starter’. Steamed foamed velvety milk poured over one shot (1) of coffee oil extract made from 12gm of freshly ground beans producing 38ml of essence. Finished by topping with foam and a sprinkle of chocolate powder. Served in a pre heated vitrified ceramic cup.
Con panna: Like the beverage "macchiato", but whipped cream is substituted for steamed milk.
Corretto: Espresso "corrected" with a touch of grappa, cognac, sambuca, or other spirit.
Doppio: Italian term for double. Double Espresso or twice the amount of coffee and twice the amount of water. Basically it describes two shots of espresso in one demitasse container.
Espresso con Panna: A variation of the macchiato by substituting a dollop of whipped cream for the milk froth. Basically a Starbucks invention. Means in Italian "espresso with cream”.
Espresso Lungo: American term where a shot is extracted longer for a bit of extra espresso. Tends to maximizes the caffeine but will mostly produce a more bitter cup.
Espresso Romano: Espresso served with a lemon peel on the side. Whilst not a typical accompaniment in Italy it is commonly served with the espresso beverage in America.
Flat White: “White Coffee” - ‘uncompromising taste’.Steamed microfroam milk poured through and under the espresso crème produced from one shot (1) of coffee extract made on 12gm of freshly ground coffee producing 38ml of essence. Served in a pre heated vitrified ceramic cup. A common espresso coffee order in Australia/New Zealand. Great for latte art!
Hammerhead: A coffee drink only served in the USA. It is an American term for a shot of espresso in a coffee cup that is topped up with drip-filtered coffee.
Latte Macchiato: Steamed milk served in a tall glass rather than a cup that is “stained” by a shot of espresso coffee.
Long Black: Often called the “American”. It is the ‘benchmark coffee without milk’. It is pure coffee made from one & one half shots of coffee extract made on 16gm of fresh ground beans producing 50ml of essence blended with steamed water. Served in a pre heated vitrified ceramic cup with the essence floated over the top of a cup filled with hot/boiling water. It is a standard espresso (Short Black) but lengthened by the addition of hot/boiling water.
Lungo: An espresso made by purposely allowing more water to flow through the ground coffee than usual. (sometimes called an Americano or ‘long’).
Macchiato: Meaning “stained” - Described as ‘strong, marked or stained’. A touch of steamed foamed milk added to a double shot of coffee extract made from 24gm of fresh ground beans producing 75ml of essence. Served in glass.
Mazagran: A French drink composed of cold coffee and seltzer water. First created by the French soldiers in 1840 in the town of Argelia. A variation includes iced coffee made with maraschino.
Quad: An espresso drink made with four shots of coffee.
Ristretto: (Ristretto in Italian means "restricted, shrunk or short”) It is the richest and most concentrated espresso drink where less water but the same amount of coffee is used to make the beverage and creates a less bitter espresso. The extraction time is shortened producing as little as 3 oz of liquid per serving. Pure and intense espresso served in a demitasse cup.
Short Black: A ‘pure intense Italian favourite with a biting crème head. Contains 75ml of pure double shot (2) coffee essence made from 24gm of fresh ground coffee beans. Traditionally served in glass and is referred to as Espresso by European customers.
Viennese Coffee: Brewed black coffee of any roast or origin topped and served with whipped cream.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Spaces of Banana Control
When Paul Rosenblatt answers the phone, he says “Bananas!”
Rosenblatt ships a million boxes of bananas every year from the Banana Distributors of New York facility on Drake Street, in the Hunt’s Point section of the Bronx. When I visited, a couple of weeks ago, he had 20,000 cases of bananas, each weighing 40lbs, in the building.
I was there with a group of students from my “Artificial Cryosphere” class — a research seminar on the built landscape of refrigeration that I’m teaching at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation this autumn. Contrary to popular belief, as well as to Chiquita’s famous advertising jingle, bananas are the ultimate refrigerated fruit. A behind-the-scenes tour at the Banana Distributors of New York contains several examples of the banana supply chain’s evolving architecture of atmospheric control.In 1899, Scientific American published careful instructions as to how to peel that most exotic and rare of fruits, the banana. But by 1914, bananas were so common that a popular scouting manual suggested that a daily good turn might well consist of “moving a piece of banana peel from the pavement.” Meanwhile, in 1903, United Fruit introduced its first refrigerated banana boat. As Sarah Murray explains in Movable Feasts:
Without refrigerated transport, shiploads of fruit frequently arrived at best overripened, at worst in a downright rotten state, making the mass marketing of bananas impossible. With the preservative power of refrigeration and the speed of steam-powered engines, however, bananas could be shipped in enormous volumes. [...] In a matter of decades, refrigerated vessels had helped turn what in the 1890s was an exotic curiosity into a mass-market product, paving the way for a massive and highly lucrative trans-American trade.In other words, in order to be a global commodity rather than a tropical treat, the banana has to be harvested and transported while completely unripe. Bananas are cut while green, hard, and immature, washed in cool water (both to begin removing field heat and to stop them from leaking their natural latex), and then held at 56 degrees — originally in a refrigerated steamship; today, in a refrigerated container — until they reach their country of consumption weeks later.
