Sunday, July 3, 2011

A Good Roasting

I am an unabashed coffee snob. I love my coffee. It must be good coffee. I buy my beans from a rather expensive coffee shop in town but it's worth it because each coffee is wonderful. I have a coffee machine and a grinder so those beans are fresh and good when they are brewed into liquid gold.

So it was only a matter of time before I entered the foray of roasting my own beans. The gorgeous Ruth Bruten of the award winning blog Gourmet Girlfriend blogged that she roasts her own coffee beans as she drinks a lot more java than I do. She also has a brood of six boys to feed (including her husband) so buying good beans on a regular basis would cut into the budget a bit. I do drink 2 to 3 cups a day-2 during the week and 3 on the weekend. I buy my coffee a kilo at a time and at $43 bucks a kilo, it gets a bit pricey on my salary.

So I emailed Ruth and asked her to give up her coffee bean connection and she very nicely did. I won't give them up in case she wants it to remain a secret. I did my online research and discovered a method using an air popcorn maker. After watching a few  You Tube tutorials, I decided this was for me. Now as we all know, air poppers are one of those things that people buy,use a few times and then it dies in the back of a cupboard somewhere. So I put a shout out to my peeps on Facebook to see if anyone had one they didn't want. My good friend Louie came back and said he had one that he never used and he was happy to pass it on to me in my quest for home roasted coffee. 

So I ordered a green bean starter pack and 2 days later, it arrived. It comes in four different bean types;Peruvian,Ugandan,Indian Mysore and Ethiopian Ghimbi. Due to my love of all things South American, I used the Peruvian. The green beans are pale and strange smelling.... it's hard to believe when you normally buy them and the smell is intoxicating.

                                                                  The raw product
 The before and after
Django the quality controller watching that all goes well.

I'm still finishing the last of my beans from Seven Seeds so I haven't tried them yet. I'll write a postscript to this blog when I do. Right now,they are resting. I am amazed that the popcorn maker does such a quick and good job on roasting them. Seeing I'm rather forgetful, I'm sure if I put them in the oven, the fire department would be around lickity split so the air popper is a better option for moi... Many thanks to Ruth,Coffee Geek and the gorgeous and yummy Tom from Sweet Maria's for helping me along.

Post Script! The coffee is wonderful! The smell developed into an intoxicating perfume overnight and when ground and brewed, tasted a bit like Nutella! I am in coffee heaven!


2 comments:

  1. Hooray!
    so glad to hear it worked!
    and No I don't mind sharing at all!
    That is what my WHOLE food philosophy.
    The green bean coffee supplier I use is coffeesnobs.com.au
    My experience has been great every time. I love me a bit of internet shopping. What's not to love about not leaving your house and all the goodness coming straight to your door!
    xx

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  2. I love you two! Yay to coffee. I will get around to roasting my own one day, just need the popcorn maker and a new grinder. My lovely old Italian one, I had for years, disappeared. So now we make do with 1kg bags of Vittoria Espresso or Genovese and my Nonna's beautiful little double-shot, stove top ristretto maker!

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