Hello folks! We’re still here (sometimes) and I hope that you are, too. Cooking is still taking place, and sometimes we blog about it.

You might recall that about three years ago I performed a magnificent destruction of Jamie Oliver and all that he stands for. I’ve spent quite a lot of time over the intervening three years improving on his methods. Recently, over on my other blog, I combined everything together into the finest meatball lasagne el diablo you have ever seen.

I’ve had Italian people tell me that my recipe is not a proper ragu, but I don’t care, it’s still better than Jamie’s.

Who remembers the perfect steak? We love the perfect steak, but many people (read: nearly everyone except Hugh) claimed that sous-vide was too fiddly. It turns out that you can do it very easily in a cool box. I shall be trying this as soon as I get hold of a cool box. More general details on sous-vide are available from the same site. They also have a brilliant sans-sous-vide recipe for doing a steak in the pan, the way our ancestors did, if that’s more your thing. My friend at Northern Food has been having a great deal of fun practising this.

They seem to like their steak at that Serious Eats site. Here’s an article on why you should salt steak, as long as you do it right (hint: do it well before you cook the thing).

I hope these are helpful to someone. What other food sites (other than KKC of course) are on your required reading lists?

Hey, guys! Long time no see. (Sorry about that – crazy busy on other projects. I haven’t forgotten about you, about KKC, or about food!)

I just had to nip over here to point out this truly fascinating article over at Meathead, about the science of what BBQ cooks refer to as the stall

"You get a big hunk-o-meat, like a pork shoulder for pulled pork or a beef brisket, two of the best meats for low and slow smoke roasting, and you put it on the smoker with dreams of succulent meat dancing in your head. You insert your fancy new digital thermometer probe, stabilize the cooker at about 225°F and go cut the lawn. Then you take a nap.

The temp rises steadily for a couple of hours and then, to your chagrin, it stops. It sticks. It stalls for four or more hours and barely rises a notch. Sometimes it even drops a few degrees. You check the batteries in your meat thermometer. You tap on the smoker thermometer like Jack Lemon in the China Syndrome. Meanwhile the guests are arriving, and the meat is nowhere near the 190°F mark at which these two cuts are most tender and luscious. Your mate is tapping her foot and you’re pulling your hair out.

Sterling Ball of BigPoppaSmokers.com, a major retailer of grills and smokers and a successful competition cook says that “no matter what I tell customers, when the stall hits them, they are horrified. It seems to last forever. They crank up the heat. They bring the meat indoors and put it in the oven. They call me at all hours.”"

I’ve been experimenting with barbeque recently, and whilst I didn’t experience the stall with my tests, it’s nonetheless a really interesting bit of science. The solution’s simple, and the approach they take is really practical.

Highly recommended!

So, it turns out that something rather alarming happened recently.

I became fat.

Well, fat-ish. Turns out that suddenly going from walking 4 miles or so a day to having access to a car will do Bad Things to your body fat percentage, particularly if it’s tied in with an increased consumption of sweet stuff. I FAIL at the blindingly obvious.

Fortunately, as a huge fan of Tim Ferriss, I’d been reading his new book, The Four Hour Body, whilst smugly thinking to myself “well, this diet stuff is interesting, but I don’t need it.” So, when it turned out that yes, Mr Blood Pressure Meter and Mr Groaning Scales agreed that I did indeed need it, stat, before I started to resemble a BBC report on Scottish health, I was prepared.

World of Warcraft players will have predicted what was coming next.

YOU ARE NOT PREPARED!

In this case, You Are Not Prepared for the sheer volume of one thing – beans.

Oh, God, Not More Beans

Tim Ferriss’s diet – which appears to be working rather stonkingly well, btw – works on one simple princple. There’s no calorie counting or going hungry – instead, you just drop all simple carbs and grains from your diet and replace them with beans. (Oh, and there’s a few other princples too – the diet’s explained online – but the beans are the issue here.)

This works. It’s nutritionally sound. Unfortunately, for a foodie, it has one major flaw.

Exactly how many ways do you know to cook fucking beans? Or equally fornicating lentils?

Tim Ferriss is a big fan of just repeating a few simple meals. Were I to follow that advice, as a hardcore foodie, I’d soon be a big fan of stabbing random strangers in the street – and I live in Edinburgh, not Glasgow, so that sort of thing’s really not done.

So began my quest for more interesting ways to cook sodding legumes.