What this means is that ripening must then be artificially induced, in a specialized architecture of pressurized, temperature- and atmosphere-controlled rooms that fool the banana into thinking it is still back on the plant in tropical Ecuador. New York City’s supermarkets, grocers, coffee-shops, and food cart vendors are served by just a handful of banana ripening outfits — one in Brooklyn, one in Long Island, a small facility inside the main Hunt’s Point Terminal Market, and our field trip destination: Banana Distributors of New York, in the Bronx.During our visit, Paul Rosenblatt told us that he aims to ripen fruit in five days at 62 degrees, but, to schedule fruit readiness in accordance with supply and demand, he can push a room in four days at 64 degrees, or extend the process to seven days at 58 degrees.
“The energy coming off a box of ripening bananas could heat a small apartment,” Rosenblatt explains, which means that heavy-duty refrigeration is required to keep each room temperature-controlled to within a half a degree. In the past, Banana Distributors of New York has even experimented with heating parts of the building on captured heat from the ripening process.
To add to the complexity, customers can choose from different degrees of ripeness, ranging from 1 (all green) to 7 (all yellow with brown sugar spots). Banana Distributors of New York proudly promise that they have “Every Color, Every Day,” although Rosenblatt gets nervous if he has more than 2000 boxes of any particular shade.To provide this variety every single day, a banana ripening facility has to have a minimum of five or six rooms (Banana Distributors of New York has twenty-two). Each room holds between 1,000 and 2,000 boxes, which means that a banana distributor has to move at least 5,000 boxes each week to make the business worthwhile. This, Rosenblatt explains, has squeezed out the two dozen smaller, three- or four-room operators that used to be sprinkled around New York City in the 1970s.
The most popular shades are between 2.5 and 3.5, but much depends on the retailer’s size and target market. The grocery chain Fairway, which sources its bananas from Banana Distributors of New York, expects to hold bananas for a couple of days, and will therefore buy greener bananas than a smaller bodega that turns its stock over on a daily basis. “Street vendors,” Rosenblatt notes, as well as shops serving a mostly Latin American customer base, “like full yellow.” Personally, he eats only a couple of bananas each week, and favours fully ripe “sevens.”In addition to precise temperature control, the ripening process also depends on atmospheric design. Over a 24-hour period, each roomful of bananas is gassed with ethylene, a plant hormone that accelerates ripening (and is also, curiously, the most produced organic compound in the world).The ethylene is produced in a low, even flow from portable “Easy-Ripe” generators. In the past, Rosenblatt, explained, rooms would be injected with a burst of ethylene released from a cylinder, which not only made it much harder to achieve an even distribution among the stacked bananas, but also posed a heightened fire risk (ethylene is highly flammable, and in the early days of injection technology, fatal banana ripening room explosions were not uncommon).
When Rosenblatt opened the door on a recently gassed room, the smell was revolting — like a wine-soaked carpet, the morning after.For students of the artificial cryosphere, a visit to the Banana Distributors of New York is particularly exciting because original pressurised rooms from the late 1970s are still in use, alongside state-of-the-art Dutch door technology. The older rooms are a legacy of the pre-pallet era, when bananas used to arrive loose and were carefully stacked from concrete floor to ceiling “like bricks,” packed tight and fan ventilated to force air around each hand.Using these old rooms to ripen today’s boxed bananas requires a few adaptations: eight-box stacks are covered with a tarp to create a vacuum, and three axial fans draw air through the carefully measured corridors in between. Even and efficient air circulation is critical to successful temperature control and ethylene distribution, as is occasional venting, as the ripening bananas consume oxygen and release carbon dioxide.
“With bananas,” explains Rosenblatt, “it’s all about ventilation.”The next rooms that Rosenblatt showed us are, he mentions almost as an aside, the first two-tier banana ripening rooms ever built. In 1988, he explains, “this guy called Jim Still came along and offered to build them for free, as an experiment.” They worked, and Jim Still is now known as Banana Jim™, founder and president of ripening industry leaders, Global Logic, LLC.
In addition to increased capacity and improved ripening uniformity, these vertical air-flow banana chambers can be loaded and unloaded using fork-lift trucks in twenty minutes or less.With minor improvements in fan engineering, and the optional addition of a third tier, brand-new banana ripening rooms still look identical to today. “All the technological innovation,” Rosenblatt tells us, “is to be found in doors.” He points out some old roll-up air-tight doors, explaining that “we call these widowmakers — we never stand under them.”I asked Rosenblatt about new, in-container ripening systems, which threaten to make the banana ripening room extinct by integrating the process into the final few days of a banana’s boat journey, so that it can be unloaded from a freighter and trucked straight to the supermarket. “Banana Jim” Still has actually filed a patent for his Ripe-Anywhere™ container system, and promotes it under the humble tagline, “It was a modest invention… but it changed a planet.”
