A little more than a week ago Dave Arnold posted a great, new technique: pressure infusion using a conventional iSi whipper! Just think of it – the whipper has been around for decades, and years a go Ferran Adrià pioneered it’s use for espumas. Several have suggested it’s use for carbonation of fruit. But no one had thought of utilizing the whipper for infusions – until August 11th when Dave Arnold of Cooking issues posted the results of his experiments in “Infusion Profusion: Game-Changing Fast ‘N Cheap Technique”. The first blogger to pick up the technique and post about it on August 12th was Linda of playing with fire and water who termed it a revolutionary technique. A couple of days later, on August 17th Aki and Alex of Ideas in food posted a combined pressurized infusion of basil and marination of mozzarella. And then on August 20th James of Jim Seven describes his results comparing conventional cold brewed coffee to cold pressure brewed coffee. It’s really fascinating how fast the idea spread, and it illustrates the benefits of an open and sharing approach to food innovations.

The science behind this is quite simple: in the pressurized canister nitrous oxide (N₂O) dissolves and penetrates the food. When the pressures is suddently released (and it is important to release pressure as fast as possible) the sudden pressure drop causes the dissolved gas to nucleate and form bubbles which expand and disrupt cells, thereby releasing flavor compounds. The physical phenomenon is known as cavitation.

A single N₂O charger contains 8 g of gas corresponding to 0.1818 moles or a volume of 4.1 L at 25 °C and 1 atm pressure. The volume of the chargers is 0.01 L which gives an impressive initial pressure in the chargers of 445 atm! With an approximate volume of 0.7 L the pressure in an empty whipper charged with a single charge would be nearly 6 atm. When liquids are added the volume decreases, but the effect on the head pressure will depend on the type of liquid added. The solubility of N₂O in water is 0.15 g/100 mL at 15 °C, meaning that with 100 mL of water, the head pressure would be roughly 10% higher than in an empty canister (that is, if the solubility is independent of pressure – I’m not quite sure about this). However, since N₂O is a rather non-polar molecule the solubility in ethanol or even oils is much greater than in water, with a resulting lower head pressure. But since flavor delivery is mediated by the dissolved gas suddenly nucleating and bursting cell structures, infusions using ethanol or oil will actually be more effective than those with water because more gas can be dissolved in these solvents (besides the fact that ethanol and oil are better solvents for flavors than water).

Thinking about how I could utilize the pressure infusion technique I came to think about the problems I ran into with hay like off flavors in the parsley and banana flavored marshmallows I made for TGRWT #2. The off flavors can be traced back to 3-methyl-2,4-nonanedione which likely stems from oxidation of unsaturated fatty acids or polyenes. Crushing parsley inevitably leads to oxidation (possibly also enhanced by mixing intra and extra cellular comounds/enzymes), but with pressure infusion – practically in the absence of air – seems to be much gentler than crushing according to Dave’s initial report (as judged by color). So I did a quick experiment with this, infusing a couple of sprigs in 2 dL of water for about 2 minutes. This was by no means enough, and the water had only a faint aroma of parsley (vodka would of course have been much better for the flavor extraction). But it was a clean parsley aroma, and the water was perfectly clear.

Cheeseburger in hydrochloric acid

Do ice cubes made with heavy water float or sink?

Exotic ways to cut through butter

Spectacular ways of destroying pumpkins for Halloween

Tea chemistry

See Martyn Poliakoff boil an egg

(Martyn mentions that the yellow color of egg yolks is due to a sulfur containing compound, but I’m not really convinced he’s right about that. The yellow color is mainly due to a group of chemical compounds called xanthophylls which have long conjugated double bond systems that absorb light. And BTW – if you want to dissolve the egg shell in your own kitchen: skip the hydrochloric acid and use vinegar instead.)