I suspect this is going to be a multi-part series, at least until “svelte” is an adjective that can be applied to me in a non-ironic way, but for now, here are some of the ways I managed to stave off psychotic rage in the first few weeks:

Basic Bean Tricks

• There’s virtually nothing on earth that doesn’t taste better sauted with butter and garlic, and optionally chilli. This was true of jellyfish when I foolishly tried to cook the stuff for a Chinese banquet, and it’s equally true of almost any flavour of beans. Lentils and, unsurprisingly, butter beans work particularly well. Yes, butter’s fine on the diet, according to Tim.
• There are more beans out there than you think. I strongly recommend Wikipedia-ing legumes, and looking through the list. For me, frozen broad beans have been a recent lifesaver – I like the things, they taste nice sauteed with butter – win. For my girlfriend, the discovery that peas can – sorta (they’re a bit low-calorie) – substitute for other legumes prevented her from gnawing on the cat in sheer hunger.
• If you don’t like beans, try black beans. They work tremendously well with soy sauce, they’re a lot darker and meatier-tasting than most beans, and they have a different texture, particularly if fried up.
• Most stock cubes are dubious diet-wise – sugar bad. But Swiss Boullion or other vegetable boullion is fine, and will really enhance the taste of just about any liquid dish.

Right. Now for a couple of recipes.

Yes, I said recipes. I know that normally KKC has a bit of a thing about recipes – as in, we hates them, we hates them forever – but in this case, I discovered that about the point that you’re going “Oh, shit, no rice, pasta, noodles, cheese, milk, or potatoes! I’m going to stab myself with my $200 razor-sharp hand-made folded-steel chef’s knife!”, having a simple instruction manual helped.

Nigel Slater’s Lentil And Tomato

When I first went onto the 4HB diet, I immediately ran, not walked, to my bookshelf to check what Nigel Slater said about beans. The man’s a culinary genius, and the only cookbook writer I know to have never written a recipe that I’ve not found awesome. (Gogo double negatives.)

Sadly, he only really had one 4HB-compatible recipe – but it’s a doozy. Turning a couple of storecupboard ingredients – cheap ones at that – into a wonderful, rich, filling dish with tons of flavour, a bit of spice, and a fantastic balanced texture – genius. Here’s my slightly adapted version.

You’ll need some red lentils – about 150g for a lunch for two people – a can of tomatoes, a bay leaf, some chilli, some onion and garlic, and that’s it.

Stick the lentils in boiling water with the bay leaf, for about 10 minutes. Whilst they’re boiling, chop and gently fry an onion and some crushed or chopped garlic. Add a bit of chilli about 2 minutes in.

Keep tasting the lentils – when they’re tender, drain them, and stick some tomatoes in with the onions for a couple of minutes. Then tip the whole lot together, stir well, taste, add boullion if you like, plenty of black pepper, and serve.

Delicious, quick, warming, and cheap as hell.

Ratatouille With Beans

An accidental discovery, this one, whilst attempting to persuade my girlfriend that beans could actually be edible.

It’s got all the positive characteristics of a normal ratatouille – plenty of complex flavours, comparatively simple to cook – but is even more filling. Add some grilled meat and you’ve got a pretty kick-ass meal.

You’ll need a couple of zuchinni aka courgettes, some onion and garlic (hell, just assume ANYTHING I cook has onion and garlic), some decent red wine (go for Pinot Noir to collect full Ferriss points), some tomatoes (fresh, not tinned), some thyme (dry is OK, fresh is better), some olive oil, some boullion if you have it and some meaty-tasting beans – I used one can of borlotti and one of haricot, but it’s up to you.

This one’s simple but slow. Dice the onion and the courgette, then heat some olive oil in a big pan (yeah, I know, I know, Tim’s over the olive oil thing – but the olive oil adds to the taste here) and gently fry the two for a while. Ideally you want nice soft, golden onion. Chop the tomatoes into eighths whilst you’re waiting.

Now add the garlic and the tomatoes, with the thyme and about half the wine, and cook for about 15 minutes. I don’t skin the tomatoes because a) I like a nice rustic style dish and b) skinning tomatoes is about as much fun as trimming a cat’s toenails, and I like to do it about as often.

Now, add the beans (rinse them first unless gas and intestinal pain is your kink – hey, I’m not judging) along with the rest of the wine. Cook for another 10 minutes, season, and serve.

Want more?

I’m interested to know if this topic’s of interest to everyone. Would you like to see more 4HB foodiness?

A great series of posts from Martin “Khymos” Lersch at the moment, as he’s going through everything he learned from a recent Molecular Gastronomy seminar in Copenhagen.

Today’s one is on stocks – and the big takeaway for me was a detailed discussion of exactly how long meat stocks can be reduced for before they turn bitter.

The TLDR? 15-20 hours over a low heat. Wow, that’s a LOT longer than most people recommend.

So, as you know, at KKC we’re fairly opposed to recipes in any way, shape or form.

But I’ve been thinking about the things recently, and I’m starting to come to the conclusion that there are times and places for such things.

