Chus On Chow

I’m going to spend a few days with my dear ol’ Mom and her equally dear ol’ boyfriend. They met a couple years ago, when he was about to turn 90, and they’ve been acting like teenagers ever since. I can’t wait to see them, but that doesn’t mean I have to like Yuban out of a can. So this morning I experimented with items to make my mornings as tasty as possible.

I checked ahead – Mom has a coffee grinder, one of those whirlygig things that blasts the bean apart rather than grinding it to a uniform size like a burr grinder does. But that’s okay; even though it’s been sitting at the back of a cupboard, it will make a nice fresh coffee-bean smell in the morning.

I’m traveling very light, by bus and train, so I can’t carry my easily broken vacpot nor a French press. Not even a little Moka pot. So I was thinking… how can I replicate the vacpot process with some items that are very light to carry and others that Mom already has in her kitchen? This is what I did this morning, to see if it would work:

Assembled the equipment:

• saucepan with lid
• measuring cup
• coffee grinder
• gold-tone coffee filter
• digital cooking thermometer
• bamboo coffee stir stick
• glass coffee pot

I poured three cups of filtered water into a scrupulously clean saucepan, covered it and turned on the flame. I measured out a bit over half a cup of fresh coffee beans and ground them, returning them to the measuring cup (I don’t like steam getting inside my vintage Zassenhaus hand grinder). Once I saw that the water was just starting to make tiny bubbles, I removed the lid and started taking its temperature. Lo and behold, it was already at 202 degrees. I immediately turned off the heat and poured in the ground coffee, giving it a stir with the bamboo stick. I timed it to 1.5 minutes, stirring gently most of the time to replicate the bubbling action of the vacpot. My goal is to have the grounds in contact with water for no more than a total of four minutes, so I let it stay in the water a little longer than usual because I guessed (correctly) that the coffee would slide through the gold-tone filter faster than through the glass filter in a vacpot.

At 1.5 minutes, I held the filter over the glass coffee pot and poured the coffee from the pan into the filter. Most of the coffee went through without my having to stir. Toward the end, it looked like the filter was plugging, so I stirred it up a little in there and finished pouring coffee from the pan. By the time all the coffee had gone through the filter, my time was just under four minutes.

As is my habit, I had pre-heated my coffee cup and glass thermos but had not pre-heated the glass coffee pot. This caused the temperature to drop a bit, as did the pouring from a saucepan as opposed to the usual rather enclosed process inside the vacpot. Nevertheless, the results were just the right temperature for immediate drinking.

I first tasted it with a little porcelain Chinese soup spoon that I have for this purpose – no metal taste, room for the coffee to cool off.

It had all the muddiness of a French press, but the taste was really, really good!  I was quite surprised, in fact.  If a coffee is not really superior, I go running for the organic heavy cream. Didn’t happen this time. It was just yummy right out of the spoon. This coffee was a Sumatran Blue Batak peaberry, roasted ten days ago by local coffee guru Owen O’Neill and I have to give him credit for 95% of this coffee’s success. Without the right roast of the right beans, all the fancy equipment or technique in the world won’t rescue it. That said, you can take stellar beans roasted to perfection and ruin them with the wrong technique or equipment.

Well, off I go to Mom’s weighed down with nothing more than a filter, a thermometer and a bamboo stick. Oh yeah, and a pound of Owen’s coffee.