Baking a cake in the lab with akward equipment…

… and then figuring out what to do with the cake
(it wasn’t eaten since it was made in a chemical lab)

Mirror images: Carraway and spearmint

Fun chemistry with Crispy creme eggs

Chocolate and roses for Valentines day

As the name suggests, the TGIF posts are a little less serious than what I otherwise post here at Khymos. I hope you enjoy it

The website to accompany Modernist cuisine is up now. It showcases stunning pictures and example pages, the complete table of contents available in pdf format, details on the exceptional printing quality (stochastic screening and wide gamut inks in case you wondered…) as well as introductions to each volume: History and fundamentals, Techniques and equipment, Animals and plants, Ingredients and preparations, Plated dish recipes – and each page of these pages has additional pictures. It turns out that in addition to the five main volumes there is a 350 page spiral-bound kitchen manual printed on waterproof, tear-resistant synthetic paper (!) with condensed versions of the recipes. And their FAQ page let me know that the complete word count is 650,000. I’ve been looking forward to these books for quite some time, but seeing the pictures just got me to start counting down the days left until December 1st.

The covers shown below give you an idea of what to expect from the photographs throughout the books. On the website many more example pictures confirm that they have indeed paid an extreme attention to not only documenting the work of a 20+ team, but to also do it in a very beautiful, clean, appealing and artistic manner as well. So all in all these books will combine food, science, technology and superb photographs. What more could we wish for?

Not that it matters, but I noticed that on their “buy” page the cover for volumes 1 and 2 look slightly different from those listed on the press page:

I recently stumbled over “Norwegian egg coffee”. At first I thought it was a joke, but it turned out that this is indeed an “egg coffee” – coffee prepared with an egg! I have never heard about it here in Norway, but the fact that it’s popular among Americans of Scandinavian origin in the Midwest suggests that it could be something immigrants brought with them from Norway (feel free to fill me out on the historic origins of this!). I mentioned egg coffee to my mom, and although she had never heard of it before, she did mention that skin or swim bladders from fish were used when boiling coffee to help clearify it. In fact the Norwegian name for this – klareskinn – literally means “clearing skin”. The English name is isinglass (thank’s Rob!). Could it be that the fish skin originally used was replaced by eggs, perhaps due to a limited availability of fish in the Midwest? After all, both are good protein sources.


Egg coffee is amber colored and you can clearly see some precipitate from the egg-coffe mixture. If serving the coffee warm it seems to be difficult to totally avoid the precipitate unless you filter the finished coffee through a cheese cloth or filter paper. The coffee in this picture has not been filtered yet.

When looking into the chemistry behind this it isn’t as strange as it may sound. Fish skin as well as eggs contain proteins. The addition of proteins while preparing the coffee serves two purposes: 1) it helps the coffee grounds to flocculate, allowing them to sink faster to the bottom of the pot (this effect is probably more pronounced when using eggs) and 2) the proteins bind irreversibly to astringent and bitter tasting polyphenols in coffee to form insoluble complexes that will precipitate. The end result is a clearer coffee with a pleasant and mild taste. The bitterness is only barely noticeable, but the coffee still has enough “body” so it doesn’t feel too thin!

Norwegian egg coffee
80 g coarsly ground coffee (rouhgly 200 mL)
1 egg
100 mL cold water
2.5 L boiling water
250 mL cold water

Mix coffee with an egg and 100 mL cold water to a thick paste. Add this mixture to the boiling water, stir carefully and leave to boil for 2-3 min. Remove pot from stove and add the remaining cold water. Let the grounds settle for a couple of minutes, skim off any floating particles, filter through a fine meshed sieve, a cheese cloth or filter paper and serve.

The first time I made this I stirred quite a bit to break up the big lumps. But I was curious whether stirring had any influence on the amount of fine particles, so I repeated the whole process with as little stirring as possible. The lumps of ground coffee where significantly larger, but I couldn’t really see a difference on the prepared coffee. There was however a small difference when looking at the glasses from below (see picture below). My conclusion so far is that there is not a big difference, and that it’s OK to stir a little at the start to break up the biggest lumps. This will also allow a more complete extraction of the ground coffee.

Difference between much (left) and little (right) stirring as the coffee boils as seen from the precipitate at the bottom of a glass of egg coffee.

The addition of the cold water helps formation and settling of the precipitate. Home brewers talk about a “cold break” when they cool wort rapidly in order to precipitate proteins which have been extracted from the malt. And while we’re talking about beer chill haze also comes to my mind. This is the cloudiness that occurs upon cooling beer, and again it’s caused by precipitation of protein-polyphenol complexes. The effect of adding only 10% cold water to the still hot egg coffee is of course limited, and won’t really be enough to give a “cold break”. But since egg coffee has a pleasant taste even when cold, I have decided to cool a whole pot of egg coffee before filtering it. I may post more on how this turns out later, but initial tasting suggests that it’s going to be a very nice iced coffee!