For example, I’d argue that there’s no bloody point whatsoever in any chilli recipe that’s less well tested than Heston Blumenthal’s “Perfect” one. You’re better off understanding the components of chilli (the mince, the vegetables, the chillis themselves, the accompaniment, the beans) and then you can produce not just one chilli, but whatever chilli you like.

A light, firey one with a single bhut joloka and turkey mince. A Texas-style one with cornbread and no beans. A heavy, satisfying beef-based chilli with chopped beef and gentle fire from normal red chillis and some peppers. There are infinite chillis.

On the other hand, if you’re baking bread, you need a recipe, or the damn thing just won’t rise. And if you’re wanting to produce really amazing food beyond your own level, about the only way to do it is to follow a really great chef’s recipe to the letter, as I’ve done several times with both Heston Blumenthal and Thomas Keller’s work. There’s no way I could improvise something that stunning in a million years.

But then there are middle ground elements. Thai curry pastes, for example. Are you better with a recipe or an understanding? When I came to write this post, I was all prepared to say “look, you need a recipe for a thai curry paste”, but now I’m wondering. I don’t understand the ingredients enough, but maybe if I did I could improvise my own to do whatever I wanted at the time.

When do you think you need a recipe? And when are you better to have understanding and flexibility?

Advanced warning – this will not be a fun read.

One of the things I’ve been really enjoying about the new KKC infodump posts (you can see them at the bottom right) is that they’re fairly frequently clueing me into food things I didn’t know about before. I mean, I had no idea what shade-grown coffee was before I commissioned someone to write about it, and the entire coffee pods thing is a completely new world to me.

And then I asked someone to write about fair trade chocolate facts .

And frankly, I felt decidedly ill afterward.

I support Fair Trade, generally. Occasionally I support coffee vendors like Has Bean (no, they don’t pay us anything, we just really like them) who don’t do Fair Trade, but do actually visit the farms they buy from and work hard to offer a fair price. But occasionally I’ll grab some non-Fair Trade coffee, and non-Fair Trade other stuff. Sure, it’s not great that people aren’t getting paid well for their work, but I wasn’t that guilty about it.

And then Hope wrote up a piece on chocolate, and Fair Trade.

Non-Fair Trade chocolate means poor farmers? No.

If you’re buying non-Fair Trade chocolate, it turns out, you’re probably funding people who enslave children.

One in twenty of the people picking your chocolate are child slaves.

See, most of the cocoa beans that are used to make chocolate come from West Africa and specifically the Côte d’Ivoire, which, it turns out, is not a very nice place. There are numerous reports of children from neighbouring countries to the Ivory Coast being lured or otherwise trafficked there and sold as slaves.

UNICEF, who aren’t exactly shrill hippies, released an official report in 1998 concluding that some of the Ivory Coast cocoa farms they surveyed did indeed use enslaved children. They’ve restated their position as recently as 2007, saying that “children from neighbouring countries such as Burkina Faso, Togo and Mali are brought to Côte d’Ivoire to work in its robust cocoa farming industry, among other outlets for child labour. Their rights are not respected and they are exposed to wide-ranging exploitation and abuse”.

Fortune Magazine – again, not exactly the Usual Suspects on green/ethical issues – as recently as 2008, said that little progress has been made in dealing with the child slavery problems on the Ivory Coast.

There are a whole load of other reports on this stuff, some of them decidedly don’t-read-whilst-eating. Wikipedia, unsurprisingly, has a very solid overview of the evidence. The BBC’s Panorama program did independant research into the issue and came to some pretty hair-raising conclusions (although read down for the full article, the summary was written by someone who had gotten a bit high on his own, presumably fairly traded and exploitation-free, supply).

In summary – yup, about 5% of this stuff – one in twenty chocolate bars you buy – was grown by some kid, probably less than 13 years old, who has been kidnapped from their parents and is forced to work by men who hit him or her if they don’t think the cocoa picking is going fast enough.

If you’re feeling sick at this point, you’re not the only one.

I think about all the chocolate I’ve eaten in the last year alone, and I don’t feel too well.

So what the fuck to do about it?

I really don’t know. Obviously, Fair Trade chocolate kinda shoots up in priority once you know about this stuff. Higher than free range chicken (tortured chickens or tortured kids is a pretty easy call to make), higher than most other kinds of Fair Trade stuff, generally to the top of the food chain.

Ironically for a UK-based blog, we’ve only got a guide – and a brief one – to the US Fair Trade Chocolate brands at KKC. For UK people like me, the best source I’ve been able to find is the Observer’s article on ethical chocolate (Green and Black’s? Not as ethical as they claim).

