I had it as a textbook in culinary school, as do many people, and it’s the one I still routinely use. The recipes are rock solid. I use it mostly for very basic things, but I routinely get requests for those recipes, sometimes even from other chefs.
I also have a copy of an old King Arthur’s cookbook from the 80s that I find similarly useful and robust. Very seldom do I need a staple baking recipe that I can’t find from those two.
I’m glad I don’t have to pick! I’m a sucker for variety. I always have natural and washed coffee on hand and I try to have a honey processed coffee whenever possible.
If I had to blindly pick a coffee and it needed to be great, I would pick a washed coffee, probably a “medium” roast. The flavor profile is fairly narrow at that point, but it can still be great coffee. I do (barely) prefer a delicate cup so most of the best cups of coffee I’ve had have been lighter roasted washed coffees.
But my most delightfully surprising cups of coffee, by a mile, have been natural process coffees. It probably wouldn’t be good if a light roasted washed coffee surprised me at this point. Natural processed coffees continue to surprise me in good ways.
For a consumer, if their preferences are equal, I think consistently good coffee is mostly about finding a good roaster. I’ve had plenty of mediocre to bad coffee from each fermentation process, many varieties, and all roast levels. I’ve seldom had a bad bag of coffee from roasters I trust.
I’ve recently been tutoring a friend to use a Hario Switch. They are uniquely suited to pick pourover up quickly, excellent manual dexterity and related transferable skills, and they’ve still had some struggles. I’d definitely forgotten the learning curve and I think it’s very reasonable to look at brewers like the Hoop to open coffee up to more people.
I’ve tried other flow rate controlled pourover brewers before and not liked the results. I suspect James’ standards are high enough I would find this the best of the bunch. I’d love to try one.
I would modify the skirt on this brewer by melting and reshaping (or just cutting out) a notch. I also often like to brew over a carafe.
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“Our hands are like the hands of the living.”
Phew. Strong line.
How do you find the poetry you post? I enjoy so many of the things I see from you, I need to connect with the same periodicals or events you do.
50-60% of my coffee intake is decaf. If I could only drink decaf I would drink pretty much exactly as much coffee as I do now.
I will have a cup tonight with you.
I think this is great advice, not least of all for opening up espresso drinks. Also lowers the risk someone will start off with “bad” coffee. The best places for this around me would be some of the good local roasters.
I’d also consider finding a place to try Vietnamese and Cuban coffee. Maybe Turkish coffee, too.
I’ve worn glasses about sixteen hours a day my entire adult life. Got my first pair around 10. Acclimating took maybe four or five days of minor discomfort. The improved vision was incredible and as a child I had child durability, so I didn’t mind the discomfort. I vividly remember how strange it felt for air to hit my face with glasses on while walking or running.
Every time I get a major prescription update it takes two or three days to feel “right”. Until then I have some disorientation. I would expect an adult who hasn’t consistently worn glasses to feel that more keenly.
If I had continued eye strain after three days of constant and consistent wear, I would call the optometrist. If it lasted a week and the optometrist was blowing me off I’d consider my options. Some prescriptions are better than others. I could tell you exactly when I got my best prescription, it was life changing. I didn’t know people could see like that. I’ve never had a “bad” prescription to the best of my knowledge, every time I’ve updated it has been an improvement.
I don’t have a brand I would recommend, but I can say making your own extracts is extremely easy. Roughly chopping hazelnuts, toasting them, and adding them to a neutral vodka or glycerin would take maybe ten minutes and no special equipment. I went through an extract phase a while back and still have several, including a truly kickass coffee vodka.
Making it yourself isn’t fast, but I share your dislike of how hard it is to find unsweetened, reasonably priced extracts. I don’t want syrups, I like being able to control sugar content separate from additional flavors.
I do wonder how it would taste in comparison. I’ve never tasted hazelnut extract vs flavored coffee, creamer, or syrup, only ever in baked goods.
I suspect it’s just one of those weird cultural foibles. The US isn’t too exceptional among Western countries regarding moderate or binge drinking. It consumes meaningfully less alcohol per capita than Germany, France, Ireland, and the UK among others, on par with Sweden, Finland, and Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_consumption_per_capita. US alcoholism rates are about on par with Sweden, France, and Germany, some 25% lower than Ireland or the UK: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/alcoholism-by-country
I didn’t thoroughly research those numbers, but they square with my anecdotal experience. Soda is where the serving size really fucks us up.