The interesting thing about the protein-polyphenol complexes is that we also encounter them when drinking wine (a quick reminder here that polyphenols is a group of compounds which includes tannins). There’s a nice experiment you can do to illustrate this which has been published on Khymos previously. When we drink red wine, the tannins react with proteins in our saliva to form water insoluble protein-tannin complexes. A precipitate is formed and as a result, the lubricating properties of the saliva are lost and our tongue feels rough and dry. In other words, we experience the astringency of the red wine. To ilustrate this, try the following (I was first introduced to this experiment at the 2004 International workshop of molecular gastronomy in Erice):

Take a sip of a dry red wine, preferably rich in tannin. Keep the wine in your mouth for 10-20 seconds without swallowing. Spit it into an empty glass and watch how a precipitate forms (this might take a minute or two). Notice how the color changes from red to light red or even pink (see picture below). Rinse your mouth by chewing a piece of bread and drink some water. Take a small sip of the wine that you just spat out (if you dare!). Since the tannins of this wine have already reacted with your saliva, it is as if they were removed from the wine, leaving a fad and flat wine without much taste at all.

Top: red wine. Bottom: formation of precipitate in red wine mixed with saliva.

The saliva flow rate and the concentration of proteins varies from person to person (the latter with a factor of 20). Furthermore the flow rate and protein concentration also varies throughout the day and is also influenced by what you are eating/drinking and even by the smell of food. As a consequence, a person with a high saliva flow rate and/or a high concentration of proteins is more likely to approve of a red wine rich in tannins than someone with a low saliva flow and a lower protein concentration. Knowing this, you should not be surprised that wine preferences can be very individual.

Sous Vide for the home cook (already available)
by Douglas Baldwin

Long time followers of Khymos will remember Douglas Baldwin whom I interviewed in 2009. Furthermore he is the author of the perhaps best paper on sous vide cooking to appear so far. The present book Sous Vide for the home cook has been written specially for the company Eades (who makes the SousVide Supreme temperature controlled water bath – the first mass produced integrated sous vide solution targetet at the consumer market!), but the book is so general that it can be used with whatever sous vide setup you have, be it an expensive immersion circulator or a cheap beer cooler. Douglas let me read through one of the drafts to the book, and this is really the book to chose if you’re not interested in the science of sous vide. It’s got many recipes (although many of the sous vides recipes are duplicated by addition of many different sauces), but there were no pictures in early drafts that I saw.

Everything But Espresso: Professional Coffee Brewing Techniques (already available)
by Scott Rao

A while ago I picked up Scott Rao’s espresso handbook The Professional Barista’s Handbook: An Expert Guide to Preparing Espresso, Coffee, and Tea. This book explains everything you want to know about brewing espressos and steaming milk in text as well as excellent full color pictures (and the book even has chapters on drip coffee, French press and tea brewing as well). Together with Espresso Coffee: Professional Techniques by David Schomer these are the reference books on espresso brewing. It was therefore great to see that Scott Rao has recently written a book which is devoted to all the non-espresso coffee brewing techniques out there such as manual and automatic drip coffee, French press, steep & release and vacuum pot/siphon. There are also chapters on bean storage, grinding as well as some basic water chemistry.

Coffee with Tim Wendelboe
by Tim Wendelboe

While writing about coffee books there’s no way around Tim Wendelboe’s book on coffee which finally is available in English. I must admit that I have only leafed through the Norwegian version of the book and it’s certainly on my wish list. The book is intended for a broad coffee loving audience – no knowledge of science is required! Tim Wendelboe is a Norwegian coffee pioneer and award winning barista, and it was great fun visiting his shop to do the tests with salt and coffee. As of now it seems that the book is only available from Wendelboe’s webshop.

In Search of Total Perfection (already available)
by Heston Blumenthal

This is a soft cover book combining Heston Blumenthal’s previous books In Search of Perfection and Further Adventures in Search of Perfection: Reinventing Kitchen Classics. If you own these, don’t get this book – if not, this new book is cheaper than bying the books separately. The dishes that Heston investigates in great detail are: fish and chips, roast chicken, spaghetti bolognese, steak and salad, pizza, sausages and mashed potatoes, black forest cake, treacle tart and ice cream, trifle, baked Alaska, fish pie, hamburger, Peking duck, chicken tikka masala, risotto and chilli con carne. Each dish was also featured in the BBC series that came along with the books (or was it the other way around?). To get an idea of the style and detail level, check out video clips from the series over at Youtube.