Beyond that, you/we could write letters, of course. A letter to Cadbury’s in the UK suggesting that they check the living shit out of their Faid Trade supply chain would be a good start. For more info, there are a lot of organisiations working on this problem, from the Cocoa Initiative to Stop Chocolate Slavery . They’ve got lots of suggestions on what to do.

But overall, I didn’t write this piece to sell you on any particular action. I just figured that something this horrifying is something that more people should know about, particularly when we’re often innocently funding it. So I guess that’s the other thing that you can do – tell people. Make sure everyone knows what’s happening to supply that chocolate.

I simply couldn’t believe what I was reading when I started getting articles on this stuff.

But it’s incontrovertably true.

I wish it wasn’t.

I have just noticed that if you fail a ReCaptcha challenge, it removes your comment text from the comment box.

That’s extremely unacceptable, and sorry it’s been going on this long. I’ll look into fixing it.

Morning all.

So, today I’ve got a couple of quick but awesome links for you.

First up, the Hacker’s Guide To Tea . Not quite as complete as it would suggest, but nonetheless a darn good read, which a couple of useful titbits that I hadn’t thought of.

For example, did you realise that, basically, the temperature you need to steep tea at goes up linearly the more oxidised it is? Black tea’s more oxidised than green tea, so needs a higher temperature. Interesting.

(I wonder if the same applies to coffee?)

Secondly, courtesy of KKCs’ new backend and linkbuilding writer, Hope Jael Perez (say hi, everyone!) comes a gallery of quite the most bizarre kettles I have ever seen or heard of. Marmite kettles. Typewriter kettles. Kitchen kettles – as in a kettle shaped like a kitchen. Sadly there’s no way to track down where these kettles came from, on the site, but nonetheless, there’s your morning/early afternoon dose of wierd right there.

(She’s also responsible for doing a bunch of the hunting we needed for our yellow kettle article – turns out the damn things are hard to find. )

I ran across an interesting question yesterday, and I figured that if any people in the world knew the answer, the assembled KKC collective probably did.

Is there an easier way to eat noodles?

My girlfriend has some problems with her wrists, and hence finds eating noodles with a fork rather hard work.

And indeed, noodles with a fork are generally a pain in the ass.

I’ve suggested chopsticks, which I personally much prefer for anything noodley, but does anyone have any other/wierder suggestions?

OK, I’ve been meaning to find some time to do more thorough tests of the very, very cool vacuum-like extraction with an ISI creamer technique. However, Life being what it is, haven’t so much gotten time yet. So here’s a quick summary of my preliminary tests.

What is it and why should we care?

Basically, a bunch of Clever People have discovered and been experimenting with a new way to extract flavours into liquids, which you can then use as a sauce, a stock, or whatever else you can come up with.

The technique uses an ISI cream whipper, which normally generates high pressures inside it using nitrogen dioxide capsules to force cream or other substances (like, say, a Xanthan-based solution of orange juice) out through the nozzle as a foam. They’re extremely ace, and I had one already for molecular gastronomy stuff.

Instead of foaming, though, this technique just requires you mix the liquid you want to extract flavours into and the thing you want to extract flavours from, pressurise with a gas canister, leave for two minutes or so (no longer – that’s the mistake I made), then release the pressure as fast as possible. For a variety of not-totally-understood reasons (cavitation of the cells in the thing you’re extracting from plus a bunch of other stuff), this forces the flavours out fast and efficiently.

You can also use the same technique in reverse, kinda, to rapidly marinade meat. Haven’t tried that yet.

So why do you care? Well, previously when I’ve wanted to make garlic-infused oil, say, it’s been a matter of sitting at a stove for an hour with garlic immersed in warm oil. Now I can do it in 2 minutes. That opens up a lot of possibilities for those of us who don’t want to spend all day watching rosemary simmer.

The Tests

I tried 3 tests initially.

First up, I tried rosemary in water. Using dried rosemary, I mixed about a teaspoon with about 100ml of water, charged up the pressure, shook, and left it for two minutes. Annoyingly, my creamer hadn’t been used for a while, and the valve was stuck slightly open making a high-pitched whistling sound, which probably reduced the pressure in the vessel, and definitely made me fear I was about to be rushed to the hospital with bits of exploded creamer stuck in me.

In a shocking turn of events, that didn’t happen. After two minutes, I offgassed (not to be confused with OFGASsing, which is where you refuse to do anything about energy companies blatantly taking the piss until you have no other choice) and sieved the liquid.

Not. Terribly. Impressed. The water had a very, very faint rosemary smell, but that was about it. No colour, and I’m far from sure the smell wasn’t from some tiny bits of rosemary I missed.

Second test: Garlic in oil. A bit of reading had pointed out that water is less than 100% WIN for extractions, so I had higher hopes of this one. Crushed garlic, vegetable oil, and I left this one for about 5 minutes.

