I suppose an appropriate first post would be one about coffee. Hopefully, you have a cup in hand as we speak, maybe not a cup as good as the one you’re about to learn how to brew, but coffee nonetheless.
On to the snobbery.
The coffee brewing method I’ll be talking about is called pour over, and it honest to goodness produces the best, most flavorful cup of coffee possible. There are a few pieces of equipment that you will need, once you have them you are all set and you’ll never look back.
Heres what you’ll need (I’ve included links to the specific ones that I have found work well).
Gooseneck Kettle (electric or classic for use on a range or fire)
Digital scale or This other digital scale, even if you don’t plan on brewing coffee this way you should still have a scale in your kitchen. It makes cooking and baking faster, cleaner and much more accurate. These are the two that have been in just about every professional kitchen that I’ve ever stepped foot in.
Good coffee beans!!! Don’t expect a great cup of coffee from cheap and or old coffee beans. Beans should ideally be ground at the same time that you are brewing if possible. If you don’t have a grinder at home, buy smaller amounts of beans more often and grind them at the store where you purchase them. The grind you use should be about the size of coarse kosher salt, which just so happens to be the salt that you should have in your kitchen anyway, so comparing will be easy!
All that’s left is water, heat, a timer of some kind (phone, watch, clock, etc.), and we’re off!
- Fill your kettle and put it on the heat while you gather all your mise en place.
- Weigh out your beans. You want to use a ratio 1:16 (coffee:water). This recipe is good for about a 12oz cup of joe. Weigh out 23g of coffee beans and grind to the appropriate size (23g of pre-ground beans is fine as well). Now multiply 23 x 16 for the amount of water you will be brewing with. Jot this number down so you don’t need to calculate each time. 23 x 16 = 368g of water.
- Once your water comes to the boil, use a little to rinse your filter. This will help eliminate any papery flavor that you may get from the filter, as well as helping to heat up the vessel you are brewing with. I like to pour that water into the mug I’ll be drinking out of to help keep everything nice and hot while I brew.
- Place your ground coffee into the rinsed filter and set your scale back to zero.
- Start your timer/stopwatch and make your first pour using a very slow clockwise rotation, making sure to saturate all of the coffee, this will be somewhere around 50-75g of water. wait 45 seconds to allow the coffee to fully bloom and de-gas.
- continue to pour 50-75g of water over the grounds in the same circular motion every 15 seconds until your scale reads 368g (or more, or less depending on the amount of coffee you are brewing). Allow all of the water to finish dripping which should take around 4 minutes total.
- You did it! Probably the most work you’ve ever put into a single cup of coffee, but drink it and tell me its not the best cup you’ve ever made for yourself, or you hate and this was just a big waste of time, but I don’t think that will be the case.
Once A Cook 