Heston Blumenthal: The Biography of the World’s Most Brilliant Master Chef (available)
by Chas Newkey-Burden

The first part of The Big Fat Duck Cookbook retraces the beginnings of the restaurant and is in a sense autobiographical, but here’s the full story of Heston Blumenthal – a self-taught chef who turned the world of gastronomy and high end cooking on its head.

Cooking Sous Vide: A guide for the Home Cook (available)
by Jason Logsdon

The author is the co-founder and main contributor to the website Cooking sous vide which has become a relatively large collection of sous vide related articles. There is also a blog where Jason keeps track of developments related to equipment and other sous vide information on the web. If you’re totally new to sous vide the book could be a good place to start, although I’d recommend you to take a look at what’s available on the website first.

Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food (to appear August 3rd)
by Jeff Potter

Don’t let the tongue-in-cheek title make you skip this book. It covers kitchen gadgets, hydrocolloids, sous vide, protein denaturation, Maillard reactions and caramelization – too name a few. But what makes this book different from the rest is it’s style and language (ever heard about overclocking an oven to make it hot enough for pizza?) as well as the personal approach with a number of interviews with food experts including Hervé This and Harold McGee. And guess what – there’s even an interview with me in the book (even though I definitely don’t belong in the same food expert category as This and McGee…). You can find more information on the Cooking for geeks web site.

Heston’s Fantastical Feasts (to appear September 28th)
by Heston Blumenthal

In a British television series in 2009 Heston Blumenthal set of to prepare six feasts inspired by history, literature and legend: a Willy Wonka Feast, a Fairy Tale Feast, an Edwardian Feast, a Gothic Feast, a ’70s Feast, and a Feast of the Future. From the publisher: “Delving deep into the world of each dish, Blumenthal creates poison apples, transforms pumpkins into carriages, and builds Edwardian gingerbread houses with sugar windows. Scouring Italy for rare mushrooms and Switzerland for wild boar, he records the journeys and inspiration behind each meal, laying it all out in grandly illustrated detail. Witness his delectable riffs on Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham and Roald Dahl’s Lickable Wallpaper, and even try the recipe if you dare.”

NOMA (to appear October 6th)
by Réne Redzepi

The restaurant Noma was founded by Réne Redzepi and Claus Meyer, and was voted Best restaurant in the world by Restaurant magazine in 2010. This alone should probably be a good enough reason to get the book, but there’s more: Claus Meyer was appointed adjunct professor of molecular gastronomy at The Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University of Copenhagen in 2006 (today part of University of Copenhagen). Back in 2004 he established a molecular gastronomy study group in cooperation with Thorvald Pedersen, a Danish chemist and life long food chemistry/molecular gastronomy enthusiast. And he still works together with the Danish scientists who recently co-authored a major review on molecular gastronomy with Peter Barham. Even though NOMA is authored by Réne Redzepi alone, I find his cooperation with Claus Meyer and the link to molecular gastronomy and the Danish scientists quite interesting.

Keys to Good Cooking: A Guide to Making the Best of Foods and Recipes (to appear October 28th)
by Harold McGee

In a mini Q&A with NY Times in 2008 Harold McGee said the following about this book: “I’ve heard from many cooks that while they value the scope and depth of “On Food & Cooking,” when they need practical help with a specific technique or ingredient it’s often hard for them to locate the information. So my next book will be nothing but practical information and directions, concise and brief.”

Modernist Cuisine (to appear December 1st)
by Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young and Maxime Bilet

With 2200 pages spanning 5 volumes this will be the reference work on modern cooking for years to come. Nathan Myhrvold has had a team of 20+ people working in his labs. Watch this 26 min video of the labs to get an impression of the work they’re been doing there. I’ve the book previously here and here.