The results here were pretty darn impressive, actually. The oil smelt and tasted distinctly garlicky, replicating the hour-long garlic confit effect nicely. I’ll definitely be using this one the next time I do salmon confit in garlic oil.

(Try it, it’s gorgeous).

Finally, I tried something a bit bizarre. I’d read that vodka was the perfect fluid to extract into, but didn’t have any around. However, I did have a nearly-finished bottle of Glenmorangie sitting on the countertop, and let’s face it, if there was ever a single malt you wanted to use for cooking, Blandmorangie’s probably it. (Unless you have some 10-year Glenfiddich around, obviously. It’s like FAIL in a bottle.).

I ground up some of the Continental (read: “over-roasted”) coffee beans I had lying around to about a cafetiere grind, mixed ’em up, pressurised, and left it for 20 minutes.

(Yes, that’s far too long, I know. I was using the tried-and-tested KKCook technique of “read fast, understand about half, try it, Do It Wrong, then read up and go "D’oh!”.")

The results were… well, they were definitely coffee-flavoured. However, it was very hard to say if that was because the whiskey had come out tasting of coffee, or just because repeated filterings still couldn’t get the ultra-fine coffee grinds that had somehow gotten in there out again.

(Note to self – next time, get rid of the fines before extraction)

It was bitter and pretty horrible, but it has to be said, it definitely tasted of coffee.

More?

Well, it’s definitely got promise. It’s a major pain that you have to use fat or alcohol rather than water for the extraction, since I don’t really want to eat every meal with vodka. However, with some experimentation I suspect that milk, cream or even melted butter would work well as a medium for capturing the flavours.

I’m very interested in the marinading technique, and I’ll be trying that next – tomorrow, hopefully. And I want to do some more testing to see what other flavours I can extract into my oils – maybe even try some of the more “out there” flavour ideas from vacuum filtration, like charcoal, wood, or forest soil.

Also, I’ve been hearing some very interesting things about cold-brewed coffee made this way.

Have you tried these new extraction techniques out, and do they work for you?

I see BoingBoing’s picked up on the exciting stuff you can do with pressure, extraction, marinades and so on.

(For a summary, check the Khymos post of a few weeks ago).

Of course, KKC ain’t far behind! I’ve been doing some tests with extraction, and will be doing some marinade tests as soon as I have some chicken or other marinadable meat to hand. Expect a post soon.

(Initial results: garlic-infused oil WIN. Coffee-infused Glenmorangie FAIL. Other results in need of more testing.)

So I’ve been writing some long-tail content for KKC recently, aiming to cover various topics around some of our longer blog posts.

Now, these are all little snippets, and I was originally intending to just stick them on the blog quietly and not tell anyone about them until Google found them.

But the more I’ve been writing them, the more they’ve been rather fun. And so I thought you guys might enjoy some of them too!

Kettles

• So you want a pink electric kettle?
• How to find quiet electric kettles
• Choosing a quiet electric kettle (read this one, it’s better)
• The Hunt For A Yellow Kettle

Cafetieres

• Why, yes, you can buy a gold cafetiere (now with 100% more sarcasm)
• Making coffee in a small cafetiere (focussed on good coffee at work)
• How a double walled cafetiere can insulate your way to great coffee (Dodgy title but interesting test result)
• Why a cafetiere cover will make your coffee better – with SCIENCE! (Fairly basic stuff)
• What’s the best steel cafetiere? (I was surprised).

These aren’t full-on KKC madness, so they’re quite short and often quite basic, but hopefully you’ll get some amusement from them anyway!

Oh, and read our infodump on fair trade chocolate facts – it’s IMPORTANT.

As you may have noticed, I’ve been having a bit of an “appreciate the simple tools” time in my kitchen recently (hence my pean on the electric kettle). In fact, the most recent gadget I bought was a set of digital food scales, accurate to +-1g, for about £8, from Sainsburys – and I really can’t believe I went so long using crappy analogue scales.

They’re the universal solvent of cooking – they make my coffee better, they make my experiments easier, and they make my cruddy measuring jug less necessary.

Give it up for the scales.

Beverages

I bought the scales for coffeemaking, and they haven’t disappointed. As I mentioned in the article on cafetières, accurate scales are absolutely vital for good coffee using a cafetiere or, I suspect, a filter, whether manual or automatic.

It’s not just coffee they’re great for. As we should all know, measuring ground solids by volume is a fairly crappy way to go about things, particularly if the individual grains are large and uneven. You’ll need a microgram scale to get the best results with measuring tea, but if you get one, you can start optimising toward the perfect brew (I really need to do that “A/B testing for food” article soon – sound interesting?). Unfortunately there’s very little info available on exactly how much tea you’ll need per pot, but Wikipedia recommends 2.25g per 180ml for black tea, which means that you can use even a normal scale for a pot of tea for three or more (assuming about 275ml in a mug, you’re looking at 825ml for three people, so make a litre to avoid the dregs, using 12.5 of tea).

