Holiday dinners.

Madison.

Ah, the winter holidays: time for eating way too much. Unless you're me, spending a week and a half visiting parents and in-laws, where skipping a meal is sometimes preferable to actually eating. When the breakfast choice hangs between heavily-processed packaged foods¹ and nothing, I'll wait until lunch.

Or dinner. Whatever.

Toss in a general disinterest in sweets - late-December holiday sweets being among the most sugar-intense of the year - and it's no wonder I'm itching to cook a meal for anyone who's around at any given time. Even something simple - like omelettes with bacon, caramelized onions and cheddar cheese - tends to go over well with the various folks who either don't cook or don't have time to cook.²

No surprise, then, that we cooked up a few grand meals to keep everyone happy. The first one, a last-minute menu before my brother and his fiancée left for Wisconsin, was a simple affair: a small salad of beets, beet greens and purple carrots; a cream of purple potato soup; a seared and roasted tri-tip steak from Fountain Prairie;³ whole-wheat and ricotta gnocchi; green beans with fresh lemon juice; and a braise of mushrooms and sweet onions in red wine. Then, for dessert, we had whole-wheat crepes, stuffed with fresh ricotta, strawberry jam and goat cheese, and topped with a rich lemon-egg sauce.⁴

The big meal, though, was the Christmas gift from Sharon and I to her parents, as well as a group of their friends - 9 in total. This was complicated by the following:

• Sharon's mom is really limited in what she can eat, texture-wise, to avoid the risk of her either choking or being unable to chew and swallow things. This meal was primarily for her, since she's unable to go out anymore, so it wasn't fair to prepare a nice meal for the others, then do something different for her.
  
  
• Sharon's parents' kitchen is well, kind of bare-bones. Most of the pots and pans are really thin metal, and just about everything is non-stick. It's better by my folks, but you still end up without the occasional thing you'd consider standard, like a cheese grater.
  
  
• My parents were invited to the dinner, as well as a number of people I didn't know at all. I know my mom's dietary restrictions, so those were easy to dance around, but everything needed to be simple enough to eliminate potentially unwanted ingredients at the last possible moment.
  
  
• We wanted the meal to highlight those things that Sharon's parents really like, but they're not particularly helpful in that regard. Asking them directly results in responses like "Oh, I'm sure anything you make will be fine."

With all of that in mind, I put together a tentative menu to run past them for approval, which became the final menu without any significant changes.⁵ Though it was pretty funny when they thought that the second course was the main course, and we had to explain that there were still plenty more to go. Here's the menu we finally served:

amuse-bouche
asparagus, mushroom and lemon risotto

first course: soup
carrot and ginger soup, with spinach and roasted garlic puree, yogurt and fried onions

second course: seafood
seared scallops with bacon, orange and mustard cream sauce, and fresh asparagus

third course: pasta
blue cheese gnocchi with pear-white wine sauce, port wine reduction and toasted walnuts

fourth course: meat
braised beef with butternut squash spaetzle, and fresh green beans with lemon vinaigrette

fifth course: dessert
fresh ricotta with blackberry-port sauce and roasted apples

mignardises
rosemary-scented shortbread cookies
chocolate truffles

It went over extremely well, and I'm quite happy about that. A few notes on the food details:

• I had really wanted to find some good, southeast-Asian fried shallots for the soup, but the Asian food selection in Downingtown is pretty limited. So I went with good, old, French's fried onions. The kind you usually find atop a cream-of-[insert vegetable here]-based casserole. Worked just fine.
  
  
• The bacon that accompanied the scallops was also in the package from Fountain Prairie. And, damn, was it ever a fine pairing with those scallops. As was the cream sauce, with consisted entirely of heavy cream, blood orange juice, dijon mustard and a little salt.
  
  
• Blue cheese works pretty well for gnocchi. I replaced half of the ricotta with a soft blue, and it lent a subtle flavor to the finished pasta. I also finally figured out the trick for properly rolling gnocchi off a fork to get that football-ish ridged shape, but haven't figured out how to explain it just yet.
  
  
• The pear-white wine sauce was really just a chunky applesauce, made with ripe anjou pears and a lot of riesling. I was going for the the classic combination of blue cheese pairings of port, pears and walnuts.
  
  
• I didn't actually toast the walnuts. I over-toasted the first batch, and didn't have time enough to get more ready to send out. In an open kitchen, where every move is visible from the dining room, I had to be really sneaky to get the burnt tray of nuts into the garage, out of the range of sight and smell.
  
  
• The braised beef was a beef cheek from, of course, Fountain Prairie. Sharon's parents have been making fun of us for eating it, though I don't see why it's any weirder than eating any other cow muscle. So we didn't tell them until afterwards, when her dad said something about how amazingly good it was. He no longer seemed creeped out by it.⁶
  
  
• The blackberry-port sauce was pretty much just that. A bag of frozen blackberries, a third of a bottle of port, and a cup of sugar or so. Simmer for half an hour and strain to get all the seeds out. A little pectin'd make it into a mighty fine jam.
  
  
• The chocolate truffles were another Wisconsin special, from Gail Ambrosius. All I want to know is this: Doesn't anyone other than me appreciate the goodness of chocolate and Indian curry? At least my dad'll eat the chilli-chocolate truffle.

* * * * *

¹Such as frozen "French toast sticks" or other high-fructose corn syrup-based food products.

²That'd be our families, especially around the holidays, when just keeping the house tidy is a full-time job.