Ideas in Food: Great Recipes and Why They Work (to appear December 28th)
by Aki Kamozawa and Alexander H. Talbot

The food blogging couple Aki Kamozawa and Alexander H. Talbot have taken the step into the printed world. Through their blog they have taken a tremendously open and sharing approach, blogging about their ideas, inspiration and creativity – even long before they turn into specific dishes. And always accompanied by very nice photos. Not much information is available about the book yet, but I will update as soon as I find more. The title suggests that it’s style may be a bit similar to Hervé This’ book Révelations gastronomiques (no English translation yet that I’m aware of, but it’s available in German as Kulinarische Geheimnisse – it’s basically a compilation of 55 recipes with scientific explanations inbetween the recipe directions).

So to sum it up, the list of interesting books for 2010 is as follows:

Sous Vide for the home cook
Everything But Espresso: Professional Coffee Brewing Techniques
Coffee with Tim Wendelboe
In Search of Total Perfection
Heston Blumenthal: The Biography of the World’s Most Brilliant Master Chef
Cooking Sous Vide: A guide for the Home Cook
Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food (to appear August 3rd)
Heston’s Fantastical Feasts (to appear September 28th)
NOMA (to appear October 6th)
Keys to Good Cooking: A Guide to Making the Best of Foods and Recipes (to appear October 28th)
Modernist Cuisine (to appear December 1st)
Ideas in Food: Great Recipes and Why They Work (to appear December 28th)

Any books I forgot to mention? I will update the list as new books appear.

Harold McGee, author of the seminal On food and cooking: The science and lore of the kitchen (which is one of my favorite non-recipe books for the kitchen) has done it again! The book Keys to Good Cooking: A Guide to Making the Best of Foods and Recipes is to appear in October, but is already available for pre-order as I write. The book is one step closer to the kitchen and the actual cooking than On food and cooking. In a mini Q&A with NY Times in 2008 Harold McGee said the following:

“I’ve heard from many cooks that while they value the scope and depth of “On Food & Cooking,” when they need practical help with a specific technique or ingredient it’s often hard for them to locate the information. So my next book will be nothing but practical information and directions, concise and brief.”

I think it’s fair to say that Harold McGee, more than any other person I know of, has been very successful at distilling scientific work into a very readable and accessible form. He did this back in 1984 with the first edition of On food and cooking, and then again in 2004 with a more or less rewritten edition in 2004. A complete book with practical information rooted in science can easily become the single most useful book in your kitchen!

In Asia it is not uncommon to eat fruit with salt or even soy sauce. From my own experience, and via friends, I known that fruits such as mango, guava, honey dew melon, watermelon, nashi pears and papaya are eaten with salt. Interestingly salt is used both for ripe and unripe fruit – the latter is especially the case for mango and guava. With unripe fruit I can imagine that the primary motivation is reduction of bitterness. I’ve previously blogged about salt and coffee and how salt in tonic water reduces bitterness – the mechanisms are the same. In addition to the bitterness suppression low concentrations of salt will enhance sweet taste. [1] This would certainly be an advantage in unripe fruit. In ripe fruit there is hardly any bitterness left (or at least I presume that is the case), so here the salt may serve a different funtion. Could it be to balance the sweet taste and give a more savory and complex flavor? Perhaps it could also be explained as increased sensing by contrast amplification?


Nashi pears (Asian pears) are delicious when served in a bowl of salty water!

One particular combination of fruit and salt that I remember from growing up in Taiwan is eating slightly unripe guavas with a beige powder. We would either sprinkle the powder onto the fruit or simply lick it from our hand. The powder had a savory flavor and was a little salty. I can’t remember the name, but from a couple of google searches I’m quite sure that it was a dried plum powder – li hing mui (or just li hing). I see that it’s available from several sellers on Amazon (In fact I just ordered a pack from Hawaii – if it’s the same I used to eat with guavas as a child it will bring back a lot of memories when it arrives!). I found a couple of blogs showing guava with plum powder and masala salt which suggests that there are probably several spice powders used together with guava. The Wikipedia entry on guavas also mentions them being eaten with soy sauce and vinegar (occasionally with sugar and black pepper) on Hawaii, and with a pinch of salt and cayenne powder/masala in Pakistan and India.

Guavas taste even better with a salty/savory dip! For the picture I combined ground star anis with salt and sugar.

