Lonely Lion

I wrote an article on home coffee roasting for Tastebud last night. I’m a big fan of home roasting, and have been explaining it to a bunch of folks over the past couple of months. I thought it was worth a write up, and might be interesting to you techie folks. http://tastebudchicago.com/blog/roast-your-own-coffee/

I also added a couple of my roast notes. I have a stack of index cards I need to enter into the site, a bunch of wines, cheeses, and coffees. The teeny coffee list is at http://tastebudchicago.com/coffees/.

If you like coffee, and have a DIY sort of ethic, coffee roasting is probably right up your alley. Get up on it.

I’m 30!

So, expect a lot more mature blogging now, instead of all this hot open source stuff I’ve been tossing out at you. Now that I’m an old man, I’m pretty sure I’ll be writing Java or C#, kicking back with my enterprise friends, chatting about the power of waterfall.

So long 20′s, I barely knew you.

Camri and I have been working on a tasting weblog for the past couple of weeks. We’re officially opening it to the outside world today.

The site is called Tastebud. For the past year or so we’ve been taking notes on wines, cheeses, coffees, and teas that we like. We kept our notes on index cards, which was fine for a while, but eventually we decided what we were doing would make a good website.

This also marks my first complete project written in Ruby on Rails. I think the site took us about 40 hours total, including design. I’m pretty impressed with Rails, it’s easy to use, and does present the MVC style of web app development in a good way.

I think working through the Rails book was a valuable experience. Although I think I understood the MVC pattern before working with Rails, I’d never really implemented it on such a large scale. Regardless of whether or not I choose Rails as my framework of choice (it’s at the top of the heap) I’m completely sold on MVC as a style. I can’t imagine going back to a page by page style of development for projects I’m in control of.

For a while now, I’ve wanted to try baking Buttermilk Biscuits. Buttermilk isn’t in our fridge as a rule, so it took a little bit of pre-planning. Saturday was the first attempt.

I used the recipe from Baking Illustrated which was somewhat different than the Good Eats recipe, mostly in how the dough is handled. In BI, they roll it in balls, AB rolled it flat and cut out circles. The thing they both agree on is using very cold butter (I even popped it in the freezer for a few minutes) and handling the dough as little as possible.

Everything turned out well, despite the fact that I got my teaspoons and tablespoons mixed up (it was early in the morning) which led to somewhat salty biscuits. Last night at the grocery store I picked up another carton of buttermilk, and plan on giving it a second go this Saturday.

I’m also thinking about trying a big “rustic” loaf of bread during the day Saturday. The BI recipe is pretty involved. You make a “sponge”, which is a little bit of flour, water, and yeast, and let it sit for five hours. Then you add the rest of the ingredients and let them rise, punch them down, rise again, and then (finally) bake. The entire process is ~ 8 hours. I’m not sure if I have the time on Saturday or not. We shall see.

In related baking news, Camri and my tasting log (written in Rails) is progressing nicely. I’m hoping we’ll have something online before the end of the month.

Camri and I went to Ireland a few weeks ago, for a friend’s wedding. We stayed at a Bed and Breakfast in Dingle called the Captain’s House. Every afternoon we’d come back to the B&B and love the smell of baking for the next day’s breakfast. I liked it so much, that I committed to a renewed baking push for the holiday season.

So, last weekend I broke out our copy of The Joy of Cooking, and made a batch of scones. They turned out so well, that I made a second batch this past Saturday. Camri bought me a copy of Baking Illustrated as a Christmas present, but we agreed that it would be best served pre-Christmas for cookie baking. From that book, we made pretzels Sunday night. They turned out really great, and went well with beer and mustard. Good stuff.

I’m all hopped up on baking, and getting pretty excited for the Holiday cookie cycle. We built a list of key-cookie-events over the next two months, so that we’ll know what we need when. The next step is to build the list of cookies. I think I’m also going to throw in a few Pecan Pies, and some other non-cookie baked goods. Plus, we’re getting ready for our first Thanksgiving at home with guests. We had a just the two of us Thanksgiving a few years ago, but this will be the first time we have other people over. It’s sort of fun (and tremendously nerdy) to apply some project management skills to cookie baking and turkey stuffing.

In related news, Camri and I have used a pretty specific note card system to track different food things we like for the past year or so. We’re going to adapt it to a sort of blog. It’s going to be my first full blown Ruby on Rails project. The only thing that really differentiates it from a straight blog is that each post has special data associated with it, so if the post is about a wine we like, there will be different meta-data than if the post was about a cheese. It’s in the pretty early stages of development, but I’m hoping that we’ll have a site up and running by December 1. I’m also tracking hours against the site, to try and get a more objective idea of how long it takes to build.

Found this link (http://www.afactor.net/kitchen/coffee/kaffeeKantate.html) to a cantata written by JS Bach for performance in a coffee house via this violin.com blog entry. While you’re there, check out this mp3 of Scottish style fiddle.

I’ve been a fan of Intelligentsia coffee for about two years now. I like the fact that they enjoy what they do, it clearly comes through in the product. About six months ago, they started to offer unroasted beans on their site. I didn’t realize that it was possible to roast at home. Finally, two weeks ago, I bought Home Coffee Roasting : Romance and Revival from the book store.

Here’s the thing: you roast the beans in a stovetop popcorn popper. The book recommends Sweet Maria’s for beans and equipment. After ~ $60 (including shipping) I had a whirley popcorn popper, a candy thermometer, and 8 little bags of various green coffees. I also signed up on the Sweet Maria’s discussion list. It has a good amount of traffic, it’s been interesting reading.

I’ve now roasted a total of three times. The first turned out pretty poor. Way too little roast. It was interesting, but needed just a touch more roast to really be considered good coffee. The next two turned out really well. I’ve roasted two varieties of coffee, one from Nigeria and one from Rwanda. The Nigerian had a heavy earthy taste to it that I liked. I think if I would have roasted for a bit longer it would have turned out great. The Rwandan is very good. Both times it roasted to a nice oily deep roast. Flavor wise, it’s pretty plain. I’m going to try and tone the darkness down a bit on the next roast to try and let the varietal flavor come out a bit more. I’m not sure if the dark is killing something else in the bean. We shall see.

I was surprised at how quickly I picked up the techniques, never having seen anyone roast before. It’s really not that difficult. However, it is pretty messy. I did all three roasts on the side burner of our gas grill out back. The coffee smokes pretty heavily, and creates a lot of chaffe.

I need a better way to track information about the roasts, so I can recreate successful ones with some sort of accuracy. For now, I’m taking notes on index cards for each roast. It’s not a bad system, but the nerd in me wants to get computers involved. I’m still not entirely sure how, or where, but computers and or robots will get involved at some point.

I’ve recently declared myself the world’s greates Pecan Pie baker. Here’s the secret, the Karo syrup recipe from the back of the bottle. I am of the belief that the recipes on the back of the packages are generally the best. Take for instance, this ingredient list from an online recipe:

    * 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
    * 1/2 teaspoon salt
    * 2 tablespoons white sugar
    * 1/2 cup butter, chilled
    * 4 tablespoons ice water
    * 3 eggs, beaten
    * 3/4 cup light corn syrup
    * 2 tablespoons dark corn syrup
    * 3/4 cup light brown sugar
    * 3 tablespoons butter, melted
    * 1 pinch salt
    * 1/2 cup pecans, finely crushed
    * 1 cup pecans, quartered
    * 1 cup pecan halves

That’s too much. Salt? What for? The fewer ingredients, the better. Rule of thumb number 2, less ingredients are better.