³Sent via FedEx, along with a boxful of other goodies intended for Christmas gifts. It was alarming to have regular, supermarket, corn-fed beef another night, and to taste the difference. The supermarket stuff was almost flavorless, by contrast.

⁴Kind of like a thinner version of lemon curd. I think the Joy called it "Rich Hot Lemon Sauce".

⁵Any changes were based on what we could find at the grocery store.

⁶It was just in a simple braise of whatever lager was in the fridge with onions, carrots, rosemary and sundried tomatoes.

On Coffee.

Madison.

I love coffee. But my particular style of coffee appreciation doesn't encompass massive, or even necessarily frequent, consumption. Caffeine makes me, for lack of a better term, wiggy. And besides, I'm more than willing to shell out a fair price for good coffee, which is harder to find than you'd think. Primary reason: most folks have probably never had good coffee. After all, when less than 2% of world coffee production is really top-grade, it's not the easiest thing to find.

I've been thinking about coffee, of late, especially as I've had the time to brew some in the lazy mornings of my end-of-the-year vacation. So, in case you ever wondered about where coffee comes from, here's more information than you ever wanted to know. (I used to work for Johnson Brothers Coffee Roasters, here in Madison, so I like to pretend I know what I'm talking about.) Check the links below for a series of digressions.

* * * * *

Coffee: Production.
Coffee: Roasting.
Coffee: Brewing.
Coffee: Flavors.

Coffee: Production.

Madison.

Coffee: from the tree to the cup. In brief, here's a rundown¹ on modern coffee production:

1. Coffee grows on bushy trees native to east Africa, though they've since spread around the world. The red berries are still prized in certain regions, such as Yemen, and are gaining ground in some trendy processed foods, but chances are that most of us will never see one. Until the 14^th century, when someone discovered the magic of the roasted seeds, the berries were the only reason anyone was interested in the trees.
   
   
2. There are two primary types of coffee trees. Coffea arabica - with its two subspecies, var. typica and var. bourbon - is responsible for the good, well-balanced coffees of the world. These trees grow best at high altitudes, generally producing higher quality beans at higher elevations, ideally 5,000 to 7,500 feet above sea level. They're low-volume producers - sometimes as little as a pound per tree per year once mature - that prefer shade, regular rainfall, and warm, steady year-round temperatures.
   
   Coffea canephora, or robusta, on the other hand, is a hardy, disease-resistant tree that produces large quantities of beans, doesn't mind full sun, and makes for a bitter, terrible coffee. The dominant flavors of robusta beans are burnt rubber and wet cardboard.
   
   
3. To produce coffee, the berries are harvested from the trees all at once. Defects - including varying degrees of ripeness, insect damage, mold, etc. - are dealt with through later processing. The berry skins are removed, then the mucilage - the fruity matter - is fermented off. What remains is a pair² of seeds, called beans. At this stage, they're called 'green' beans.
   
   
4. Traditionally, the processors float the beans through a series of channels filled with flowing water to separate them into three (or more) general groups. Denser beans are more desirable than lighter beans, and floaters are completely worthless. This process, though simple, does a pretty good job of sorting out defective beans; better producers and processors will be more careful here, eliminating more beans that they could potentially sell in exchange for a higher quality (and a higher price). The sorted beans are then dried, either on concrete patios in the sun or in mechanical dryers.
   
   
5. This is where the coffee brokers step in. Through a bizarre series of commodities-trading shenanigans³, the Big Four coffee roasters have managed to drive the price of coffee beans very low, but it's still a wild market. In order to get good beans - you can't make bad coffee beans taste good - you have to know the right green brokers. You have to be someone with influence, or hire a person like that in order to even have a chance to taste and buy the best beans.⁴ Roasters purchase green beans by the bag - roughly 60 to 70 kg.⁵ Large quantities of them, usually - at least 10 to 20 bags. Futures are sold in containers, meaning 250 bags, or about 37,500 pounds of coffee beans.
   
   
6. This is when your friendly, neighborhood roaster takes over. A good roaster - i.e., not Starbucks⁶ - will take care to roast beans regularly, providing them to you (or your favorite coffee shop or restaurant) while still fresh. Roasting's a complicated process, if you want to get it right, and takes a lot of skill and practice. A good roaster adjusts the roast profile for each different type of bean, further adjusting to respond to moisture loss as the beans age, aiming to emphasize the best qualities of each particular coffee. There are a great variety of ways to roast coffee, beyond just medium vs. dark roast, and it pays to find a good roaster who can consistently produce the characteristics that you like.
   
   
7. Then, you brew. Coffee brewing has many, many different forms, and I won't pretend to be familiar with all of them. Each tries, in some way, to extract the good parts of the coffee bean in water - about 20% of the bean's weight - while leaving behind the extractible-but-unpleasant bits - another 10% of the bean. (There are a few methods - mostly ancient ones around the Middle East - that leave all of the bean in the cup.)

* * * * *

¹As I understand it. As a former professional coffee roaster, I've got the notes (and memories) from my former job, as well as Harold McGee's On Food And Cooking for references. That said, a lot of folks disagree over a lot of things when it comes to coffee, in no small part because the professionals - roasters, brokers, etc. - tend to keep their secrets close. For example, out of respect for my former boss, I won't be divulging any of his roasting secrets here.

²Some older trees will start to produce a single seed, called a peaberry. A number of Tanzanian coffees are marketed this way, though it doesn't really mean anything in terms of quality.