Rosenblatt is not convinced: “Walmart could do containers, but in New York City, retailers don’t have the volume.” Nonetheless, the future of his family business is uncertain. While his father-in-law got his start in the fruit trade at the age of eight, working for street pedlars, Rosenblatt told us that he hopes his own children don’t go into banana ripening.
The hours are certainly unappealing: Banana Distributors is open from 10pm to noon every night. To the downsides, I added my own mistrust of banana boxes, dating back to a scarring experience with a large, furry spider as a sixteen-year-old shelf stacker at Waitrose. However, Rosenblatt told us that in his 39 years in the banana trade, he has never seen a snake, and has only come across one spider, which he gave to the Bronx Zoo.We said goodbye as the final trailer was being loaded and shipped out for the day. Nearly two million bananas pass through these ripening rooms on their journey to New York consumers each week — a vital link in the largely invisible, highly specialized architecture of artificial refrigeration that has enabled the banana to become and remain America’s favourite fruit.
Rosenblatt ships a million boxes of bananas every year from the Banana Distributors of New York facility on Drake Street, in the Hunt’s Point section of the Bronx. When I visited, a couple of weeks ago, he had 20,000 cases of bananas, each weighing 40lbs, in the building.
I was there with a group of students from my “Artificial Cryosphere” class — a research seminar on the built landscape of refrigeration that I’m teaching at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation this autumn. Contrary to popular belief, as well as to Chiquita’s famous advertising jingle, bananas are the ultimate refrigerated fruit. A behind-the-scenes tour at the Banana Distributors of New York contains several examples of the banana supply chain’s evolving architecture of atmospheric control.In 1899, Scientific American published careful instructions as to how to peel that most exotic and rare of fruits, the banana. But by 1914, bananas were so common that a popular scouting manual suggested that a daily good turn might well consist of “moving a piece of banana peel from the pavement.” Meanwhile, in 1903, United Fruit introduced its first refrigerated banana boat. As Sarah Murray explains in Movable Feasts:
Without refrigerated transport, shiploads of fruit frequently arrived at best overripened, at worst in a downright rotten state, making the mass marketing of bananas impossible. With the preservative power of refrigeration and the speed of steam-powered engines, however, bananas could be shipped in enormous volumes. [...] In a matter of decades, refrigerated vessels had helped turn what in the 1890s was an exotic curiosity into a mass-market product, paving the way for a massive and highly lucrative trans-American trade.In other words, in order to be a global commodity rather than a tropical treat, the banana has to be harvested and transported while completely unripe. Bananas are cut while green, hard, and immature, washed in cool water (both to begin removing field heat and to stop them from leaking their natural latex), and then held at 56 degrees — originally in a refrigerated steamship; today, in a refrigerated container — until they reach their country of consumption weeks later.
What this means is that ripening must then be artificially induced, in a specialized architecture of pressurized, temperature- and atmosphere-controlled rooms that fool the banana into thinking it is still back on the plant in tropical Ecuador. New York City’s supermarkets, grocers, coffee-shops, and food cart vendors are served by just a handful of banana ripening outfits — one in Brooklyn, one in Long Island, a small facility inside the main Hunt’s Point Terminal Market, and our field trip destination: Banana Distributors of New York, in the Bronx.During our visit, Paul Rosenblatt told us that he aims to ripen fruit in five days at 62 degrees, but, to schedule fruit readiness in accordance with supply and demand, he can push a room in four days at 64 degrees, or extend the process to seven days at 58 degrees.
“The energy coming off a box of ripening bananas could heat a small apartment,” Rosenblatt explains, which means that heavy-duty refrigeration is required to keep each room temperature-controlled to within a half a degree. In the past, Banana Distributors of New York has even experimented with heating parts of the building on captured heat from the ripening process.
To add to the complexity, customers can choose from different degrees of ripeness, ranging from 1 (all green) to 7 (all yellow with brown sugar spots). Banana Distributors of New York proudly promise that they have “Every Color, Every Day,” although Rosenblatt gets nervous if he has more than 2000 boxes of any particular shade.To provide this variety every single day, a banana ripening facility has to have a minimum of five or six rooms (Banana Distributors of New York has twenty-two). Each room holds between 1,000 and 2,000 boxes, which means that a banana distributor has to move at least 5,000 boxes each week to make the business worthwhile. This, Rosenblatt explains, has squeezed out the two dozen smaller, three- or four-room operators that used to be sprinkled around New York City in the 1970s.
