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zerofuckingwaste · 7 months

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Easy zero waste tip no. 6: Find out what caffeinated beverage you actually want/need, then learn how to make it; aka "The Starbucks Lie"

Tl;Dr: You may be misinformed about how coffee actually works, leading you to purchase beverages that you may not actually like, that may not serve the purpose you want them to serve, and you can save money (and the environment!) by learning to make something you'll actually like at home.

Last week, I went to Starbucks to get a pumpkin chai latte, because I'm not perfect and needed to fulfill a craving on a bad day- but at least I used a reusable cup. Anyhow, while I was there, I witnessed the following conversation, not for the first time, nor the last, which I'm sure is commonplace:

Barista: What can I get you?

Customer: Do you have a dark roast? I like my coffee dark.

B: We just have a medium roast ready, but I can do a dark roast pourover.

C: Nah, that's not going to be enough caffeine for me, and I need drip coffee, not anything fancy. I'll have an Americano, then- espresso beans should be high enough in caffeine!

Now, if this seems like a reasonable exchange, that's ok- you're likely not a trained barista, and even if you are, there's a chance your training was at least a little bit wrong. Let's walk through it point by point, to explain why this exchange made me want to tear my hair out of my head.

"I like my coffee dark!" Most likely, this is false- studies have shown that people are most likely to say they want dark coffee, when they actually most enjoy a lighter or medium roast. Darker roasts are bitter, partially due to having more tannins- which is why they can cause more side effects, like headaches and digestive issues.

"Not enough caffeine" In fact, the longer (darker) you roast coffee, the more caffeine it loses. If you want a highly caffeinated beverage, you should opt for the lightest roast available.

"I need drip coffee, not anything fancy (pourover)" Pourover is essentially a method of making drip coffee one cup at a time. No machine or anything, it's the least fancy coffee option possible.

"Espresso beans should have high enough caffeine" The beans used for espresso are the same as the beans used for the drip coffee- they're just ground more finely before going through the machine.

"An Americano [...] should have enough caffeine" An Americano is a double shot with hot water, about 160 mg of caffeine if you're getting a 'grande'. A drip coffee that same size is over 300 mg.

This man claimed to love coffee, but didn't understand anything about it, leading him to pay $4.39 for 160 mg of caffeine instead of $3.28 for almost double that- keeping in mind that number could easily have been doubled again had he opted for the lighter roast. So, let's fix that.

1. Light or Dark Roast?

Have you ever wondered why Starbucks has a medium roast, the Pike Place, as their go to roast all the time? It's because it's the most middle of the road, bland option, completely inoffensive- not very good, but also, not too bad. It's a blend from a bunch of places, so there's no overwhelming flavor besides coffee with a slight hint of being burned. That burn taste everyone complains about, btw, is a result of the roast being too dark for them, hello tannins!

A lot of things happen to coffee as you roast it. Let's go through each point one by one:

The color changes. The darker the roast, the darker the roast- literally. This is best gauged with ground coffee, where you can see the average of the whole bean, not just the outer shell.

The mass decreases due to a loss of moisture. However, the bean actually expands in volume due to the strength of the cell walls. In essence, the density decreases.

Oils seep out from inside of the beans, coating them, and protecting volatile chemical compounds that give them flavor.

The caffeine content is lessened the longer you roast.

With high heat, the Maillard reaction occurs. While this reaction is responsible for the lovely color and the viscous, dark flavor notes, it's also responsible for breaking down the citric and tartaric acid, which causes the sweet and fruity flavors to dissipate. It also breaks down chlorogenic acid, creating caffeic acid and quinic acid, aka bitter, bitter tastes.

High heat also causes caramelization of sugars- but at a certain point, those sugars start to burn away.

Taking all this into consideration, we can begin to figure out what kinds of coffee you'll actually like. One quick note: always get single origin coffees. Each region has its own flavors, and if you're only getting coffee from one spot in your cup, then those notes will be amplified for your enjoyment.