³About half of the world's coffee production is bought up by the Big Four: Sara Lee, Kraft, Procter & Gamble and Nestlé. These companies managed to crash the price of coffee by storing large amounts of nigh-undrinkable robusta beans in their warehouses, building it up so that supply exceeded demand.^a Down came the price of coffee futures, destroying the lives of coffee growers around the world. Coffee prices have yet to recover.

^aNote: green coffee beans don't have an exceptional shelf life. Under controlled temperature and humidity, you've got a year or so until they start to lose their good qualities. Not that these beans they withheld - stuff like Vietnamese robusta, which tastes like burnt rubber - had much going for them, but the commodities market didn't care. Those same beans sat in warehouses for years, entirely unusable, serving primarily to increase profits for the Big Four at the expense of the world's coffee growers. Who, it should be noted, are among some of the poorest farmers on the planet.

⁴Brokers are salesmen. They will tell you that the sample of beans that they sent you is the best stuff they have, even if it's the worst. Most small roasters aren't aware that they're never seeing the sort of beans they ought to be roasting; most of them aren't aware that there's anything better than what they're able to get.

⁵You really learn to appreciate how heavy a bag is when you're doing the monthly inventory, weighing bag after bag. A newly opened bag, used for just a few pounds before the end of the month rolled around, was the bane of my existence.

⁶Man, I could rant against Starbucks for days, but I'll limit it to one anecdote:

When I was roasting coffee, we got a shipment of some really great Colombian coffee, called La Florencia. Except that Florencia, in Caquetá, doesn't produce coffee. It was actually a batch of top-notch coffee from Nariño, a nearby department.

Starbucks, in its effort to maximize profits, decided that it would purchase the entire Nariño coffee crop, and made a deal with the processors to lower the price in exchange for buying in bulk. Nariño, like much of Colombia, was already producing coffee for lower prices than beans of similar quality elsewhere, so this represented a serious loss of income, particularly for the high-quality growers. One farmer was so incensed by this that he smuggled his crop to Florencia, selling it there for a price he could afford to live on.

If I recall correctly, we were paying $1.32 per pound for that coffee, and it was a steal. Starbucks was paying less than $1.10 per pound. (Significantly less than a living wage.) So whenever they make some sort of claim about supporting coffee farmers, I know they're lying. Starbucks, as a corporation, doesn't care about the quality of life of coffee growers, unless it can somehow boost their bottom line.

(Here's a map of Colombia, if you're interested.)

Coffee: Roasting.

Madison.

Coffee: the roasting process. You could, conceivably, find an alternate use for green coffee beans,¹ but, as Harold McGee writes: "Raw green coffee beans are as hard as unpopped popcorn, and about as tasty."

Coffee roasting turns these little green BBs into brown, brittle packages, developing their flavors through a careful application of heat. Anyone can do it at home, though a frying pan or a modified popcorn air-popper does lack some of the subtle control that the professional drum roaster offers. In general, the process goes like this, regardless of your choice of roasting apparatus:

1. The roaster heats the green beans over a fairly high heat. They're endothermic at this point, absorbing heat as their temperature increases. Slowly, they'll begin to change color from gray-green to a dull yellow and take on a faint aroma of hay, around three minutes².
   
   
2. The beans continue to change color and aroma, from yellow/hay (three to five minutes) to gray-brown/bread (six minutes) to cinnamon/coffee (eight minutes) - and they begin to expand as the remaining moisture vaporizes, puffing up the beans. Throughout this process, an experienced roaster can smell the beans to gain an sense of the flavors that will be present in the final roast. In the even you're considering this as something to try at home, beware that the beans will start smoking here. A lot. All of the bean's proteins, sugars, phenols, etc., start to break down, producing all of the great variety of coffee flavors and aromas, while giving off lots and lots of smoke. (Invest in a really good ventilation system, or do it outside.)
   
   
3. At about nine minutes, the beans reach the "first crack", which is the point where the chemical breakdown becomes self-sustaining and the beans become exothermic (about 320°F). Since they're putting off energy, the roaster needs to reduce the heat to avoid burning the beans, which will give them a harsh, unpleasant flavor. The first crack is where the steam pressure inside the beans causes them to pop, with a sound a lot like popcorn, starting with a few sporadic beans before it suddenly erupts in a wave of popping sounds.
   
   
4. Depending on the hardness of the bean, which is primarily a function of altitude - beans from lower altitudes are considered "soft", and can't take as much heat without burning - the roaster may then choose to apply extra heat to finish the roasting. At about twelve to thirteen minutes, the beans will enter the "second crack", which is where the natural sugars begin to caramelize. It sounds very much like a series of small cracks, as the beans themselves deform enough to produce small cracks or, in some cases, break pieces off.
   
   
5. When the beans have reached the desired level of roast, the roaster cools them down with a flow of cold air, usually stirring the beans to bring them down to room temperature as quickly as possible to stop the roasting process.

There are an unbelievable variety of final roast levels, and no one really seems to have agreed on what "dark roast" and "espresso roast" mean, exactly. Part of that is due to the fact that different styles of roasting - the subtleties not mentioned in the above that give each roaster their signature flavors - give varying end results within the "medium-dark-French" roast range. Here's one approximate breakdown of some typical roast levels you might see:

• Light roast. This would be any roast that never made it to the second crack, and you don't see them often. The aromas are often underdeveloped at this point; the coffee's natural sweetness is subdued; and the coffee's acidity is very high and often unpleasant.
  
  
• Medium roast. A medium roast should be the best expression of a coffee's character, with the roasting stopped just as it reaches the second crack. At this point, the aromas and flavors that are part of the bean itself - as opposed to the flavors of the roast - are fully expressed, and haven't been driven off by further roasting. A high-quality coffee will be naturally sweet at this point, but coffees with defects - meaning 98% of the coffee out there - will have varying degrees of bitterness that make them unpleasant.
  