The most popular shades are between 2.5 and 3.5, but much depends on the retailer’s size and target market. The grocery chain Fairway, which sources its bananas from Banana Distributors of New York, expects to hold bananas for a couple of days, and will therefore buy greener bananas than a smaller bodega that turns its stock over on a daily basis. “Street vendors,” Rosenblatt notes, as well as shops serving a mostly Latin American customer base, “like full yellow.” Personally, he eats only a couple of bananas each week, and favours fully ripe “sevens.”In addition to precise temperature control, the ripening process also depends on atmospheric design. Over a 24-hour period, each roomful of bananas is gassed with ethylene, a plant hormone that accelerates ripening (and is also, curiously, the most produced organic compound in the world).The ethylene is produced in a low, even flow from portable “Easy-Ripe” generators. In the past, Rosenblatt, explained, rooms would be injected with a burst of ethylene released from a cylinder, which not only made it much harder to achieve an even distribution among the stacked bananas, but also posed a heightened fire risk (ethylene is highly flammable, and in the early days of injection technology, fatal banana ripening room explosions were not uncommon).
When Rosenblatt opened the door on a recently gassed room, the smell was revolting — like a wine-soaked carpet, the morning after.For students of the artificial cryosphere, a visit to the Banana Distributors of New York is particularly exciting because original pressurised rooms from the late 1970s are still in use, alongside state-of-the-art Dutch door technology. The older rooms are a legacy of the pre-pallet era, when bananas used to arrive loose and were carefully stacked from concrete floor to ceiling “like bricks,” packed tight and fan ventilated to force air around each hand.Using these old rooms to ripen today’s boxed bananas requires a few adaptations: eight-box stacks are covered with a tarp to create a vacuum, and three axial fans draw air through the carefully measured corridors in between. Even and efficient air circulation is critical to successful temperature control and ethylene distribution, as is occasional venting, as the ripening bananas consume oxygen and release carbon dioxide.
“With bananas,” explains Rosenblatt, “it’s all about ventilation.”The next rooms that Rosenblatt showed us are, he mentions almost as an aside, the first two-tier banana ripening rooms ever built. In 1988, he explains, “this guy called Jim Still came along and offered to build them for free, as an experiment.” They worked, and Jim Still is now known as Banana Jim™, founder and president of ripening industry leaders, Global Logic, LLC.
In addition to increased capacity and improved ripening uniformity, these vertical air-flow banana chambers can be loaded and unloaded using fork-lift trucks in twenty minutes or less.With minor improvements in fan engineering, and the optional addition of a third tier, brand-new banana ripening rooms still look identical to today. “All the technological innovation,” Rosenblatt tells us, “is to be found in doors.” He points out some old roll-up air-tight doors, explaining that “we call these widowmakers — we never stand under them.”I asked Rosenblatt about new, in-container ripening systems, which threaten to make the banana ripening room extinct by integrating the process into the final few days of a banana’s boat journey, so that it can be unloaded from a freighter and trucked straight to the supermarket. “Banana Jim” Still has actually filed a patent for his Ripe-Anywhere™ container system, and promotes it under the humble tagline, “It was a modest invention… but it changed a planet.”
Rosenblatt is not convinced: “Walmart could do containers, but in New York City, retailers don’t have the volume.” Nonetheless, the future of his family business is uncertain. While his father-in-law got his start in the fruit trade at the age of eight, working for street pedlars, Rosenblatt told us that he hopes his own children don’t go into banana ripening.
The hours are certainly unappealing: Banana Distributors is open from 10pm to noon every night. To the downsides, I added my own mistrust of banana boxes, dating back to a scarring experience with a large, furry spider as a sixteen-year-old shelf stacker at Waitrose. However, Rosenblatt told us that in his 39 years in the banana trade, he has never seen a snake, and has only come across one spider, which he gave to the Bronx Zoo.We said goodbye as the final trailer was being loaded and shipped out for the day. Nearly two million bananas pass through these ripening rooms on their journey to New York consumers each week — a vital link in the largely invisible, highly specialized architecture of artificial refrigeration that has enabled the banana to become and remain America’s favourite fruit.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Sous-Vide 101: How to Cook the Most Tender and Flavorful Meat You’ve Ever Tasted
Dry turkey and overcooked steaks don't have to be a staple of your holiday dinners or homemade meals. Sous-vide is a cooking method that uses immersion in hot water to cook food over long periods, low and slow, resulting in some of the most succulent and tender meat you've ever tasted, and an easy, hands-off cooking process that anyone can do. Sous-vide has gotten a bit trendy but it's for good reason. It's surprisingly easy, not nearly as fussy as it might appear, and the results speak for themselves. Here's a primer to what sous-vide cooking is, why it's incredible and you should try it, and how you can get started on the cheap.
Sous-vide cooking involves cooking food in sealed plastic bags immersed in hot water for long periods of time. Depending on the cut, type, and thickness of the meat or the type of food in question, cooking sous-vide for several hours is not out of the ordinary. The key is managing the temperature of the water so it stays hot enough to cook the food thoroughly and evenly, and long enough to kill any food-borne pathogens that may be in the bag along with the food. Cooking in sealed bags (usually vacuum sealed) at lower temperatures also results in juicier food, since there's no substantive transfer of moisture from the food in the way there is with a more moist cooking method like poaching or broiling, and the cooking temperatures don't get so high that the food starts to dry out.