As I started to search for combinations of fruit and salt I was overwhelmed by all the different combinations I found. Salt (and other salty food items) are often mixed with other ingredients such as chili or lime. Here’s a small selection of what I found in no particular order:

salt + sugar + chili (Prik-kab-klua)
salt + sugar + chili + lime (Muối ớt)
salt + chili sauce
salt + masala
salt + cayenne
soy sauce
soy sauce + vinegar (+ salt/pepper)
fish sauce
fish sauce + sugar + chili
fish sauce + black pepper
tajin = salt + chili + lime juice
kiam-muy-hoon/kiamuy
li hing mui (dried plum powder)
dried plum powder + sugar
bagoong (salted shrimp paste)
prosciutto
…

One of the few many salt + fruit combinations that has made it to Europe: prosciutto ham with honey dew melon (and some drops of balsamico syrup)

Other more specific fruit/salt/savory combinations I found were:

bananas and guavas with salt and fresh pepper (served in India)
chili salt with fruits such as Granny Smith apples, plums or oranges.
peaches with chili/lime/salt
pomelos with salt and red chillis
Hawiian margarita with Ling Hi Mui powder
…

It seems that eating fruit with salt is far more common in warm countries where an additional intake of salt is recommended due to perspiration. (Update: Lisa comments on her Swedish blog that it could be due to the fact that there are more supertasters in Asia – they are more sensitive to bitterness, hence the additional use of salt) And I admit that my craving for salt does increase when it’s warm. But there is more to this than physiology – the few combinations I have tried are indeed mouth watering – even when tested in cold Norway. And thinking about it, it is really fascinating how plain table salt – one of the simplest (chemically speaking) ingredients we have in the kitchen – has such a repertoire in combination with fruit. There is certainly a lot to try out in the kitchen now – and perhaps some inspiration from Asia for chefs as well?

If you know about or have tasted other fruit + salt combinations, please leave a comment in the section below

Reference:
[1] Keast, R. S. J.; Bresling, P. A. S. “An overview of binary taste-taste interactions” Food Quality and Preference 2002 (14), 111.

When I wrote about Nathan Myhrvold’s book project in November he estimated the book to reach 1500 pages. But what originally started out as a 300-page book on sous vide has now, with the help of a 20-person team, grown to a total of 2200 pages spanning five volumes! Need I say more? Finally the long wait is over: The Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking is now available for pre-order at Amazon, and the expected release date is December 1st. One could almost be afraid that there will not be anything more to blog about here at Khymos as everything will be covered in Modernist Cuisine (but I know better – every previous talk about “end of science” has turned out to be more a starting point than a final destination)

Ferran Adrià says that “This book will change the way we understand the kitchen”, and according to Heston Blumenthal it’s “A fascinating overview of the techniques of modern gastronomy”. And if that’s not enough – take a look at this 26 minute video which guides you through the almost endless amount of high-tech equipment Nathan Myhrvold and his team have available. Oh boy, oh boy!

Other links:
The lecture “Cooking in Silico: Understanding heat transfer in the modern kitchen” by Nathan Myhrvold and Chris Young is available for streaming/download from University of Washington.

I have spent lazy summer days in a “Sommerhus” (e.g. “summer house”) in Denmark with my family and one thing I will share with you is the coffee I enjoyed every morning. My wife doesn’t drink black coffee, so to keep things as simple and easy as possible I brought my Aeropress and a glass of preground coffee (for obvious reasons I decided not to bring my coffee grinder, but I did use a nice coffee from Tim Wendelboe though). At home I have enough equipment to prepare coffee in a dozen ways, but none are as simple and fast as the Aeropress (well – maybe except for Nescafe, but does that count?). I would even dare to say that no other method of preparing coffee offers a better quality-price-convenience ratio!

Although it’s simple, you can still vary grind, amount of water, water temperature and extraction time, so there are plenty of possibilities for experimentation. And believe it or not – there is even an Aeropress world championship. That should give you an idea of how much variation is actually possible!

Using two measuring spoons and the suggested 30-40 second brew time gives a somewhat overdosed and underextracted coffee according to my taste (i.e. a lot of “coffee” aroma, but too little bitterness and a little flat tastewise). This of course also depends a lot on the density of the coffee – and here we’re back to why volume measurements are quite useless for dosing powders. After some experimentation however I’ve ended up with a dose around 15-20 g (ground at setting 40 on my Rancilio Rocky) and extraction times in the range 40-90 seconds. But these conditions are not carved in stone – I keep adjusting them as I get different coffees, and also enjoy how my coffee tastes a bit different every morning. You can get further input on the Aeropress recipes from previous AWC competitors.

