This may take some explaining

by **kingseven** » Wed Oct 20, 2004 11:54 am

I thought I'd better explain the thought process before I jump right in there.

I was reading about carrots. Most of the flavour in carrots is water soluble so when you boil em up you lose a lot of taste - but roasting keeps it all there.
Then I thought about coffee, as I do perhaps a little too much. Most methods of brewing - cafetiere, drip etc - extract only the water soluble flavours. Espresso allows fat soluble flavours to be extracted because the pressure of extraction produces and emulsion.

So. I heated some butter in a pan, grab a handful of green beans (Columbian I think, I wasn't really looking) and started to fry them up. I've read about a couple of Ethiopian ceremonies that used green beans fried in rancid butter (yummy I am sure you will agree) with loads of other things.

In went some chopped onion, reduced the heat (the beans are a light milk chocolate brown) and the onions brown and soften. Its at this point the girlfriend begins prompting me to stop. I don't know why. The results were surprisingly tasty! But in a hard to describe way. Experiments will continue to see if I can use this, mixed with a stock-esque method, to produce something interesting and tasty....

Out of interest - has anyone here made a coffee infused oil?

by **Raf** » Wed Oct 20, 2004 12:21 pm

Ha, King7, you are truly the Hervé This of coffee! And my new hero. Were the beans soft? Like beans-in-tomato-sauce-soft? And did they taste like coffee? Did you get a caffeine trip afterwards (cos that must have been one hell of a dose you took!). Tell us more, and by all means: send in the recipe, then we'll publish it!

What I've been thinking about recently is the whole espuma-craze sweeping over gastronomyland. I went to a restaurant recently that served an amazing pea soup in a tiny but tall glass, with about two thirds of actual soup, and one third of pea espuma. I thought: an espresso espuma, lukewarm, served on top of some heated milk (a reverse cappucino), would be nice, but you could go a lot farther than that even.

by **kingseven** » Wed Oct 20, 2004 1:46 pm

Espuma? Do you mean the sort of foams and airs places like El Bulli are doing? I have experimented with espresso. The problem is that the fats emulsified in the coffee destroy foam so you need to dramatically alter the coffee. A lot of good syrup will produce a stable foam (but taste far far too sweet). I am waiting to get my hands on some Xanthum to see how that stabilises the crema, and espresso foams.

I have been playing with mixing coffee with various other foams - such as fruit and vegetable foams. I have drunk a lot of odd, and in some cases bloody awful, macchiatos....

If foams are of interest I would recommend Sidney Perkowitz's book Universal Foam

I didn't get a caffeine kick out of the beans. Mostly cos I didn't eat a great deal, and secondly because caffeine is water soluble so not much would have come out into the butter.
Nor did the beans become soft, but the cooking time wasn't that long. I would like to spend some time (maybe this afternoon) working on an oil infused with coffee. Its interesting to me because a lot of the bitter chemicals in coffee are water soluble. I am sure someone making essences has been through this.

Jo Malone on Brook Street do a perfume that uses coffee, and whilst they gave me some samples and were very helpful they didn't tell me much about how they got the fragrance from the coffee (they do two perfumes, one just smells a bit floraly and the other roasty and spicy but I think there would be something very very wrong with me if I started buying that for my girlfriend!)

So.... where is my oil?

by **Raf** » Wed Oct 20, 2004 2:12 pm

kingseven wrote:Espuma? Do you mean the sort of foams and airs places like El Bulli are doing? I have experimented with espresso. The problem is that the fats emulsified in the coffee destroy foam so you need to dramatically alter the coffee. A lot of good syrup will produce a stable foam (but taste far far too sweet). I am waiting to get my hands on some Xanthum to see how that stabilises the crema, and espresso foams.

I don't know Xanthum, but my nephew, who has a restaurant and is keenly interested in those Bulli/espuma things, said something about using a little bit of gelatine to stabilize the foams. I don't know what that does to the taste, I guess gelatine is rather neutral, as they use it in patisserie all the time.

I was planning to buy some of those containers to make foams myself (apparently they come with gas cartridges to make the foam), to experiment a bit.

by **kingseven** » Wed Oct 20, 2004 2:22 pm

Gelatine won't really stabilise a foam as its not really a surfactant. Adding gelatine to coffee would probably mean that when it set it would congeale (sp?)

I am planning to try and steal one of those gas things from the fat duck. Only certain things will make foams.
Just for your own entertainment get an aerolatte spinning whish thing. Foam some cold milk. the milk will foam nicely but if you listen to it you can hear all the bubbles start to burst immediately. Very quickly it will retreat to nothing. Steam some milk (but don't stretch it/add any air). It will be noisy - we all know that noise, the screeching. Now use the aerolatte. It will take more work to get it to foam but now the foam is much more stable. This is to do with how protein stretches out and wraps itself around bubbles, and also how heat alters the nature of the protein and its permanent shape.
I don't really want to bang on about it because I will very quickly stray from dull into patronising. Once again - if it is of interest then get the foam book. I paid 99p for it on amazon so its kicking about cheap....

Peter Barham's The Science of Cooking, Harold McGee's on Food and Cooking and Illy's Chemistry of Quality are all quite interesting when it comes to this topic too....

by **kingseven** » Wed Oct 20, 2004 3:26 pm

And so the experiment begins.

300ml of grape seed oil
handful of coffee beans
vanilla pods (with seeds scraped out and added seperately)
a little coffee essence

Will report tomorrow when it has had time to stew, so to speak.

by **kingseven** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 1:28 pm

Just a quick update.

The oil has developed a rich chocolately aroma. At the moment I am still without inspiration as to how to use it but rest assured - when I know... I will ramble about it on here.

by **moccafaux** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 3:08 pm

Ever tried smoking the coffee or snorting it through a rolled pound-note?

by **Joey** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 1:37 am

got a delivery from Jawah Chava from Roberts Coffee and sell those tins in my shop.... it's a juice made from the flesh of the coffee cherries - how do you like that? ;-)

Sorry, no oils.

by **kingseven** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 10:12 am

Ooo!

I've been dying to get hold of something like that. Can you buy it on the site?
How does it taste?

by **Joey** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 11:50 am

nope, got a huge delivery, I can send you some.... tastes a bit like a lighter ginger ale. They made a lemonade with bubbles out of it, not like a fruity fruit juice.... I think it's nice.
joey

by **kingseven** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 12:27 pm

Ah - I was hoping for just a plan syrupy juice that I could condense down and see how it worked for sweetening coffee.

Is it popular? I've never heard of it before?

by **Joey** » Sun Oct 24, 2004 12:15 pm

i dunno how popular it's in finnland, sweden and the neatherlands - that's where roberts coffee has it's shops - but franchise shops....
I just found it on the homepage.
Here in my shop I have positioned it right at the counter, but just found out that as I have a lot of (rather expensive) specialities, like REALLY crazy chocolates, or "Dutchy" - the bisquits made from Prince Charles cerials - the cheap looking can /tin doesn't quite please the customers. I'll have to promote it more. But on the other side, hey, I have just had opened for 10 days now - who knows, maybe it will be an insider drink in some months ;-)

But the people who drank it liked it.
If you send me your adress with PM I'll send you one as a sample.

joey

This may take some explaining

This may take some explaining

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