Meat and fish are best suited to sous-vide cooking. You can cook vegetables, but because they usually require higher temperatures than cooking meat does, they can be a bit more difficult (although not impossible—more on this later.) Almost any type of meat takes well to to process, and since sous-vide doesn't significantly alter the texture, you can cook delicate fish that's sensitive to high temperatures or usually dry and difficult meats like turkey breasts and flank steak and end up with a flavorful, moist dinner.
Professional chefs use high-end, thousand-dollar immersion circulators that regulate the temperature of the water precisely within fractions of a degree for the duration of the cooking process, and are well insulated to lose as little heat as possible while cooking. Home cooks like you and me don't need that kind of gear to get started, though. Below, I'll suggest some starter sous-vide methods that don't require you to buy anything at all.
What Makes It Better or Worse Than Cooking On a Stove or Grill?
If you're still not convinced sous-vide cooking is for you, here are some pros and cons to consider:
Sous-Vide 101: How to Cook the Most Tender and Flavorful Meat You’ve Ever Tasted Pros:
Cooking sous-vide results in evenly-cooked meat and fish.
Cooking sous-vide gives you specific control over the final temperature of the meat, avoiding overdone, dried-out food.
You can hold foods cooked sous-vide at their specified temperature for long periods of time without damaging the texture or quality of the dish, making it an ideal cooking method for holiday dinners or meals with multiple components and side-dishes.
Bacterial or other contamination is largely not an issue with sous-vide cooking. While you may be cooking up to minimum safe temperatures, the length of time you're holding the food at its safe temperature will pasteurize your meat and ensure the safety of your food, meaning "safe" meat doesn't have to equal "dry" or "not pink" meat any longer. Still, keep your meat thermometer handy, and test before serving. Remember, sous-vide lets you hold food at temp for long periods without diminishing the quality of the food, so if it's undercooked, you can seal the bag and put it back in.
Sous-vide cooking is by nature a repeatable process. Set the temperature, set the timer, and walk away. You will wind up with perfectly cooked food every time you do it.
Sous-Vide 101: How to Cook the Most Tender and Flavorful Meat You’ve Ever Tasted Cons:
Cooking sous-vide usually requires some equipment you may not already have.
Sous-vide takes a long time—sometimes an hour or so for thin cuts of meat, and sometimes several hours—even most of a day—for thicker cuts and large portions. Planning ahead is key—sous-vide is definitely not a 30-minute-meal approach to cooking.
When cooking meat sous-vide, you're cooking at low temperatures, which means the Maillard Reaction, characterized by the delicious browning of the outside of the meat, does not occur. You can get around this by applying a finishing sear to the meat after cooking, or by pre-searing at very high temperatures to get the reaction without cooking the interior.
While sous-vide cooking is largely considered safe, care must be taken to ensure that food cooked sous-vide reaches the appropriate safe internal temperature before serving, more-so than higher-temperature cooking methods, because of the risk of botulism contamination. Even though sous-vide cooking times are long and hot enough to pasteurize meat, extra care must be taken, especially when handling leftovers, and people with immune disorders and pregnant women have been warned to eat sous-vide cooked meats with caution, if at all.
It's Easier Than You Think: Some Easy Sous-Vide Dishes
If you're ready to try cooking your next meal sous-vide, you don't have to run out and spend several hundred dollars on a sous-vide cooking kit, or a home-version of a professional immersion circulator or water oven. We've discussed sous-vide cooking in the past here at Lifehacker, and one way you can get started is with some small cuts of salmon and your kitchen sink. This method relies on the fact that low temperatures—even temperatures within the danger zone—can still pasteurize meat and fish if held at temperature for the appropriate amount of time (see this Serious Eats article and this USDA guide for chicken for examples of this.) Because a large volume of water loses its temperature slower than smaller ones, a kitchen sink full of hot water—and you need to take its temperature with a instant-read thermometer to make sure the temperature is right—makes for a great sous-vide cooking vessel if you're only going to cook a thin cut of fish for a matter of minutes, and then crisp up the outside in a pan.
Sous-Vide 101: How to Cook the Most Tender and Flavorful Meat You’ve Ever Tasted My first sous-vide recipe closely followed the beer cooler steak hack performed by Serious Eats' J. Kenji López-Alt back in 2010, and their sous-vide steak how-to. I picked up a 5-quart personal cooler from Amazon for $16, and thawed out a pair of thin (less than a quarter-inch) strip steaks I had in the fridge. I seasoned the steaks and dropped them into a pair of sealed plastic bags along with a little canola oil for a little fat in the mix. In a separate pot, I brought some water up to 145 degrees, and poured it into the cooler. I got as much air as possible out of the bags by dipping them in the water and letting the air come out before sealing them shut, added them to the cooler, shut the lid, and walked away for just over an hour. Since I was using a typical beer cooler, traditionally designed to keep cold in and warm out (now converted to work in reverse), I couldn't heat the water in the cooler to keep temp. Instead, I relied on the cooler to retain heat, which it did (mostly, I lost a few degrees, but not much) for the duration of the cooking time. When I took the steaks out, the results were incredible, and some of the juiciest steak I'd ever eaten.