  
• Dark roast. A dark roast coffee has usually been roasted until the second crack is nearly complete,³ but not quite. The Maillard reactions produce more sugars, resulting in a sweeter coffee that can disguise the bitterness of mid-grade beans. It also produces more flavors of the roast, such as toast, cooked beef, and roast coffee.⁴ The downside is that many of the delicate, complex aromas have already started to disappear, though there are some coffees that benefit from a darker roast. A small amount of natural oils may appear on the surface of the beans.
  
  
• French roast. This roast has pushed all of the way through the second crack, resulting in a coffee with intense roast flavors and very little, if any, of the bean's aromas remaining. The telltale aroma of a French roast is maple syrup, though there are often notes of toast and smoke, especially as the coffee runs the risk of burning by this point. Ruptured cells start leaking oils to the surface of the beans, giving them a definite gloss. There is also a significant amount of caramelized sugar⁵, as well as the creation of new, harsh flavors from the Maillard reactions. The high sugar content of French roasts makes them good candidates for the high-pressure, short-time extraction used in making espresso.
  
  
• Italian roast. Just short of completely burnt, this is a roast sometimes used for espresso. There are no real aromas left, and the development of harsh, bitter flavors overwhelms any developed sugars. The distinct aroma of an Italian roast? Fish.

In addition to roast level, roast date is a critical piece of information in finding good beans. The roasting process develops enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, which the beans expel over the next several days. Enough that it's all but impossible to keep them in a completely closed container; any sealed bag of coffee will have a small, one-way air valve to let the excess gas escape, pre-explosion. Though this does prevent staling due to oxygen, the production of carbon dioxide helps volatilize the delicate oils that give the coffee its distinct aroma, so its quality begins to fade away quickly.

Coffee is best when made one or two days after roasting, when the aromas are still present. It'll still be good, without any noticeable stale flavor, for at least ten days after roasting. Grinding, however, greatly accelerates the staling process, and you can notice a definite loss of flavor in just a few hours. Ground coffee will stale in just a few days.

In case you're interested in home-roasting, you can give it a go with anything from a cast-iron skillet to a countertop roaster, which is like a miniature version of the gas-fired drum roasters used by professionals. Check out Sweet Maria's for a good selection of high-quality stuff, including better green beans than you'll find just about anywhere else.⁶ Just want to buy some good beans? Get 'em from Sweet Maria's or Johnson Brothers Coffee Roasters.

* * * * *

¹Like in Brazil in the '70s, when they were strongly considering the use of low-grade beans - most of Brazil's crop makes harsh, thin coffee - as fuel for steam locomotives.

²The times here are estimates, assuming you want to finish the roasting process in about twelve to fifteen minutes. Less than ten minutes produces sour flavors, while longer than twenty gives the coffee a baked aroma. A good roaster adjusts the heat applied throughout the process to, ideally, bring in every medium-roast batch at the same time.

³Better sorted - i.e., more uniform - beans will tend to reach the first and second cracks as a group, relatively close together, but it's still a period that stretches over thirty seconds or a minute, depending. Less uniform batches of beans run the risk of over- or under-roasting portions of the coffee, resulting in a mess of off-flavors.

⁴This is not a joke. Roast coffee is a standard aroma in coffee, and is present in all roast levels, but at different amounts. It also tends to be one that remains in coffee over time, after all of the other aromas have dissipated.

⁵The reason this roast was developed and is so frequently used is that the high development of sugars covers the natural bitterness of coffee defects. It also allows larger roasters - particularly the big corporations - to maintain a more consistent product, since variations among French roasts are far less than among medium roasts.

⁶You're paying well above normal green bean prices, for the privilege of having access to Tom Owen's pre-approved selections. Every coffee he'd sell you is one that he's already roasting and selling, himself.

Coffee: Brewing.

Madison.

Coffee: how to brew it. There are a lot of methods for brewing coffee, each with their ups and downs. A sampling:

• The drip brewer, the American standard. Water drains through a bed of grounds, passing through a fine mesh filter of either paper or metal. Generally has a light body, with the possibility for good flavor,¹ and it keeps well if you don't drink it all at once. One of the biggest drawbacks of most drip brewers is that you have very little control over the brewing process.
  
  
• The percolator, the worst idea ever. Ever notice how a coffee percolator fills the kitchen with the wonderful aroma of coffee? That's because it's no longer in the coffee. Percolators often end up boiling the grounds, and passing the water through the grounds repeatedly, resulting in overextraction and bitterness. If you like how it makes the house smell like coffee, go ahead and do it, but make sure you brew up another batch via some other method for actual consumption.
  
  
• The French press, which was actually developed by an Italian. Go figure. This is my preferred method, because it permits the fullest range of control over all of the brewing variables, resulting in a consistent cup every time. It produces a full-bodied cup, with lots of flavor, but the resulting tiny bits of ground coffee mean it continues to extract, becoming bitter over time. It's good while it's still hot, but you might as well toss it after it's reached room temperature; it's best to make only as much as you want at the moment, then another pot later.
  
  
• Espresso, which is all but impossible to do (well) at home. Given the fine grind necessary, as well as the necessary water temperature and pressure, it's all but impossible to make a good cup of espresso at home. Espresso relies on forcing steam through well-packed, finely ground coffee to extract the readily available sugars in a short period of time. Even more than in other brewing methods, freshness is absolutely critical for espresso, in order to get the highly desirable crema.

