I am going to take this opportunity to share the chili oil that is so good that I'm sure I could never make it: the most delicious chili oil made with sesame oil from the best sesame oil producer.
Yamada Seiyu Goma ra-yu (spicy sesame oil)
Ingredients are: sesame oil, red pepper, spring onion, ginger, sansho (zanthoxylum piperitum), cinnamon, star anise, mikan tangerine skin
Although it's not on the Nijiya Market website, it can often be found there, mixed in amongst the lesser sesame chili oils. It's a favorite gift of mine to give, and nearly everyone who receives it mentions later to me how much they enjoyed it.
My "recipe" is simply caiziyou and erjingtiao, hot flash method, and it works well enough.
One thing the author misses about the oil choice: what makes caiziyou superior to other oil choices is that it has a high viscosity. That results in the chili oil sticking to food and the tongue better once used; it probably also affects the fluid dynamics of the frying step in a way, though I can't say if it's significant.
With regard to the health risks many comments note, I wonder how many natural (collaborative, so to speak) ingredient mixes might contribute to positive food safety despite the known threats.
For example, I had a roommate who would cook salmon in a tomato sauce and leave it to sit overnight. From my background, this sounded like obvious death, but he assured me it was a common recipe in South Africa. I did try it, and it was delicious. I had no adverse reactions after eating it (a full day after it was cooked and left sitting in the pan).
Why would this concern you more than anything else? If you cook the fish, it's not going to "go bad" as quickly as if it were raw. If you cook anything to a particular temperature and time, it should kill most bacteria in it. Then the acidity of the tomato should help resist bacterial growth a wee bit longer than something pH-neutral. On top of all this, "obvious death" from bacteria in food is some serious hyperbole; it's quite rare to die of food poisoning.
I’d go so far as to say it’s virtually unheard of for healthy adults to die of food poisoning from cooked food going bad*. It’s mostly children, the elderly, and the immunocompromised that are at risk. The fast majority of microbes that cause food born illness are really common in our environments and we’ve built up plenty of immunity.
* fecal contamination and other toxins like paralytic shellfish poisoning are another matter
Death would be unlikely, but food poisoning from cooked food is pretty common. You'll just vomit for half the day. Which while being a long way from death, is still very unpleasant.
You'd have to add controls before making that statement. Unsafe food practices by definition will raise your likelihood of getting sick from cooked food. Most people don't leave cooked fish sitting on the counter overnight, therefore getting sick from cooked fish is going to be relatively uncommon.
Damn, I didn't realize I screwed up that message.
It was supposed to be
"Isn't bacillus cereus (the culprit in that case) the microbe associated with 'fried rice syndrome'? It seems to be pretty nasty, but also easily avoidable."
Some fish curries from kerala can be left outside for days and the flavor is supposed to improve. The curries have high heat and acidity, so it makes sense it doesn't go bad.
Cookbooks with these kinds of recipes surely exist, but I wonder if there are any recipe books that focus first on special ingredient and preparation combinations that result in safety/preservation benefits beyond just good taste.
Yeah it's something I've wondered about. Like for fish curries, adding coriander is supposed to make it so it doesn't last as long. I guess one thing is books on fermented foods that should give lots of hints on how to modify your recipes for preservation.
I'm struggling to believe this can be done by taste; I could understand it if you went milk+teabag, then added water, but this seems like brewed tea in a pot added to milk in cup v.s. milk added to brewed tea in a cup, which will get totally mixed either way...?
The only difference I can think of in these situations is the temperature of the bottom of the cup. Can this really detectably affect the taste? Maybe she was subconsciously feeling this?
The difference is that if the milk is added first, slowly pouring the prepared tea will gradually heat up the milk from its initial temperature to the final combined temperature. If the tea is added first, the milk will start at tea temperature and gradually cool down to the combined temperature.
Imagining a scenario where the milk starts at 0 degrees and the tea at 100 and having a 1:10 milk:tea ratio, the difference is whether the milk gradually heats up 0->90 or gradually cools down 100->90.
Thus, in one scenario the milk will experience more extreme temperatures that can "burn" it whereas in the other scenario it won't.
To me at least I'd say the difference is barely noticeable, if I had to guess I'd say that in a blind tasting I might be able to get 55% of my guesses right.