From there, I moved on to experiment with salmon fillets one night and cod fillets another night, both bagged with a little olive oil and some spices and herbs for seasoning, and cooked in 120-degree water for well over an hour. The process worked like a charm, and the resulting fish was flaky and flavorful, and thoroughly cooked. To that point, there is a bit of blind faith that comes with sous-vide cooking. You're trusting that the cooking process is running its course, and while you can measure with a meat thermometer before you serve (and you should, to make sure your food is completely done and ready to eat) you don't get the same sight, smell, and texture cues that you get when cooking in an oven or on the stove. You can't poke or prod your meat or fish to see if it's coming along—it's a more scientific process than that. You just have to wait for your timer to go off, take the temperature of the food, and put it back in the bath if it's not finished.
Just as López-Alt discovered, I found that even though the personal cooler loses heat much more rapidly than a commercial sous-vide cooker or water oven, the heat loss is definitely slow enough to keep the water at temp for long enough for a few thin cuts of steak, or a couple of ribs, or a pair of fish fillets, seasoned with oil, spices, and aromatics. However, the heat loss is enough that if you want to try a whole rack or ribs, or thick ribeyes or full New York strip steaks, or if you want to try cooking the perfect turkey the way my friend Dr. Terry Simpson does every Thanksgiving and Christmas (and on other occasions, too), you'll need better equipment than a small beer cooler and some simple freezer bags.
Give the cooler or the kitchen sink method a try if you want a super-low-cost entry point to sous-vide cooking that gives you the freedom to experiment without a big investment first. As long as you won't cook vegetables (Pectin, the tough stuff that binds vegetables together, breaks down at over 180-degrees, a temperature that's difficult to hold in a small cooler for long enough to cook the veggies to the right doneness), and you know you'll only cook for one or two people at a time, you'll be fine. If you plan to cook at higher temps or for long periods, it's time to step up your game.
Sous-Vide 101: How to Cook the Most Tender and Flavorful Meat You’ve Ever Tasted
Take It to The Next Level with Specialized Equipment
The costs associated with sous vide cooking are not trivial—depending on the type of water oven you get, you can spend hundreds of dollars on the oven, and then a good bit more on a vacuum-sealer and the appropriate FDA-approved polyethylene bags you'll need to put your food in before it goes into the water oven. As we mentioned earlier, these products can all range in quality and price, but the Sous Vide Supreme water oven is considered the best and most widely available consumer water oven for the task. It will set you back $399 at Amazon stand-alone, or $479 in a promo package with a vacuum-sealer and some bags to get started. The Sous Vide Supreme Demi is a slightly smaller appliance, retailing for $299, that has a lower entry point, but still requires you get a sealer and the right bags to cook with. Serious Eats took the Sous Vide Supreme for a test-drive with a professional chef, and the results were encouraging, if you're considering picking one up.
There's no reason to run out and buy a PolyScience immersion circulator like professional chefs use in their kitchens. Even so, when it comes time to do a whole rack of ribs, or you want to cook enough to feed a dinner party, or you're ready to cook a whole chicken or turkey sous-vide, you'll need a larger water oven to get the job done than a cooler or kitchen sink can provide, even if you cut up the chicken or turkey into dark meat and white meat and cook them separately.
Separating the dark meat from the white meat before cooking your poultry sous-vide is a technique I recommend, since the temperature and cooking times for perfect doneness can differ between parts of the bird, and doing so will allow you to pull out the dark meat while it's still tender and juicy, while letting the white meat cook a little longer until it's fully done, but also juicy and perfectly cooked. You'll never have to worry about perfectly done dark meat and under-done breast meat (or vice-versa) again.
Sous-Vide 101: How to Cook the Most Tender and Flavorful Meat You’ve Ever Tasted Regardless of what you plan to cook in your water oven, a 10-liter model will do you just fine when it comes to cooking just about everything, from large, thick steaks to thin fillets of fish, and it does it all safely. Simply program the oven with the cooking temperature, and the oven makes sure the water stays at the right temperature for the duration of your cooking time. It's definitely a steep admission price to get into the world of sous-vide cooking, so even though we think the food is worth the cost, it's a good idea to try our cooler method before you buy.
Have you tried cooking sous-vide? The beer cooler hack may be a little difficult to explain to a spouse or visiting friends, but once they've tasted the results, they'll be convinced. Share your sous-vide cooking tips in the comments below.