If you want to make the best possible cup of coffee, I'd recommend going with the French press. It allows you control over the greatest number of variables, though it does require some serious thought and experimentation to get the process right. Here's what you need to keep in mind:

1. You'll need to have the following equipment handy:
   
   • A French press.
     
   • A kettle for boiling water. Electric or stovetop is fine.
     
   • An adjustable burr grinder. (More on grinders below.)
     
   • A timer.
     
   • A scale capable of weighing in one-gram increments.
     
   • A spoon.
   
   
2. Start by weighing out your coffee. For a one-liter French press, I've settled on sixty grams of coffee, but that may vary, depending on your water quality, preferred grind, steeping time, etc. You'll want to weigh it, because different coffees - especially at different roast levels² - have different densities. You may want to test it several times with varying amounts until you get a cup that's not overextracted (bitter) or underextracted (thin).
   
   
3. Grind the coffee beans; you'll want it coarse. Exactly how coarse depends on your taste and the limitations of your grinder, but it may take several batches to fine-tune everything. Start with a coarser grind than you might expect, and get it progressively finer with each test batch. Keep making it finer until you begin to get a bit of bitterness in the cup, then back up the grind a little.
   
   
4. Boil your water. If you don't like the taste of your tap water, run it through a carbon filter.³ You'll want it just off the boil, at about 190°-195°F.
   
   
5. Set your timer for four and a half minutes. The ideal extraction time is usually between four and five minutes for most brewing methods.
   
   
6. Put the ground coffee in the carafe, then pour the hot water over top, being sure to wet all of the grounds evenly. You can stir it, briefly, if need be. Be sure to start your timer as soon as the first grounds are wet. Fresh coffee will bubble as the carbon dioxide in the beans escapes, hastened by the heat, so you may need to tap the carafe to settle things down.
   
   
7. When the timer goes off, break the crust on top with the spoon. As you do this, get your nose in there as close as you can, and take a whiff just as the crust breaks. You'll get the best, most intense aroma at this moment, as the volatile molecules have been trapped just beneath the grounds. Give it all a quick stir, then place the plunger on top, pushing down in one fluid motion to strain the grounds from the coffee.
   
   
8. Pour immediately into cups. Proper etiquette for pouring is to only pour a half cup in the first, second, etc., until filling the last cup, then going backwards to top off. The full body of French press coffee is due to tiny, suspended particles, and there are more of them at the end of the pour than at the beginning. By staggering the pours, everyone ends up with the same cup. If you have extra coffee, pour it off of the grounds; it will only continue to get bitter as it sits on them.

If you'd still prefer to work with a drip brewer, it's worth looking into a burr grinder and a scale to ensure a consistent grind and quantity of coffee per pot. Do remember, though, that a half pot will take more than half the coffee to produce the same-tasting coffee, due to the way the water drains through the bed of grounds.

As for grinders, there are several options, depending on what you like. Some common options include:

• The mortar and pestle. If you're making coffee the ancient Ethiopian/Middle Eastern way, this is how to do it. Unless, of course, you'd prefer to do it between two flat stones. Granted, this isn't a common option, but it is authentic. Making coffee like this involves adding the finely ground beans into a pot with sugar, then boiled two or three times before serving. Don't forget the sugar; it's pretty much unpalatable without.
  
  
• The grinder inside the coffee maker. This sounds like a terrible idea, but I'll wager they're selling like hotcakes for gifts this season. Not only do you have no control over grind size or quantity, but what happens when just one little piece of the expensive all-in-one coffee maker breaks?
  
  
• The electric blade grinder. Most everyone has one of these, but they're not great. It's impossible to get a consistent grind, especially for something like a French press, that wants it coarse; there's invariably a lot of fine dust to make the coffee more bitter. In addition, they can also produce a lot of heat during grinding, which can volatilize some of the coffee's aroma away before it even gets in the pot.
  
  
• The burr grinder. They come in electric or manual versions.⁴ Rather than a chopping propeller blade, burr grinders use a pair of interlocking gears that shear the bean into pieces that only pass through when they're small enough to fit between the gears - the grind dimension that you set. In addition, the beans are only in contact with the gears for a brief time, and so don't end up pulverized or overheated in the process.

* * * * *

¹Assuming you have a good drip brewer. Top-grade professional models - since there are plenty of sub-par ones out there - take care to get the right brew temperature, extraction time, and an even wetting of the grounds. Home models run the gamut from "not bad" to "genuinely awful".

²Coffee beans expand as they roast longer, so a dark roast takes up more volume than a medium roast. Also, if you're working by volume, you're running into the issue of how the coffee bean fragments pack and settle in the scoop. A 2-tablespoon scoop can hold anywhere from 8 to 12g of ground coffee, which is too much leeway to make a consistent cup.

³If it's still nasty, you may want to use bottled spring water. Overly hard water will prevent the coffee from properly extracting - as will distilled water - and any taints, such as chlorine, will result in funky off-flavors.

⁴Mine's a manual grinder from Zassenhaus, a German company. Sweet Maria's carries (or, well used to) a full line of their grinders, which feature smooth adjustability, enabling you to get the perfect grind, every time. The downside of a manual mill is the amount of time and effort it takes. A coarse grind for the French press is quick and easy, but a fine grind for espresso can take forever, and is probably better left to an electric version.

Coffee: Flavors.

Madison.

Coffee: because it tastes so good.