Without the gravity you don't have the (same) resulting turbulence?
I have no clue how fast the temperature equalizes or how long it takes to scorch milk at different temperatures, but I heard about this as a kid and made the following thought experiment.
If I pour the milk first and then put in a single drop of tea, the milk at the surface of the drop would receive some flash heating, then equalize pretty fast to an average of their temperatures and then as the water turbulences away the resulting temperature would barely be above that of the original milk.
If I pour the tea first and put in a single drop of milk, the relative masses would equalize the temperature of the milk to pretty close to boiling, and it's gonna require a lot of drops before the milk cools down again.
Thus the time spent at higher temperature seems longer in the latter case. Assuming it matters for things like protein breakdown, and that those changes can affect the taste, then the question becomes: how slowly do we have to pour our tea for this to matter? I suspect I don't pour anywhere near slow enough.
I do know that brewing tea with not-quite boiled water (70-80 degrees C) instead of boiled water 80-90 is recommended because otherwise the leaves go bitter.
Perhaps if they were using water fresh from the kettle the milk-first way was preventing the "scalding"
Bitter tannins are what you want in black tea, they're smoothed out by milk but a good cup needs to be grippy in the mouth. Black tea made with anything less than boiling water is usually not very nice, in my experience.
100% this. Which is why, as a Brit, my heart still sinks when ordering tea in most European countries: nine times out of ten you get a glass of once-boiling water to add a teabag to.
Yep, a proper cuppa needs the water at absolute boiling. 1000m above sea level is high enough that I won't even bother trying to brew a cuppa; it just won't hit the spot.
Milk is a factor. Weirdly for a country with a robust approach to pasteurisation, French milk is insipid.
In China, I couldn't even get hot enough water for coffee. The places I stayed offered water almost cool enough for a bath. I had thought I was clever, buying ground coffee in Beijing, but I might as well have carried a bag of sand.
Hey ho. Travel without privation is merely holiday.
I believe the point is to avoid overheating (any of) the milk, because that changes its flavour. For example, tea made with UHT milk tastes very different (and, to me, much less nice) than tea made with pasteurised milk.
When adding the tea to the milk, the temperature of the milk will never exceed the final temperature of the mix. When adding the milk to the tea, it will.
> David Salsburg reports that a colleague of Fisher, H. Fairfield Smith, revealed that in the actual experiment the lady succeeded in identifying all eight cups correctly.
> One could then ask what the probability was for her getting the specific number of cups she identified correct (in fact all eight), but just by chance.
Interesting, does it go bad quickly?
Kurbiskernol is one of my favorite oils for special uses but it seems to spoil faster than some other oils. And I don't always travel somewhere I can pick up a good bottle. I suppose thinking of oils as more like a juice might be a good approach.
My favorite chili oils take the chilis just beyond a perfect maillard "sear" and venture very slightly into burnt territory. Many peppers have a natural bitterness when dried, and that slight bitterness added from the barely burned flavor brings out some extra, magical, umami depth. Adding some acidic elements makes for some incredible dishes.
I have found that smoked chilis lose their smokiness with high heat though. I wonder if doing a lower heat extraction might retain those smoky flavors. Sounds like the multiple extraction/blend the author talked about would be worth a shot to get both.
I agree. Indian cooking uses a lot of flavored oil as “tadkas”. Spices (cumin, coriander, garlic, mustard etc.) including whole red chillies are brought up to temp in a small metal bowl with ghee over a flame and then added to the final dish.
I’ve made chili oil this way and it seems to draw out more flavor and there’s the slight burnt flavor that I love.
I've learned from cooking more Indian food recently that it's okay to burn spices a little. In most cuisines you're told to only bloom spices briefly but Indian food isn't afraid to really cook spices to their limit.
Yup. It basically becomes a household emergency when we run low. We were out of this and sriracha for a couple weeks. That was a sad, tasteless, time. (Also, it's mentioned in the article)
It used to be spicier and even better before her son took over and changed it to a cheaper chili from another province a few years ago (which wasn't great).
I ended up trying something like 20 different brands looking for an alternative, and my favourites from least to most spicy were: Chuan Lao Hui, Lee Kum Kee, and Wa!, which I actually found even better.