Apart from the nice coffee, the best thing about this coffee maker is that it’s very easy to clean. Because of that it’s also the ideal coffee maker to use in the office or at work (in case there’s no good coffee available there). Here are some pictures to illustrate preparation of a cup of coffee and cleaning of the Aeropress:

Areopress upside down on countertop, loaded with coarsly ground coffee (I dialed my Rocky to around 40).

The advantage of the “inverted” method is that no coffee starts to drip before you want it to.

I stir to make sure all the coffee is properly wetted. I then screw on the filter holder with a filter paper inserted (not shown here). Also note that I fill it up all the way with water, and I usually use freshly boiled water. Some prefer to use less water and temperatures anywhere between 75-95 °C.

Oooops – not a perfect fit with the mugs in the summer house, but this did in no way affect the taste of the coffee With the mugs/cups I use at home there’s no problem. After extraction I top of the cup with hot water.

After the filter holder is unscrewed, pressing the plunger the last few millimeters makes the filterpaper and the filtercake pop out of the cylinder. You would of course normally just pop this directly into your waste bin, not on a clean plate as in the picture …

Quickly rinse your Aeropress under running water – and you’re done!

In my everday cooking sage is really underutilized. The only dish I can think of with sage that I’ve prepared during the last couple of years is potato gnocchi. So this was indeed the most likely candidate for experimentation in this month’s TGRWT #21. Potato gnocchi are one of those dishes that I suddenly feel a craving for, and I make it every now and then. When I get things right the gnocchi have a very light texture which fits nice with the melted butter and cheese. This time I decided to incorporate the peanuts into the gnocchi and apart from that stick to the original recipe.

While cooking I tried to chew some peanuts with a sage leaf, and this was a quite remarkable experience. The roasted peanut flavors blended into the sage, and the sensation was stronger than what is usually the case from the previous TGRWT rounds. When tasting sage by itself it will actually remind me of peanuts and vice versa. The last time I had a similar strong sensation was when combining roasted cauliflower with a cocoa agar gel.


I used a mini-food processor to grind the peanutes to a coarse powder.

Gnocchi with peanuts and sage
1 kg mealy/floury potatoes
100 g roasted peanuts
50 g butter
1 egg
250-300 g flour
1 t salt

For serving:
melted butter
chopped sage
grated parmesan
black pepper

Grind peanuts to coarse powder. Boil (or bake) potatoes (preferably unpeeled) until soft. Drain. While the potatoes are still hot, peel them and mash them. Add peanuts, butter, salt, egg and about half of the flour. Mix. Slowly add more flour until you get a soft and slightly sticky dough. Use as little flour as possible, but remember that with less flour the gnocchi are more prone to fall apoart (the added egg helps bind the gnocchi together by the way). Make a roll, approximately 2.5 cm in diameter and cut 1.5 cm pieces. Press against the back of a fork for the characteristic pattern, and place the gnocchi on a towel sprinkled with flour or semolina. Bring a large pot of salted water to a slow boil (is the salt really necessary here?) and cook the gnocchi for 2-3 minutes, or until they float to the surface. Remove from the water and drain. Serve with melted butter, chopped sage and plenty of grated parmesan and ground black pepper.

Gnocchi ready to be cooked. Use too much flour in the dough and you get boiled lumps of flour. Use too little flour and your gnocchi will fall apart.

Verdict: The amount of peanuts used gave a noticeable, yet mild nutty flavor which actually fitted the gnocchi quite nice (for future gnocchi attempts I can imagine even trying other nuts as well, such as hazelnuts or walnuts). The sage works very well as an aromatic and fresh component together with the more “heavy” flavors of potato, butter and parmesan. And frankly, I must say that the gnocchi were a success! I’ll make a note in the cook book that adding 100 g of peanuts works nice so I won’t forget the next time I make potato gnocchi.

A quick search over at The good scents company reveals that the butyraldehyde occurs naturally in both sage and roasted peanuts. But as I’ve pointed out several times previously – as long as we don’t know the impact odorants it’s impossible to tell whether this is the compound that ties sage and roasted peanuts together or not. If you’ve done litterature searches for impact odorants of roasted peanuts and sage, please tell me about it in the comments