Saturday, May 22, 2010

The turbo broiler did not work as well as I had hoped.
Bag of Grade 1 Sulawesi Toraja green coffee

Roasted beans waiting to be packed.

Coffee Roasting

It was inevitable. The ideal companion to a good loaf of bread is a cup of good coffee. I have been able to source for good Columbian and Brazillian coffee from an old man in a HDB market. However, my last purchase from him disappointed me. I have to thank him instead because it led me to roasting my own beans. This was a project that has been on my mind all this while but then, green coffee beans are not exactly easy to find unless you are willing to buy hundreds of kilos of the stuff.

However, I managed to get samples of my favorite Mandheling and Toraja coffee recently. My first attempt was in my bread oven. Although the coffee that came out was good, I did not want to see another blizzard of coffee chaff whipping up in the oven chamber ever again. I had thought that a turbo broiler would have been an ideal substitute but to my horror, the highest temperature that it could go up to was 230C, not the 250C on the dial. Now that I am saddled with another red elephant, I decided to bake a bread with it. It turned out pretty good. I am convinced that it is possible to bake good bread with fairly basic equipment. You just need to know how dough behaves.

Since the turbo broiler was out, I had to resort to another basic equipment for roasting my coffee. It turned out better than I had expected. I under-roasted my first batch of Toraja but the subsequent batches made great coffee without the excess acidity of under roasted beans. This morning, I made 2 extra batches for my friends who are fellow coffee lovers.

2 comments:

tomsbread said...

Hi LT,

Please contact me at tomsbread@gmail.com

Tom

Z said...

Hi, where do you buy your green coffee from?

I'm a coffee enthusiast in Singapore too!

maybe you can get in contact via email, icecoldmilo[at]gmail[dot]com

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