It's funny that the last time I posted was in the beginning of December. I guess I'd like to say a lot has happened since then, but I'm not sure that it would be entirely true.
The weather has warmed up an awful lot, though. In some ways it's nice - our gas bill has fallen to half of what we paid just two months ago, and will fall further as we desperately try to keep the apartment from becoming a functional greenhouse
Which, I suppose, begins our discussion of what isn't so nice about the weather.
On Sunday, it hit 90 degrees outside. This was some serious temperature whiplash, up from 50s and maybe low 60s during the week previous. We kept all of our shades down, but cracked all of the windows, and in desperation plugged every fan we own into any outlet we could find. I did not sleep well on Sunday night, tossing and turning fitfully under a single sheet until 4:00am, when I can only assume my brain finally shut itself down and I woke up four hours later to a cheerily chiming alarm.
Needless to say, yesterday was a tough day. I climbed out of bed, brushing at the sheen of sweat already beading on my skin, and put on the lightest shirt I could find. Exhausted, hot, and miserable, I entered the kitchen and couldn't even think about heating water for coffee. Hot coffee when the apartment is 80 and muggy? No thanks.
As it turns out, cold brew coffee is easy to make in a French press, and I have a French press (I'm slowly moving along the path to fancier and fancier coffee, although the internet laughs at my sad little attempts because I don't roast my own beans - who has the time?! - but more importantly, because I drink my coffee with a little cream. I, coffee plebeian.). So I did a little research and tried to figure out where I wanted to pick up some coffee beans.
Even though Starbucks is conveniently located both directly next to the building where I work and about a three minute walk down the street (WHERE IS YOUR DUNKIN DONUTS NOW - it's in many of the T stops and also everywhere else), I didn't particularly want to pay for Starbucks beans for an undertaking that I wasn't even sure whether or not would work for me. Especially since I prefer lighter roasts for hot coffee, but the general consensus on the internet is that lighter beans don't have a bold enough flavor profile for cold extraction, which would lead to, what, caffeine water? Would that be so terrible?
Quick sidebar: I tried some iced coffee on that self-same hot Sunday, made by the pourover method over ice. It was pretty delicious but I can't justify paying $3.21 for a relatively small cup of iced coffee every time I have the urge. Cold brew is supposed to be easy!
So. Anyway. Yesterday as we left work, the temperature had dropped to a relatively balmy 65 or 62 or something that was exquisitely lovely after the unforgiving 80 degree heat in the morning. (Also, wow, what a change!) I asked Kate as we were boarding the train if she wanted to take a walk to Trader Joe's with me, because I had never been to this one and she had never been to one, period, and the weather was nice.
I have somewhat complicated feelings about Trader Joe's, mainly because I don't totally understand the praise that it gets. To me, it is far more a specialty store than an all-purpose grocery store. I would never do all of my shopping at Trader Joe's. Still, for the sweet tooth that I undeniably have, Trader Joe's has a truly impressive stock of various chocolate-type things. I bought some dark chocolate toffee with roasted pistachioes - what?? I came in well under-budget for this month and sometimes you just want to treat yourself a little - and then headed slowly around the store with Kate. I narrowly avoided buying cookie butter by remembering that even if it tastes amazing, I don't have anything to eat it with, and do I really need something that tempts me to have it straight from the jar?
We already have Nutella at home, I guess is what I'm saying.
So eventually we found the coffee, and I stared at the wall of colorful cylinders for a while before I just picked a dark Italian roast. Who knows? This could be a total bust. But the beans smelled pretty good, and I figure cold brew is supposed to be forgiving.
I guess I haven't been totally straight with you about the reason I wanted to go to TJ's for coffee, and it was that they have a grinder right there in the store with variable grind sizes. Perfect! I poured the entire cylinder of oily brown beans in, selected the coarsest grind (gotta filter that sediment with a French press grate, after all), and hit start. I won't run you through the whole gory process, but I did eventually figure it out.
Also, grounds take up way more space than beans. I sort of felt like I was cheating myself out of some coffee, so I took a break, tapped the can around to try to get everything to settle, and ground those last seven beans. Ah, life.
I bought chocolate and coffee; Kate bought milk and grapes. Oh well.
When we got back, I read approximately thirty different recipes for cold brew coffee, and thought that I had maybe stumbled on a ratio of grounds to water that would suffice. It's all very complicated. Luckily for us, I have a food scale. Talked Jonathan into buying it for me for Christmas with the intention of using it for bread (flour weight is way more reliable than volume because it packs so easily), and then discovered that to actually make a good loaf of bread, you have to trust your hands to tell you when enough flour is enough.
So I started to weigh out 140g of coffee grounds and got a little concerned around 50g when I already had probably close to a cup of coarse grinds. I compromised by filling the container I was weighing them in for a grand total of approximately 120g, then dumped them in the French press.
"Kate," I said, laughing, emerging from the kitchen with a French press literally half-full of coffee grounds. "Look at this."
She humored me by looking and laughing about it, and then I poured in about 3.5 cups of cold water, tried to figure out how to saturate the mountain of grounds, then rubber-banded some plastic wrap over the opening and pushed it into the refrigerator.
This morning was nice and cool; the temperature outside was right around 60 as we left for work, the temperature inside hovering around 68 if the thermostat is to be believed. Today is supposed to be hot, but sitting in my climate-controlled, air-conditioned workplace wearing a sweater over my clothes, I couldn't tell you whether or not it's living up to the hype.
I think, ultimately, that since cold brew coffee is meant to be brewed as a concentrate and then diluted, that this will work out. But if it doesn't, at least I still have my dark chocolate roasted pistachio toffee to remind me that the trip wasn't a waste. Anyway, in about six hours, I'll be pouring off what is hopefully a dark brown, caffeinated nectar.
It's a good thing I have a lot of milk in the fridge. I'm excited.
I especially enjoyed your paragraph contrasting your purchases with Kate's. Chocolate and coffee sound more appealing together than milk and grapes. These four items might be better matched as chocolate and grapes, milk and coffee, although I vastly prefer cream over milk in my coffee. As far as I can tell, chocolate goes well with anything else on the list, and grapes seem the least well matched overall.
ReplyDeleteI am overthinking it, but a well crafted sentence can spur one's imagination into action.
Was the cold pressed coffee good in the end? The only way I have found that I really like cold coffee is in a frappucino, blended with ice and plenty of sweetened condensed milk and powdered cocoa.