Sous-vide cooking involves cooking food in sealed plastic bags immersed in hot water for long periods of time. Depending on the cut, type, and thickness of the meat or the type of food in question, cooking sous-vide for several hours is not out of the ordinary. The key is managing the temperature of the water so it stays hot enough to cook the food thoroughly and evenly, and long enough to kill any food-borne pathogens that may be in the bag along with the food. Cooking in sealed bags (usually vacuum sealed) at lower temperatures also results in juicier food, since there's no substantive transfer of moisture from the food in the way there is with a more moist cooking method like poaching or broiling, and the cooking temperatures don't get so high that the food starts to dry out.
Meat and fish are best suited to sous-vide cooking. You can cook vegetables, but because they usually require higher temperatures than cooking meat does, they can be a bit more difficult (although not impossible—more on this later.) Almost any type of meat takes well to to process, and since sous-vide doesn't significantly alter the texture, you can cook delicate fish that's sensitive to high temperatures or usually dry and difficult meats like turkey breasts and flank steak and end up with a flavorful, moist dinner.
Professional chefs use high-end, thousand-dollar immersion circulators that regulate the temperature of the water precisely within fractions of a degree for the duration of the cooking process, and are well insulated to lose as little heat as possible while cooking. Home cooks like you and me don't need that kind of gear to get started, though. Below, I'll suggest some starter sous-vide methods that don't require you to buy anything at all.
What Makes It Better or Worse Than Cooking On a Stove or Grill?
If you're still not convinced sous-vide cooking is for you, here are some pros and cons to consider:
Sous-Vide 101: How to Cook the Most Tender and Flavorful Meat You’ve Ever Tasted Pros:
Cooking sous-vide results in evenly-cooked meat and fish.
Cooking sous-vide gives you specific control over the final temperature of the meat, avoiding overdone, dried-out food.
You can hold foods cooked sous-vide at their specified temperature for long periods of time without damaging the texture or quality of the dish, making it an ideal cooking method for holiday dinners or meals with multiple components and side-dishes.
Bacterial or other contamination is largely not an issue with sous-vide cooking. While you may be cooking up to minimum safe temperatures, the length of time you're holding the food at its safe temperature will pasteurize your meat and ensure the safety of your food, meaning "safe" meat doesn't have to equal "dry" or "not pink" meat any longer. Still, keep your meat thermometer handy, and test before serving. Remember, sous-vide lets you hold food at temp for long periods without diminishing the quality of the food, so if it's undercooked, you can seal the bag and put it back in.
Sous-vide cooking is by nature a repeatable process. Set the temperature, set the timer, and walk away. You will wind up with perfectly cooked food every time you do it.
Sous-Vide 101: How to Cook the Most Tender and Flavorful Meat You’ve Ever Tasted Cons:
Cooking sous-vide usually requires some equipment you may not already have.
Sous-vide takes a long time—sometimes an hour or so for thin cuts of meat, and sometimes several hours—even most of a day—for thicker cuts and large portions. Planning ahead is key—sous-vide is definitely not a 30-minute-meal approach to cooking.
When cooking meat sous-vide, you're cooking at low temperatures, which means the Maillard Reaction, characterized by the delicious browning of the outside of the meat, does not occur. You can get around this by applying a finishing sear to the meat after cooking, or by pre-searing at very high temperatures to get the reaction without cooking the interior.
While sous-vide cooking is largely considered safe, care must be taken to ensure that food cooked sous-vide reaches the appropriate safe internal temperature before serving, more-so than higher-temperature cooking methods, because of the risk of botulism contamination. Even though sous-vide cooking times are long and hot enough to pasteurize meat, extra care must be taken, especially when handling leftovers, and people with immune disorders and pregnant women have been warned to eat sous-vide cooked meats with caution, if at all.
It's Easier Than You Think: Some Easy Sous-Vide Dishes
If you're ready to try cooking your next meal sous-vide, you don't have to run out and spend several hundred dollars on a sous-vide cooking kit, or a home-version of a professional immersion circulator or water oven. We've discussed sous-vide cooking in the past here at Lifehacker, and one way you can get started is with some small cuts of salmon and your kitchen sink. This method relies on the fact that low temperatures—even temperatures within the danger zone—can still pasteurize meat and fish if held at temperature for the appropriate amount of time (see this Serious Eats article and this USDA guide for chicken for examples of this.) Because a large volume of water loses its temperature slower than smaller ones, a kitchen sink full of hot water—and you need to take its temperature with a instant-read thermometer to make sure the temperature is right—makes for a great sous-vide cooking vessel if you're only going to cook a thin cut of fish for a matter of minutes, and then crisp up the outside in a pan.
Sous-Vide 101: How to Cook the Most Tender and Flavorful Meat You’ve Ever Tasted My first sous-vide recipe closely followed the beer cooler steak hack performed by Serious Eats' J. Kenji López-Alt back in 2010, and their sous-vide steak how-to. I picked up a 5-quart personal cooler from Amazon for $16, and thawed out a pair of thin (less than a quarter-inch) strip steaks I had in the fridge. I seasoned the steaks and dropped them into a pair of sealed plastic bags along with a little canola oil for a little fat in the mix. In a separate pot, I brought some water up to 145 degrees, and poured it into the cooler. I got as much air as possible out of the bags by dipping them in the water and letting the air come out before sealing them shut, added them to the cooler, shut the lid, and walked away for just over an hour. Since I was using a typical beer cooler, traditionally designed to keep cold in and warm out (now converted to work in reverse), I couldn't heat the water in the cooler to keep temp. Instead, I relied on the cooler to retain heat, which it did (mostly, I lost a few degrees, but not much) for the duration of the cooking time. When I took the steaks out, the results were incredible, and some of the juiciest steak I'd ever eaten.