Hot chocolate, squash, citron presse, all of these things are vastly variable on volume, and bloody difficult to reliably reproduce using just the regular teaspoon. Did 17g of Green and Blacks’ hot chocolate with 450ml of hot milk produce the Best Chocolate Evar? Now you’ll know.

Which leads me on to…

Repeatability

We’re all geeks here, right? I mean, I’m actually sitting typing this wearing an XKCD Science: it works, bitches T-shirt. So we should know by now the value of being able to reproduce our results.

You needs you a good set of scales to do that. And once you’ve got them, you can actually embark on an entirely different sort of cooking, which you may find more or less fun depending on your personal preferences – actually setting up multiple different variations on a dish and seeing what works best. Many cooks might find that unutterably boring, I know, but it has one great advantage that you can actually start adding to the Great Cook’s Canon this way: rather than following along with other cooks and chefs, having vague discussions, you can not only optimise your own dishes, you can tell other people EXACTLY how to produce your results.

Retire the measuring jug

I have a bit of a thing about my measuring jug – I can’t stand it. It’s crappy plastic, it’s hard to read, I have to bend over, squint and guess even to get readings to within 100ml of where I’m aiming.

And then, I realised that an awful lot of the time, what I’m measuring is either water, or so close to water as to make no difference. Beer has a density of 1010 g/l. Milk’s about 1030 g/l. Wine’s around 970 g/l. If you assume everything in your kitchen that’s substantially composed of water has a density identical to water, you’ll get volume measurements at least as accurate as you’d get out of a measuring jug. (And if you need to measure other stuff, there’s a good chart of densities of common liquids available online).

Advantages? Numerous. Make up stock from a stock cube by pouring hot water onto the cube in a jug on the scales. Get a precise 3/1 or 4/1 ratio for vinaigrette (and then test, and reproduce, as above!). Only heat as much water as you need to.

Diets and portion sizes

I’ll be honest – I hadn’t thought of this one until I did a bit of Googling. But it makes perfect sense. Want to control your portion sizes for weightloss, muscle-building, or just making sure you and your friends get the same amount of the roast beef you’ve just cooked? Enter the scales.

Again, you could do this using volume, or marked supermarket weights and some guesswork, but scales make it easier – and make it possible to accurately predict how many calories you’ll get out of that portion of pasta (which you ain’t volume measuring without getting Archimedian on its ass) or that hand-cut slice of bread.

Baking.

It’s science for hungry people.

Anything I’ve forgotten? Any other reasons to love the humble scale?

I really like the idea of coffee pods. For those of you who haven’t run across the things, they’re basically an attempt to make coffee as easy as humanly possible – they produce something between expresso and filter coffee on a mug-by-mug basis in about 15 seconds, using closed, easy-to-dispose “pods” with coffee inside.

Particularly for social situations, the ability to knock out cups of varying types, strengths and flavours of coffee, and even tea, quickly and easily sounds damn good. And let’s face it, producing good coffee’s a bit of a hassle – I’d estimate my morning mug of coffee takes 10 minutes, between preheating, grinding, boiling, waiting, measuring and steeping.

Now, that’s not a problem for me, because I’m extremely sensitive to stimulants, and more than one cup of coffee inside six hours puts me straight into a gibbering twitching government drugs-are-bad-mkay American Psycho state. So I have my little ritual in the morning and my damn fine cup of coffee. On the other hand, if I was running an office on six cups a day, and making for the rest of the office every time, that really wouldn’t be sustainable.

So, as I say, enter the pods.

Too Long, Didn’t Read: the Coffee Pod Summary

• They’re very convenient indeed, and work particularly well brought into the workplace to replace shitty office coffee.
• The taste is somewhere between “foul” and “pretty good”, heavily affected by whether you buy the “official” pods (shonky) or ones from third-party suppliers (links below).
• The Nestle Nespresso is generally considered to produce average to half-decent coffee (much better than the average office dispenser) but is very expensive and ties you to Nestle (who, as pointed out in the comments on our Fair Trade Chocolate article, are really not very nice people.)
• If convenience is very important or quality isn’t, they’re the win. Particularly good for an office setting.
• Otherwise, get a cafetière /cafetières instead.

What’s Out There?

There are a whole bunch of different pod systems and sizes out there, and they’d take more than the length of this article to go into. Thankfully, there are also several excellent dedicated sites focussing on pod machines – if you;re looking at getting one of these machines, I’d recommend a trip to http://www.singleservecoffee.com/ and their forums at http://www.singleservecoffeeforums.com/.