There is a trend in high end spirit sales in the US to sell 1 or 1.25oz pours, 30 and 38ml respectively. It’s more a cost saving measure, but I do like it. 30ml is enough to try something.
I always knew James Hoffman is the same kind of weird goblin thing as me, but now I have video evidence.
I’m finishing off my bag of Counter Culture Field Trip, which I will miss. It was Aeropress today, I’m out of V60 papers. I have about 20 grams left, great for a lazy morning at home, but maybe I’ll have someone over and share it.
Every frozen and defrosted non-dairy milk I’ve had (mostly almond I think) did end up grainy, but still usable. Freezing it for baking is still reasonable. The time to defrost it would bother me.
If your household drinks a lot of sweet coffee drinks, yes, make a big batch of oat milk syrup to extend the shelf life.
I would personally make a huge batch of congee with a ton of ginger, garlic, shallots, and if you eat meat chicken (chicken arroz caldo). I use coconut milk for rice porridge, but oat milk would be good. I’d portion it into pint containers and freeze them. It’s cheap, freezes well, and could easily use up as much milk as you’d like. To my palate it’s a huge upgrade on chicken noodle soup when I’m sick, so it’s good to have frozen in advance.
If you have occasion in the next few weeks, it would be good for flan or blancmange as a dessert. I’ve never made blancmange with oat milk but it’s usually nut flavored, so I’d expect that to work really well, probably better than dairy milk. It’s a good time in the northern hemisphere for fruit sauces, too, so fresh compotes are on the table, and maybe toasted almonds.
Yeah, even the better boards struggled to break 3,000MT/s with Zen 1. They sure were fun to play with, though, one of the last times I felt like tinkering was actually getting me something.
I’d be curious how the more modern “default” 3600 kits do, I didn’t have a Ryzen system by the time they were popular and cheap.
Some B350m models did get Zen 3 compatibility. Not all, if I remember correctly, though I could be wrong. So whether it’s compatible I think is model dependent. Whether an old B350m has the VRMs for a chunkier CPU would also be a reasonable question.
I mentioned the R5 3600 because the prices on them are great. A 5800X3D does perform better, but I see completed eBay listings at $225+. They also needs a cooler. I see one 3600 that went for about $50 and several that went for $60, which isn’t too much more than a 16gb kit of DDR4.
I would definitely consider a Zen3 CPU for this upgrade, depending on budget.
First generation Ryzen struggles with higher memory speed. You very likely will not get the full 3600MT/s. There’s no real reason to buy slower, just be aware you’re likely going to hit a ceiling.
For gaming you might see bigger improvements from upgrading the CPU, maybe to an R5 3600. That and the memory are both going to offer big performance improvement.
I’m also worried about online recipes. Decent cookbooks routinely have recipes that benefit from adjustments or lack good instructions. Online recipes are already worse than that and AI is going to make them much worse. Sometimes you want a known good recipe.
In my experience the recipes in these seven books are particularly trustworthy. They deliver what they say on the tin, the listed quantities are good, and they’re well written.
I wish I could add Mexican and maybe regional Indian cookbooks of this caliber, but I haven’t read any I liked this much. All the classic French books are also excellent and very reliable (Larousse, Bocuse, etc.), that’s kind of their thing. Joy of Cooking does cover similar ground.
I recommend two plant focused books, both deeper cuts.
I cooked through Vedge with a few skips during COVID and it’s haymaker after haymaker, I can’t heap enough praise on it. From the Earth is pretty dated, and sometimes that shows in the ingredients, but also shockingly solid.
To learn to cook from the ground up, I’d favor YouTube over books. The books work, but video simply conveys more information. And as lists of recipes I don’t find those books particularly useful.
Ruhlman’s Ratios is an extremely versatile cookbook for soups, sauces, batters, and doughs that walks through a mindset that will let someone easily overhaul recipes to fit their vision or what’s on hand. You can find it very cheap and I think it can help most okay to even amazing cooks improve.
I recommend looking for many of these used, online or in person, or skimming them in a library. The Joy of Cooking in particular is practically falling out of trees they’ve printed so many of them.