Ever wonder why coffee has such intriguingly complex flavors and aromas? Here are a few nuggets of information from Harold McGee:

"As the bean's color becomes darker than medium brown, the distinctive aromas characteristic of prized beans become overwhelmed by the more generic roasted flavors - or, conversely, the flavor of second-rate beans become less obvious."

...and...

"More than 800 aroma compounds have been identified, and they supply notes that are described as nutty, chocolate-like, cinnamon, tea, honeyed, caramel, bready, roasty, spicy, even winy and gamy.

If you're really feeling it, check out these two flavor wheels created by the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA). It's well worth noting that not all of the possible flavors are good things. Some - like, say, skunky - are hideous, hideous faults.

You can also splurge and purchase the professional coffee aroma kit, Le Nez du Cafe. It's a collection of the most typical aromas in fine coffees, as concentrated, volatile essences. You can probably imagine most of them, but it definitely helps to have a specific aroma available to jog your memory when trying to identify a specific aroma. The kit includes 36 aromas, arranged in groups that correspond to the chemical processes that produce them:

• Enzymatic
  
  • Flowery
    
    • Coffee Blossom
      
    • Tea Rose
      
    • Honeyed
    
    
  • Fruity
    
    • Lemon
      
    • Apple
      
    • Apricot
    
    
  • Herbal
    
    • Garden Peas
      
    • Potato
      
    • Cucumber
  
  
• Sugar Browning
  
  • Caramelly
    
    • Caramel
      
    • Fresh Butter
      
    • Roasted Peanuts
    
    
  • Nutty
    
    • Roasted Hazelnuts
      
    • Roasted Almonds
      
    • Walnuts
    
    
  • Chocolatey
    
    • Dark Chocolate
      
    • Vanilla
      
    • Toast
  
  
• Dry Distillation
  
  • Spicy
    
    • Pepper
      
    • Clove-like
      
    • Coriander Seed
    
    
  • Resinous
    
    • Maple Syrup
      
    • Black Currant-like
      
    • Cedar
    
    
  • Pyrolitic
    
    • Malt
      
    • Roasted Coffee
      
    • Pipe Tobacco
  
  
• Aromatic Taints¹
  
  • Earthy
    
    • Earth
      
    • Leather
      
    • Straw
    
    
  • Fermented
    
    • Coffee Pulp
      
    • Basmati Rice
      
    • Medicinal
    
    
  • Phenolic
    
    • Rubber
      
    • Cooked Beef
      
    • Smoke

* * * * *

¹Despite the fact that they're referred to as "taints", these aren't all bad things. Some, like medicinal and cooked beef aromas, lend structure to the other aromas when present in small amounts.

Brakhage.

Madison.

I've completed watching what I believe to be the most bizarre collection of film I've ever seen: By Brakhage: An Anthology, a selection of Stan Brakhage's films released on DVD by The Criterion Collection. It contains, in total, twenty-six films running 243 minutes, but it took me nearly eight hours to make it through all. Every so often - sometimes in the middle of a film - I'd have to take a break. It's intense.

Just to give a brief overview of Brakhage and his work, as I understand things:

• Brakhage's work is grounded more in poetry than cinema. Though he notes, on the DVD, that he greatly enjoys Hollywood movies, it doesn't appear that he ever made a film even remotely close to Hollywood's aesthetic. He made films, yes, but more analogous to paintings than to any sort of narrative medium.
  
  
• His early films are primarily shots of actual things, though scenes are cut up, overlaid on top of each other - up to four different reels in the case of Dog Star Man - and otherwise garbled. Later, he began painting and scratching the film itself, sometimes over exposed images, sometimes on blank or fully exposed film. In essence, he began creating films without a camera.
  
  
• Most of his films have no sound; he explains that he feels any sound would be a distraction from what's on screen. Sometimes, especially during his longer pieces, I found myself wishing there were something to listen to, but couldn't possibly imagine what would fit with the images I was watching. Some sort of hyper-frenetic John Zorn composition, maybe.
  
  
• Brakhage's films explore, in his words, "birth, sex, death, and the search for God," and he had no qualms about showing deeply disturbing images. Dog Star Man features snippets from the birth of his daughter, overlaid with solar flares and shots of the Colorado wilderness; Window Water Baby Moving is much of the same footage, no longer obscured by other imagery. Then there's The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, which the DVD prefaces with this warning:
  

  PLEASE BE ADVISED: This film consists
  entirely of footage of actual autopsies.

  It does. It's both disturbing¹ and fascinating. Like when the coroner's thumbprint leaves a dent in flesh, where a living person's body would have sprung back. Or when slicing open the skin produces no blood, just a layer of skin and subcutaneous fat that's drawn back for... whatever they're doing, exactly. With no sound, and a constant shifting from one autopsy to the next, you're left without the sort of context that might let you linger on one, specific corpse for too long. It's eerily disengaging.
  
  
• An experimental icon, Brakhage even took to taping objects to film to see what would happen. The most famous of these is Mothlight, which, like many of his hand-painted films, is as fascinating frame-by-frame as it is at 24 fps. You can see individual frames from a number of his works on Fred Camper's Brakhage website. Seeing them in this format, with frames laid out as they were during the painting process, gives another level of understanding and appreciation for the work.
  
  
• Regardless of what you think of the overall craziness of Brakhage's work - and there's craziness aplenty - it's worth noting the amount of effort and craft that went into this. When working directly on (usually 16mm) film, he could only complete one quarter- to one half-second's worth of film in a day. Some of his later works were several minutes long, representing a phenomenal amount of work for something that, until the creation of this DVD,² flitted past in a barely-recognizable instant. Some of them, particularly those in Nightmusic, are absolutely beautiful.