The question of what the best machine is seems to be nearly impossible to answer. Singleserve coffee.com have rounded up their reviews and some of their recommendations, but even that recommends 4 different machines.

Of course, the range of beans is one of the make-or-break factors. The general rule, from Coffeegeek.com and elsewhere on the ‘net, seems to be that the brand-name beans from the machine manufacturers vary between average and awful, but that third-party suppliers (a number of posters mentioned http://www.bettercoffee.com ) produce coffee that, whilst it doesn’t hit the heights of really well-prepared fresh-ground coffee, is pretty damn good. One poster on CoffeeGeek said “Nobody’s going to mistake this for fine French press coffee, granted, but after the Senseo and Yuban attempts, it’s a revelation”.

The Nespresso system belongs slightly in a category of its own. It uses a different pod technology to the other systems, aggressively guarded by patents (indeed, according to Wikipedia, they’re suing one manufacturer of compatible cartridges right now . The pods are very expensive (about 50p each) but are generally considered to be of reasonably decent quality (see below).

Do pod coffee machines produce good coffee?

Depends on what you mean by good coffee. One poster on Metafilter, talking about the Nespresso machines, said "Honestly, they probably produce better espresso than a many people with home espresso machines that don’t clean them properly or don’t have a decent burr grinder, and the patience to dial it in. "

In general, if your coffee palate’s particularly refined, they’re not going to perfectly satisfy. However, many of the awful reviews given to pod machines on sites like CoffeeGeek seem to have been using the default manufacturer’s coffee pods – Senseo pods came in for a particularly thorough kicking, both for lack of quality and lack of range. By contrast, third-party pods offer much more of the range serious coffee afficionados would expect – BetterCoffee offers a few hundred options compared to the dozen or so offered by most machine manufacturers.

Overall, the answer seems to be “satisfactory”, but very much dependant on individual preferences. See the range of reviews for the Phillips Senseo , for example, which vary from “If you’re desperate enought to call this swill coffee, you’d better switch to another beverage.”, through cautious optimism (I’d recommend this review) in particular for a balanced overview) to “Great price, great coffee”.

The Nespresso, again, appears to be a special case. All of the serious coffee connosieur reviews seem to converge on “pretty good, but not as good as an espresso pulled by someone who knows what they’re doing”. Given the relative levels of effort involved, that’s pretty high praise.

Any hacks we should know about?

As you’d expect from a rather cool and complex system exposed to the Internet, there’s a lot of discussion about hacking and improving the darn things.

Most notably:

• You can make your own pods for the machines half a dozen different ways, the most convenient of which seems to be the Perfect Pod Machine . Potentially useful, again, for an office setting.


• The pods also make very convenient storage mechanisms for coffee for the Aeropress – as one CoffeeGeek user reports.


• There are a fair number of minor optimisations it’s possible to make to the coffee-making process with a pod – with most pods, one of the most important tips seems to be to pre-wet the pod with hot water before inserting it into the machine.

Any experience?

All of this is from my research, of course. I’ve not used one of the things extensively myself.

Have you? If so, what did you think?

I’ve been on a bit of a coffee mission in the last few months, ever since discovering the wonders of Has Bean Coffee subscription coffee plan. One single-estate coffee through your door every week, what’s not to like?

And as a result, I’ve been working out how to make that coffee taste as awesome as humanly possible. Now, I’m a bit old-fashioned, and grew up with a heavy francophile influence, so my preferred way of making coffee is the cafetière (“French press” for the USAians amongst us, although I’m sure there are states where it’s now officially referred to as the “Freedom Press”).

Cafetières are awesome, actually. Baristas seem to reckon they’re one of the best ways of making coffee, period, and certainly one of the top ways that doesn’t cost hundreds or thousands of pounds. They produce coffee similar to that from a filter, but less burned-tasting than filter machines often produce, and with a real complexity of flavour depending on how you brew.

And there’s the rub. Making coffee with a cafetiere might look simple, but there’s a LOT of optimisation you can do…

Optimise your grind

Hardcore types will already know that blade grinders, the cheapest type of coffee grinder, are fantastic for chopping chilli but sodding useless for coffee (although, IMO, if you have to use one a cafetiere brew is one of the less-horrible ways to do it). Pre-ground coffee is only of much use if you drink it within a day or so of grinding, and even then it’s nowhere near as aromatic as fresh-ground. So, one of the first stops on the coffee pilgrimage tends to be the burr grinder, with variable grind size. But here’s the rub – even burr grinders aren’t created anywhere near equal, and a bad burr grinder is particularly bad for cafetiere grinds, which need to be large and even. It turns out, you see, that cheap burr grinders can set a maximum grind size, but will randomly produce lots of finer-ground particles of coffee smaller than that grind size too, and that equals sludged-up cafetière and overbrewed coffee thanks to excessive surface area.