I tried Lao Gan Ma again now that they're back to chilies from the original province, but it still doesn't taste quite the same, I wonder if the sourcing changes caused them to lose their specific cultivar?
Wa! is my absolute favorite chili oil. I put it in and on everything. A simple bowl of rice, with some Wa! (and perhaps an egg), becomes an entire meal.
If you're getting the "fried chili in oil" product, you could look out for the "chili oil with black bean" product they make.
Another option is Fly By Jing's original "sichuan chili crisp" which has a different flavour profile than LGM but is very forward with the douchi / black beans / black soybeans.
I love nerding out on food as mich as the next person. On food and cooking is one of my favorite kitchen tools. Sichuan chili oil is a staple condiment in our house.
That said, i find the following to be an oft-repeated bs phrase parroted across the internet. You can find it tracing back to reddit threads over ten years ago.
> You can end up with what are called fines and boulders, fines being tiny, dust-like pieces of coffee that create bitterness in the cup, and boulders being large chunks that create sourness or emptiness in the cup.
I dare any coffee drinker to blindly try their coffee with a crappy grinder, and compare to their $200 carbon fiber whatever. You wont detect the difference. I once looked into someone’s reddit account who was repeating this - and found that they were selling grinders elsewhere. Must be awesome margins.
A friend of mine started a company based entirely on the premise that grind quality matters. They did many blind taste tests and found that they could taste a 50μm difference in grind size when they controlled the other variables. Can you tell the difference between a $50 spice mill and a $200 burr grinder? Yes, absolutely. Can you tell the difference between that and a $1,500 expresso grinder, probably.
His little startup company ended up getting bought by one of the large coffee companies.
Even amateurs will notice the difference between a "perfect" pour over from a $50 grinder and a $200 grinder. The GP clearly does not own a V60 :)
Above the $200 range really only matter for espresso. Manual brews don't need that fine grind precision, just consistency (no fines, no rocks) at medium grind levels.
I’m sorry but what is an “amateur” coffee drinker? Is coffee drinking so complex that you can become an expert in it? Get over yourself, you’ve been drinking the koolaid, not the coffee.
People who own v60s tend tie the promotion of v60s to their personal character so i know this might fall flat but; every real study ive seen, thats blind, has shown no no added benefit to slightly more consistent grounds. Ive noticed the same when testing between the two myself. Feel free to share otherwise if you have data to support that ;)
Do you have a link to such a study? My google-fu is failing.
I don't doubt you but would like to read it and try to confirm my bias anyway!
My experience is mainly with completely crap grinders vs high-end burrs which is very distinguishable. Probably low/mid end burrs do okay as long as there aren't too many fines. Grind size variability may even be advantageous :)
It’s fascinating, isn't it? “Experts” are more than willing to dish out hundreds of dollars for finer microns and consistent particle sizes, and even measure those sizes using LASERS. They will go through the trouble to make fancy edited videos with all sorts of dubious claims about taste. But all of these people are totally unwilling to do blind taste tests and release their data, and as such we find a massive lack of real studies on the internet. People will make every excuse under the sun to not run blind taste tests on the effect of different coffee grinders. Look at this guys list of reasons… lol he states that he needs “people from around the world” in order to make such a study accurate.(https://towardsdatascience.com/double-blind-coffee-studies-a...).
The one i know of was done by Americas test kitchen. I had read and/or watched another a while back but couldn’t find it. Good luck with your cuppa - continue to enjoy the ritual.
I don't know if there is a taste difference that's meaningful, but the consistency is probably the real difference between grinders.
With a spice mill, it's a total crap shoot if a grind will pull properly, blast through or block up completely. It is a challenge to always get a good grind.
A burr grinder? If it's the same beans, it is set and forget. Always the same grind, same pull, easy.
If there is any taste difference, I suspect it is down to consistency of the grind and not much else.
Tasting a difference in grind size does not equate to fine particles being “bitter” and larger particles being “flat”, nor does it result in a slightly uneven grind being “better” than a more consistent one…
The effect of fines being bitter and the coarse being sour is easy to test. Take a decent grinder and your favorite coffee. Grind one batch a couple notches finer than usual. Grind another batch coarser than usual. Brew both with the same amount and temperature of water for the same time as you normally would. Compare the flavor of both brews. This is a common step of "dialing in a brew" to get your preferred flavor. The finer grind tends to be more bitter, the coarser tends to be more sour.