A dark roast will have less caffeine, a stronger coffee bitterness, and very simple, up front flavors: chocolate, nuts, smoke, wood, etc. (My favorite tastes like dark chocolate with a hint of hickory)

A light roast will have more caffeine, a lesser amount of bitterness, and very complex, more nuanced flavors: citrus, caramels, fruits, florals, etc. (My favorite tastes like blueberries and white chocolate, with notes of almonds)

No two coffees are alike. My recommendation is that you purchase a bag of whole beans from your favorite local cafe or roaster based on your caffeine needs, and try out different beans until you find one- or two, or five, or a dozen- that you really love.

One quick note- a much, much greater flavor difference can be found in aerobic v. anaerobic roasted beans. I recommend reading into this process on your own, it's fascinating- both of my favorite coffees are anaerobic roasts, as it happens.

2. How should I make my coffee?

I'm a big fan of the affogato. I'm a dessert for breakfast kind of gal, so it makes sense; a hefty double shot over a scoop of ice cream. Absolutely divine; I pretty much only do espresso for myself, although my partner greatly prefers French press.

The overall rule for caffeine in your coffee is that the finer the grind, the more caffeine you're going to get out of the bean. That being said, that doesn't mean the final product will actually have more caffeine than another method, as different ways of making coffee require different amounts of coffee grounds. Keep the ratio of grounds to water in mind for this reason. However, you must remember that the perceived strength of the beverage- the concentration of flavors- is not necessarily correlated to the amount of caffeine. I'll now go over a few methods of making coffee which can be 100% zero waste (assuming you compost those coffee grounds!).

Cold Brew- You either let grounds freely float in water, or let them steep inside of a little filter bag. Let it rest overnight, up to 48 hours. If you like your coffee cold, and not a lot of effort, this might be your best bet.

Pourover- You put grounds into a little filter over either your cup or a pitcher. Pour water over the filter and let it drip down. If you like having a calming morning ritual, this might be for you. Essentially the same as drip coffee, except you don't have to care about a machine.

French press- You put grounds in the bottom of the press, then fill with hot water, and let it steep for a few minutes, then press the grounds down. If you don't mind a little work every morning, waiting a few minutes (when you could prep your breakfast, perhaps) then give this a go.

Moka pot- You pour water into the base, then put grounds into the basket, then screw on the top. Place on the stovetop, and remove as soon as the coffee begins to come out of the spout within. If you like a strong cup but don't want to invest in espresso, this is a great option. The pressure is too low for it to be true espresso, but it's very good.

Manual espresso- This is a bit more complex. It will be the same as automatic espresso, except there's no chance of the machine failing for any electronic reason. You fill a little basket with grounds, then tamp them down. Water is brought to temperature, then pressed through the espresso at a relatively high psi. If you want espresso, this is the way. You can get an entry level (Flair makes several that are fantastic) or you can get something high end with a built in boiler (I have a La Pavoni with an attached steam wand, great purchase).

Automatic espresso- Essentially the same as manual, but the machine does the pressing for you. If you love espresso but don't want to do a lot of work for it, this is a great investment! If you can buy used, do- just make sure the brand is one that offers replacement parts.

There are plenty of other options, but these are a good place to get started, when figuring out what works for you.

3. Why do I want my coffee?

Are you looking for a caffeine boost to get through a rough workday? Do you want something sweet to accompany your breakfast? Are you just bored?

Figure out why you want your coffee, then tailor your morning experience to your needs. If you need a caffeine boost for a rough workday, maybe don't do anything time consuming- prepare a middle of the road medium roast cold brew for the week on Sunday, and go ahead and grab a glass in your hurry out the door each morning. If you want something sweet with breakfast, get a light roast and a French press, and make it part of the routine for the meal. If you're bored, do pourover with a dark roast into a funky mug, or learn to steam milk to make latte art.

Really, coffee is something lovely, that you should enjoy, without mindlessly spending money on something that's not even good. As a bonus, you can support local businesses (coffee roasters and cafes), develop a new skill, and better the environment.