After screaming at the price of top-end grinders, I’ve settled for now on a Hario Skerton hand grinder. It’s a pain to figure out how to use it initially (I’ll write a guide on here at some point), and it’s certainly some fairly hard work to grind 50 grams or so of beans for four people, but it produces a very, very nice, smooth grind, and the smell when you first open it up after grinding is worth the price of admission on its own. Plus, I’ll probably study Brazilian Ju-Jitsu at some point, so the increased grip strength from using it every day ain’t going to waste…

A/B testing cafetières’ brews

OK, let’s start simple. Get a set of scales with a 1 gram sensitivity. Better than that would be great, but they need to be able to handle a maximum weight of 2 kg or so, and most microgram scales can’t cut that, at least not on a non-lab budget. (Please do tell me if I’m missing a brand here – I’d love to get a set of microgram scales with a wide weight range).

Why do you need scales? Because the single biggest optimisation I’ve been able to make to my cafetière coffee has been precise weight measurement, both of the beans and the water. Measuring by volume works very, very badly for coffee – the ground beans froth varying amounts, the volume can be widely different dependant on the grind size, there are all the usual problems of volume compared to reasonably large eliptical objects. Get a set of scales in play and you can get granular on the problem. So to speak.

Now, there are four variables in the process. People who design websites, ads, software or Toyota cars for a living will be starting to make a matrix in their head already.

1. Temperature. Coffee is brewed somewhere in the 88-93 degree centigrade ( 190F to 200F ) range, but there’s not a lot of agreement beyond that as to what the ideal temperature is. (Yeah, I know I said 93 in the electric kettle article. But, as usual, it’s more complicated than that, much like finding a bloody yellow kettle turned out to be – true story.)
2. Brew time. Artisan Coffee in Edinburgh say 3 minutes, Square Mile Coffee say 4 minutes. My experience is that 3 minutes produces a more fruity, acidic brew, and 4 minutes produces a richer, heavier, and more caffinated brew.
3. Amount of coffee. Again, not a lot of agreement here. Somewhere between 5 grams and 8 grams per 100ml works well, with 8 grams working for heavier, smoother beans, and 5 grams working well for the lighter and fruitier, although it can sometimes produce a smooth brew too.
4. The bean. Different beans respond different ways to different approaches. A Kenyan Gethumbwhini will work well with a 4 min/7g/l combination, wheras the El Salvador Finca Argentina (a fantastic bean from this week’s subscription) seems to respond better to 5g/l / 4min.

So what do you do? Well, there’s a variety of approaches you could take. At the hardcore end, I’d recommend half a dozen small cafetieres, a big pile of ground beans, a matrix table, and some serious tasting. (I keep meaning to organise this in Edinburgh). You might want to Google “A/B testing”. At the lighter end, just vary your brew between the extremes every time you make a morning cuppa, and keep notes (that’s what I’m doing normally).

(Anyone got a systematised way for optimal testing of this sort of thing? My maths ain’t up to it.)

Either way, the important thing to remember is that each bean responds totally differently. So don’t assume a brew method for one bean will result in a good brew with another – I’ve had one bean which actually tasted plastic if given a long, high-density brew, but was fantastic at a much lighter brew.

All cafetières are not created equal

For starters, there’s the temperature drop-off through the side – whilst the classic cafetiere is made of glass, that means that it’ll lose heat really quickly, meaning that the optimal extraction temperature drops off. (Hmm, we should really do some taste testing on this – watch this space.). There are a couple of ways to mitigate that – remember to pre-heat the cafetiere, for starters, as it really does make a difference. Wrap the cafetiere in something insulating, like a towel or some foam. And if you really want to get hard-core, you could immerse the cafetiere in hot water, or even water heated to exactly the right temperature in a water bath. (Again, must try that.)

Your best option for convenience and quality is probably to buy a double-walled cafetiere, though. Sadly Square Mile seem to have stopped selling their excellent-looking silver ones, but Amazon have a fair selection. They’ll hold heat like a thermos flask, meaning you get a much, much better brew.

The other variable, of course, is shape. As Mathias pointed out in the kettle article, the shape and material of a brewing vessel has a hell of an effect on the brew. In general, bigger, wider vessels should ensure greater extraction in less time, and they’ll also lose less heat to boot (volume and hence heat energy goes up as a cube whilst surface area only goes up as a square.). Having said that, the press will also work better the higher up the cafetière the coffee starts, so balance is important.

And that’s about it. Any other cafetiere tips out there?