coffee

[cellio]

Dear LJ Brain Trust,

We recently received a Keurig coffee maker as a gift. This is one of those gizmos that takes individual packets for making coffee (or tea or cocoa). Pour in water, put in individual packet, push the button, and out comes a cup of hot drink a couple minutes later. As the pitch goes, if you and your spouse like very different things, this gadget's for you.

To my surprise, I have found a coffee-based drink that was actually pleasant. This is a first, so I turn to you, o brain trust, to guide my further explorations. Because while this was fine, it isn't exactly healthy. Also, I'd kind of like to know about non-dairy options (for meat meals), assuming any exist that I'd like. For this experiment I started with Dani's mantra that coffee is a good source of calcium.

What worked: a French vanilla packet turned into 8oz of coffee (the gadget supports 6-10), about 4oz (!) of half-and-half (didn't have cream in the house), and about two heaping tableteaspoons of sugar (ack). These were added incrementally, alternating half-and-half and sugar in small quantities until it tasted good. So possibly a better answer is more milk product/no sugar, and I don't know how cream versus half-and-half will play out. There is also the question of other coffee bases to try, particularly if I can find them in variety packs or something so I'm not committing to a whole box of something we turn out not to like. I am categorically uninterested in decaffeinated coffees (defeats the purpose of coffee for me).

For calibration, I also like most black teas. For a "regular" tea I default to English breakfast. I do not care for Early Grey but Lady Grey is ok. I like most strongly-flavored or spiced teas, so my instinct is to look for coffees with some flavor additive. (This is why I gravitated to the French vanilla, and I have my eye on the hazelnut packet.) I think what this all means is that I don't like bitter flavors. What does that imply about coffee roast types? I see a variety of descriptors in that space but I don't know what they tend to mean for flavor. And how should I be thinking about the trade-off between stronger coffee flavors and brew strength?

Comments

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I was thinking Ethiopian, so that's seconded.

If you like the vanilla flavour, you could try using vanilla sugar (keep a vanilla pod in your sugar jar) - ah, but is the high sugar content one of the things you're trying to finesse. There are parts of the world where cardamom is a traditional flavouring (bash a cardamom pod to release the seeds, throw the whole thing into your cup, don't try to swallow it) and might work for you...

[cellio]

I hadn't heard of vanilla sugar before -- interesting. I do want to get the sugar content down, though. On the other hand, something like this could add an interesting dimension for other uses of sugar (e.g. sprinkled on fruit).

[spiritdancer]

For vanilla sugar, a pretty good ratio is one vanilla bean per 2 to 4 cups of sugar (I used 2 cups of sugar, since that was the jar size I had handy). I split a bean, scraped the seeds out & mixed into the sugar, then I tossed to bean skin into the jar as well. I plan to pull the skin out when I'm using the sugar.

You definitely want to use a good quality vanilla bean (I had some on hand from Penzey's). Dried out vanilla beans are no fun to work with :)

[cellio]

Thanks. I've never bought vanilla beans before, but we have a Penzey's here so it sounds like that can be fixed.