#zero waste #sustainability #anti consumerism #anti consumption #sustainable #eco friendly #environment #cooking #food #kitchen #coffee #cafe #barista #coffee maker #coffee machine #espresso

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vwrtlz · 11 days

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The smell of sauteing mirepoix is fucking heavenly. This shit is about to Pop Off and I don't care that I'm only now finishing the prep work because hand cutting 9 pounds of onions would have taken forever no matter when I started and now I have half an hour before I can throw everything else in the pot and let it simmer till the wee hours of the morning.

Here's the recipe, with the numbering all kinds of fucked up because the original recipe I copied and pasted from was really poorly organized so I edited it and got too lazy to fix the numbers.

In lieu of a long-ass story about how I found this pasta recipe on Instagram (although it is a long-ass post, but hopefully it will be informative, especially for neurodivergent people who hate recipes) and decided it sounded insane enough to try. It takes a LONG TIME TO MAKE. It is EXTREMELY TEDIOUS. It is WELL FUCKING WORTH IT. Get used to me nutting about it, cuz the smell is filling my apartment as I write this and I'M AT HALF MAST just thinking about that first test bite.

For my spoonies in the audience of like zero people, you can save a lot of effort with a food processor and an instant pot but you still have to cut an entire bag of onions small enough to fit in the Food Hole™. It surprisingly doesn't use up *that many* dishes (big bowl for onions, small bowl for the carrots and celery, cutting board for everything, knife, tongs, big pot with a lid for the sauce, wooden spoon, small pot for the pasta, maybe a cheese grater if you buy full wedges) considering how much food you end up with (about a week's worth for one adult), and it's seriously unbelievably good. Imagine the rich savory chunky flavor of French onion soup, but instead of serving it in a hollowed out loaf of bread, it's served inside a million hollow noodles that soak up the sauce and also there's big hunks of beef that have been braised in onion juice for four hours until they literally part ways from the bones like a multistage rocket of flavor jettisoning its fuel tanks as it burns for Onion's Belt (that's a Food Pun).

Anyway. Here goes.

Pasta alla Genovese

• 1 1/2 Lbs of bone-in beef short rib

• 4 Lbs of Onions, Sliced

• 1 Carrot, Diced

• 2 Celery Stalks, Diced

• 2-3 Tablespoons Olive Oil

• 2 Cups of White Wine

• 1 1/2 Tablespoons, Tomato Paste

• 1/2 Pint of Cherry Tomatoes

• 6-8 Fresh Basil Leaves

• 1 Bay leaf

• 1/2 Cup of Pecorino Romano, Grated

• 1/2 Cup of Parmigiano Reggiano, Grated

• 1 Lb of Cut Ziti (or any pasta with a hole in it to soak up sauce, ziti can be kinda hard to find but regular ol' elbow macaroni is amazing)

• 1 BIG FUCKIN POT. (I've made a double batch that nearly filled up a 12qt stock pot, it starts out big and cooks down small)

1. Chop the onions, carrots, and celery as finely as possible. The more surface area we can expose, the more liquid will leach out to cook the beef and the more absurdly delicious the sauce will be when we're done. Using a food processor can save some labor, but it does just kinda Fruit Ninja the vegetables at random so it isn't exactly uniform. A mandolin slicer is also nice, but for fucks sake be careful with your fingers.

2. Cut the cherry tomatoes in half. Or don't and just mash them up against the walls of the pot while you're stirring.

8. Pat the beef dry and season well on all sides with coarse sea salt or kosher salt.

9. In a BIG fuckin pot, preheat on high then add enough olive oil to coat the bottom of the pan, then add the beef. Once it's browned on all sides (give each surface about 1-2 minutes depending on how hot the oil is), remove the beef and put it somewhere else. I just use the cutting board. It won't be out of the pot for long, you just don't want to overcook it.

10. Add the carrots and celery to the pot along with a handful of your onions and sauté the vegetables until they begin to brown.