Suffice to say, it's a lot collected onto two DVDs. It's not the sort of thing I'd want to watch over and over again, but I'm glad to have seen it. I'm still not sure what to make of it all.

If you'd like to see an example, YouTube has a few Brakhage films. They're a little lackluster - the digital compression makes a blurry mess of the frantic eruptions of color - but it's enough to get an idea. See The Garden of Earthly Delight for a series of montane flora taped to a reel of film; The Dante Quartet is a good example of his painting technique.

And, speaking of abstract, modern art, I went to see the current exhibit at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art on Friday, Alyson Shotz: Topologies. The artist was there to discuss her work, and a group of math grad students went over to check it out. (Then we went out for drinks.)

The exhibit had good and bad. It's contemporary art, which, free from the rigorous forms and styles of traditional arts, means it's open to a wide range of interpretation. Ms. Schotz admitted this much herself, explaining that she often creates a piece, then tries to determine what it means to her. Okay. Works for me.

Except that she sometimes had extra layers of meaning that weren't apparent, which she used as the crux in understanding the work. My general thought is that if, say, you need to know that the work consists of hyperbolic paraboloids that may or may not represent the shape of the universe in order to see it as more than a pretty pile of crumpled paper, perhaps that ought to be noted beside the little plaque bearing the work's title. It's one thing to be able to seek out a deeper, multilayered, more personal appreciation of a work of art, but I'm less than thrilled by art that's intentionally obscure.

Even that I can look past, brushing it off as plain pretension, a sort of myopia imposed by focusing on one's own work all day, every day.³ But there were two specific things that dug under my skin at the exhibit.

One: Ms. Shotz admitted to having an assistant who helps put together a lot of her work; on at least one piece, she said, her assistant had done all of the work. The assistant's name was not noted anywhere.

Two: The level of craft on most of the works was shoddy, at best. Regardless of the artistic merit, several of the pieces were just... poorly made. I'd be embarrassed to have my name on a piece like Cocoon. (Detail here.) Given the delicacy and translucency of the materials used to construct it - glass beads and fresnel lenses - she chose to use staples to hold it all together. Metal staples. The sort you might use to hold together your construction paper projects in elementary school. And the Forced Bloom series, while interesting enough in concept, are examples of genuinely poor computer graphics skills.⁴

Allusion of Gravity was nice, though. Note: it's more impressive at a distance.

* * * * *

¹Not the most disturbing film I've ever seen. I've been mulling over this, and I think the award - at least, of the films I've seen - goes to The Battle of Algiers. Not Cronenberg's most visceral work, or George Romero's zombie films, or anything that looks like a movie. The Battle of Algiers looks almost like a documentary, which is why the vicious scenes of torture - brief, not bloody, but looking entirely real - turn my stomach. Even more so is the scene, just before the torture, where FLN bombs explode in the bleachers at the horse races, a place filled with wealthy French spectators. An enraged mob converges on a small Algerian boy selling concessions, beating him unconscious until the police lift him out. You don't see any of the explicit violence, as it's hidden by the bodies of the mob, but the scene is so stark and brutal that I find it extremely difficult to watch.

²As near as I can tell, the Criterion DVD is the first time Brakhage's work has been made available digitally. The greatest benefit of this is that you can step through it, frame by frame, examining each as you would a painting in a gallery. Indeed, it's very much like a collection of thousands upon thousands of unique works of abstract art.

³This is a special talent that many architects (and related designers) have, in my experience. It most often occurs when they begin to think they're designing spaces for aesthetics first, and practicality second.

⁴I refuse to send out any graphics work that looks as choppy about the edges as those pieces do. She's a professional, in a field that should have a finer attention to detail than mine.

O I Sleep.

Madison.

I've been on a serious Mogwai kick of late. Just about any day, at any time, I'd be happy putting some Mogwai on in the background, but it's been really ramped up for the past several weeks. I think a good bit of it had to do with NaNoWriMo. Their dynamic soundscapes and general atmosphere of desolation fit right in with the Western/horror mix,¹ especially without the distraction of comprehensible lyrics. Plus, I've been obsessed with their music since... '98? Before Come On Die Young, but after the Kicking A Dead Pig + Mogwai Fear Satan Remixes double-disc release.

Recently, I've particularly been enjoying listening to "My Father My King", their interpretation of a traditional Rosh Hashanah hymn, while hunting out John Zorn's Masada² stuff on YouTube. Seth's really gotten me turned on to Zorn's stuff, and though I can't pretend to like all of it - if you're making experimental music,³ some of it's going to fall flat, or just not work for some folks - I'm enjoying much more of it than I'd expected. Mogwai don't have the lively unpredictability of Zorn's free jazz-inspired work - or the maddening blur of complexity-bleeding-into-confusion that entails - but they benefit greatly from the more rigorous form and composition of their songs. Each song has an overarching wholeness, a uniting theme under which they operate. It lets them do what they do best, better than anyone else I've ever heard: explore a massive dynamic range.

You can get a good sense of this from their albums, particularly Young Team. Though, for perhaps their finest recording, try "Like Herod" from Government Commissions: BBC Sessions 1996 - 2003, which is darker and more intense than the Young Team version. "Like Herod", simply put, is their finest work.