From there, I moved on to experiment with salmon fillets one night and cod fillets another night, both bagged with a little olive oil and some spices and herbs for seasoning, and cooked in 120-degree water for well over an hour. The process worked like a charm, and the resulting fish was flaky and flavorful, and thoroughly cooked. To that point, there is a bit of blind faith that comes with sous-vide cooking. You're trusting that the cooking process is running its course, and while you can measure with a meat thermometer before you serve (and you should, to make sure your food is completely done and ready to eat) you don't get the same sight, smell, and texture cues that you get when cooking in an oven or on the stove. You can't poke or prod your meat or fish to see if it's coming along—it's a more scientific process than that. You just have to wait for your timer to go off, take the temperature of the food, and put it back in the bath if it's not finished.
Just as López-Alt discovered, I found that even though the personal cooler loses heat much more rapidly than a commercial sous-vide cooker or water oven, the heat loss is definitely slow enough to keep the water at temp for long enough for a few thin cuts of steak, or a couple of ribs, or a pair of fish fillets, seasoned with oil, spices, and aromatics. However, the heat loss is enough that if you want to try a whole rack or ribs, or thick ribeyes or full New York strip steaks, or if you want to try cooking the perfect turkey the way my friend Dr. Terry Simpson does every Thanksgiving and Christmas (and on other occasions, too), you'll need better equipment than a small beer cooler and some simple freezer bags.
Give the cooler or the kitchen sink method a try if you want a super-low-cost entry point to sous-vide cooking that gives you the freedom to experiment without a big investment first. As long as you won't cook vegetables (Pectin, the tough stuff that binds vegetables together, breaks down at over 180-degrees, a temperature that's difficult to hold in a small cooler for long enough to cook the veggies to the right doneness), and you know you'll only cook for one or two people at a time, you'll be fine. If you plan to cook at higher temps or for long periods, it's time to step up your game.
Sous-Vide 101: How to Cook the Most Tender and Flavorful Meat You’ve Ever Tasted
Take It to The Next Level with Specialized Equipment
The costs associated with sous vide cooking are not trivial—depending on the type of water oven you get, you can spend hundreds of dollars on the oven, and then a good bit more on a vacuum-sealer and the appropriate FDA-approved polyethylene bags you'll need to put your food in before it goes into the water oven. As we mentioned earlier, these products can all range in quality and price, but the Sous Vide Supreme water oven is considered the best and most widely available consumer water oven for the task. It will set you back $399 at Amazon stand-alone, or $479 in a promo package with a vacuum-sealer and some bags to get started. The Sous Vide Supreme Demi is a slightly smaller appliance, retailing for $299, that has a lower entry point, but still requires you get a sealer and the right bags to cook with. Serious Eats took the Sous Vide Supreme for a test-drive with a professional chef, and the results were encouraging, if you're considering picking one up.
There's no reason to run out and buy a PolyScience immersion circulator like professional chefs use in their kitchens. Even so, when it comes time to do a whole rack of ribs, or you want to cook enough to feed a dinner party, or you're ready to cook a whole chicken or turkey sous-vide, you'll need a larger water oven to get the job done than a cooler or kitchen sink can provide, even if you cut up the chicken or turkey into dark meat and white meat and cook them separately.
Separating the dark meat from the white meat before cooking your poultry sous-vide is a technique I recommend, since the temperature and cooking times for perfect doneness can differ between parts of the bird, and doing so will allow you to pull out the dark meat while it's still tender and juicy, while letting the white meat cook a little longer until it's fully done, but also juicy and perfectly cooked. You'll never have to worry about perfectly done dark meat and under-done breast meat (or vice-versa) again.
Sous-Vide 101: How to Cook the Most Tender and Flavorful Meat You’ve Ever Tasted Regardless of what you plan to cook in your water oven, a 10-liter model will do you just fine when it comes to cooking just about everything, from large, thick steaks to thin fillets of fish, and it does it all safely. Simply program the oven with the cooking temperature, and the oven makes sure the water stays at the right temperature for the duration of your cooking time. It's definitely a steep admission price to get into the world of sous-vide cooking, so even though we think the food is worth the cost, it's a good idea to try our cooler method before you buy.
Have you tried cooking sous-vide? The beer cooler hack may be a little difficult to explain to a spouse or visiting friends, but once they've tasted the results, they'll be convinced. Share your sous-vide cooking tips in the comments below.
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