11. Add the tomato paste and stir it in. Tomato paste is apparently not traditional (sorry to all the people who speak Italian) but it increases the Visual Deliciousness. Then throw the beef back into the pot, stir everything together and once the bottom of the pot starts to get brown again, deglaze the bottom with the white wine. Then let that simmer until it's reduced by about half and starting to thicken.

12. Add a bay leaf, then throw in the enormous heap of onions and the cherry tomatoes. Season with a decent amount of salt, stir everything up, and pack it all down like you're making a delicious sand castle.

12. Let everything steam for a few minutes, then stir the onions up a bit as they collapse and release the juice. Give it a few minutes, then give everything one more stir, set the flame down to low heat and then set a timer for half an hour.

13. Stir every half hour for two hours.

14. Remove the lid and continue simmering and stirring every half hour until the meat fully breaks down (it will eventually separate from the bones by itself as you stir, but don't pull them out yet) and the sauce has thickened. It should look more like sauce and less like soup. If it dries out too much, feed it a little water at a time to keep it from burning. Taste for seasoning and adjust if needed.

15. After 4 total hours of cooking (at minimum, this follows Soup Rules. Longer = More Deliciouser) the sauce is ready to serve. At this point you can either remove the bones or leave them in the sauce to keep soaking all that delicious flavorful marrow. Usually by the time I'm done eating a massive bowl of pasta and rich meaty stew I'm in full Bear Mode and I just wanna sleep for 100 hours, so I'll just leave them in the sauce and fish them out of my bowl when I'm spending the next week eating it.

~The Next Day~

15. Cook the ziti. The original recipe has this whole process that partially cooks the ziti and then you finish cooking it in the sauce, but it's probably not necessary, and while I think the next step is also unnecessary and could probably be done ahead of time, I'm including it for the sake of accuracy.

16. Transfer about a cup of sauce per person to a saucepan and melt some butter into it. Once the sauce is hot, add the cooked (or if partially cooked, 7 ½ minutes instead of 9) pasta to the sauce. If you're doing the weird partial cook method, add some of the starchy pasta water and let it cook for another two minutes. If not, it's fine, you probably won't notice a difference. Just mix it all up until it's all hot, then slowly stir in the grated cheese. The slower you do it, the more thoroughly it will dissolve into the sauce and you'll be less likely to end up with a huge glob of melted cheese on the end of your spoon. Then again, I've never been upset to find a huge glob of melted cheese on the end of my spoon, so do whatever makes you happy.

N+1. Garnish with some basil. Eat.

N+2. Cream your jeans.

N+3. Tell everyone you know about this recipe, safe in the knowledge that your dedication to meticulous onion slicing will ensure that no one will ever try to make it and look at you like you're some sort of demented food witch.

Post-script: This is probably more of a "wintertime" meal, but it is also a very good comfort food any time. I'm no good at handling other people's grief and sadness, but this recipe is basically shorthand for "I will perform tedious manual labor until my hands and arms and back are sore just to create something that might make you smile for a few minutes" and my probably-autistic ass uses it as such. When in doubt, everybody's gotta eat, so it might as well be a home-cooked meal from someone who loves you enough to make it for you. Plus it's a thick, hearty stew-like sauce full of indescribably tender beef that you serve with pasta and melted cheese. It's basically liquid serotonin.

#food #recipes #slightly blasphemous Italian food #although in my experience every Italian recipe is blasphemy in some town or other #I'm sure somewhere somebody's nonna is sharpening the shankin' stick because i forgot the capers #well vafanculo grandma this is how i learned to make it since you were too busy tending to your olive trees halfway around the world #instead of teaching me how to cook it the way they do in your idyllic mountain village #where everyone rides scooters or drives an old Fiat when it's raining #and you can fuck off from work and spend three hours getting an espresso #fuck Italy seems lit #remind me again why my family isnt from there #we're all from rainy island bogs and European Wisconsin #our national pastimes are Toil and Labor #as jeremy clarkson says #this must be done absolutely perfectly... tomorrow

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