Should you really wish to experience Mogwai's music, you need to see them live. Or get a stereo system that you can get so loud - without losing the music quality, of course - that you can feel your insides twisting and shaking.⁴ Seth and I were discussing loud music, and he commented that there were certain sensations he'd only ever heard described, never felt, until he caught a Mogwai show. There may be other bands as loud, but not many. You can't watch Mogwai play without earplugs, but part of the necessary experience is the near-painful whole-body vibrations that accompany a sudden explosion of sound.⁵ At the first show of theirs I caught,⁶ they were extraordinarily loud, to a level I've not again experienced. They were playing the TLA in Philadelphia, and hadn't yet started selling earplugs at their shows, though my friends and I had the good sense to pick some up on the way.

I clearly remember the loudest moment of the show. At one point, late into "Like Herod", the music gets about as quiet as can be, with just Stuart delicately plinking on one or two very high-pitched guitar strings. Then, without warning, both guitarists and the bassist leap into the air, landing on their effects pedals and hitting the strings at the same instant. The girl standing directly in front of me - we were maybe four or five back from the stage - clapped her hands over her ears and dropped to the ground.

Brilliant.

Since then, I've been collecting almost all of their stuff, excepting a few releases that are too difficult to find without resorting to eBay.⁷ Even their cover of Link's "Arcadian" on the Warp Records 10th Annniversary remix compilation. Technically, it's a cover, since their "remix" doesn't include a single bit of the original Link track, but it's excellent. It's a lot like Juno's cover of DJ Shadow's "High Noon", the translation of an electronic/sample track to electric guitars and drums. Best song on the Warp compilation, though? Labradford's remix of LFO's⁸ "Freeze", overlaid with a constant, piercing tone that I adore but drives everyone else I know completely batty, like fingernails on a chalkboard.

So, yes, they're good loud. But Mogwai also have a delicate and lovely side, as seen in tunes like "Christmas Song".⁹ It's from one of those songs - "O I Sleep", one with lyrics, even - that I took the name of this blog. Actually, I used it as the name of last year's NaNoWriMo effort first, and liked it enough to use it again. The song is less than a minute long, highly unusual for a band that likes to use time to build layers of music.¹⁰ The lyrics go like this:

I wanted to see
if fire would burn me
you'd think I would know
if four walls could hold me
I wanted to see
if fire would burn me

There's even a video for it on YouTube:



I'm electing not to embed them here, but also worth watching are the two videos - each beautifully animated - for "Hunted By A Freak" and "Travel Is Dangerous". The first is disturbing. The latter, animated by Monkmus, is especially gorgeous.

* * * * *

¹Think "Ex-cowboy" from Come On Die Young, for example.

²Masada's various forms include the Masada String Trio, Electric Masada, Bar Kokhba, and probably some others, but they're all variations on Zorn's explorations of what he calls "Radical Jewish Culture". It's essentially incorporating some of the forms and rules of traditional Jewish music into the avant-garde scene, and most of what I've heard is genuinely fantastic. Check Zorn's label, Tzadik, for the massive catalog of his Masada (and other) recordings.

³And John Zorn is nothing if not truly experimental. Unfortunately, sometimes it feels like a great idea... conceptually, but fails to resonate with me on the level of actually listening to the music. Like when Yamataka Eye starts shrieking. Just... not working for me. Which is a shame, because sometimes I'm really digging the rest of the music beneath it. (Like some of the Naked City craziness.)

⁴I'm entirely serious about this. The back of the Flaming Lips album Transmissions From The Satellite Heart states: "Please play all tracks at maximum volume." For them, it's a recommendation, and a funny, sort of tongue in cheek one at that; the Flaming Lips don't need loud. Mogwai's music suffers without its dynamic intensity.

⁵There is no point to watching a Mogwai concert video. As a general rule, videos of live performances are lacking. I guess it's not as ill-advised as trying to get the feeling of a Flaming Lips Boom Box Experiment from a recording, but it's close.

⁶With godspeed you black emperor!, nonetheless, who were in spectacular form. This was before they changed their name to godspeed you! black emperor, for whatever oblique reason.

⁷Like the Travels in Constants series, which you could only get by purchasing the whole series for some too-large sum. (Since I wasn't jumping for the rest of them.)

⁸Low Frequency Oscillator, the British electronica guys, not Lyte Funky Ones, the American boy band. Though a Labradford remix of boy band cheese-pop would be well worth listening to.

⁹Not to be confused with "Christmas Steps" from Come On Die Young. (Or, as it's referred to on the No Education = No Future (Fuck The Curfew) EP,^a "Xmas Steps".) "Christmas Song": Soft, pretty, delicate. "Christmas Steps": Best played so loud that the walls shake.

^aThe EP takes its name from a youth curfew that was imposed in Glasgow to address kids getting into trouble. The band, with a number of others, protested the action, arguing that providing education opportunities for kids was a more appropriate solution, whereas a curfew would do little but punish (and upset) the vast majority of innocent kids. I have the non-recalled version, which features "Xmas Steps", "Rollerball", and "Small Children In The Background". "Small Children..." replaces the original version of "Helps Both Ways", which later appeared, modified, on Come On Die Young.

The original version - which is superior to the one eventually released - featured the music overlaid with an excerpt of John Madden's football commentary, which it matched eerily well. Madden, however, refused to give permission to release it, so the EP had to be recalled, and the track replaced with the intense, static-filled soundscape that is "Small Children...". They kept the title, though, which comes from Madden's last words on the track: "...you know, it really helps both ways."

¹⁰"Like Herod": 11:44. "Mogwai Fear Satan": 16:18. "Ex-cowboy": 9:09. "Christmas Steps": 10:39. "My Father My King": 20:12.