Now take a bit of both grinds and mix those together and brew them. You will find it is both bitter and sour.
If you want to avoid placebo, simply perform a double blind test.
James Hoffman has plenty of videos demonstrating this, even on himself. He tests many methods, machines, and beans. The things the community says matter he can reliably detect in a double blind test. Other things typically show no effect.
Don't forget, this isn't just Reddit. People have been brewing coffee for centuries. There are many professionals and lifelong tradespeople. There are definitely things that matter for making a good brew and particle size is one of them.
>Grind one batch a couple notches finer than usual. Grind another batch coarser than usual.
You are giving me advice as though I havent been "dialing in" my coffee for over a decade. Of course if you brew two different coffees with 100% different particle sizes, you will get different results. This is an exaggeration fallacy. It is not the same test as having 95% of one particle size vs 5% of another, which measures the improvement you might get from upgrading a $50 grinder to a $200 grinder.
>Don't forget, this isn't just Reddit. People have been brewing coffee for centuries. There are many professionals and lifelong tradespeople. There are definitely things that matter for making a good brew and particle size is one of them.
Yeah, people have been brewing coffee for centuries. No, people have not been concerned about minuscule differences in particle sizes for centuries. The ethopian method still consists of roasting beans in what basically amounts to a cast iron pan. Dominicans still roast their beans in sugar over a fire. Both have been grinding their beans using mortar and pestle since the beginning of time, and continue to this day. Would you scoff at those, and tell them their coffee is not "dialed in"? I'm sorry, but the pretentious exaggerations over coffee particle sizes absolutely are a recent phenomenon, and that you are seriously suggesting history in support of your claims reveals an obvious level of naivety.
EDIT: Also, you should be extremely wary of "learning" from well-edited videos of taste testers such as James Hoffman whose entire livelihood depends on being a coffee personality in a world where coffee is touted as being more complex than it actually is...
Your argument is "I dare you; you won't notice a difference." That's not convincing. Those of us who've spent time in the industry can even detect differences between high end conical vs flat burr grinders, let alone the difference between a bladed spice grinder compared to a burr grinder.
There are substantial differences to be found in many variables of coffee brewing. Just because you don't have a palate for it doesn't mean others don't.
Are you aware of any blind tests done on this? I'm fully aware that I can taste the difference between my Specialita and a blade grinder.
What I'm less convinced by is that more and more expensive grinders taste better to any noticeable and consistent degree. Personally I'd say that the taste changes day by day, maybe according to my mood, whether I brushed my teeth or ate something sweet in the last hour or two, the humidity, bean freshness, whether any defect beans got into a particular cup, and probably a ton of other factors.
I'm willing to accept that my tastes are not developed enough. But I need real double blind tests to back that up, not just people saying I should trust them because they claim to be an expert. Are there any?
Yes. Check out James Hoffman on YouTube. He tests many machines, including grinders, using double blind taste tests, and he can reliably tell the difference between many machines.
Though keep in mind that his palate is especially refined. Average Joe buying a coffee at Baskin Robbins isn't going to notice the difference between different high end grinders.
I meant by real scientists in a lab, not a YouTuber. Like a consumer testing lab maybe, or a university.
Besides, I've watched a good few Hoffman videos - including his high end grinder reviews - and while they are great, they aren't scientific standard double blind tests. They're just him in his kitchen.
I did search in case I missed anything, but can't find any videos that you might mean. If you have a specific video in mind, please link it.
> I meant by real scientists in a lab, not a YouTuber. Like a consumer testing lab maybe, or a university.
Maybe look more into who he actually is before dismissing him? He's a National Barista Championship winner and has decades of professional coffee experience and knowledge beyond just brewing a daily cup. He also co-founded a roasting company that became the largest wholesale specialty coffee supplier in London. It's not like he just popped onto Youtube one day in 2016 and decided to start making coffee videos.
It doesnt need to be convincing - I’m not the one making the claim that $200 coffee grinders make better coffee, so I’m not responsible for backing up that fact with data.
I make my morning coffee on a Lelit espresso machine. I use a Niche zero espresso grinder. I can easily tell the difference between grind sizes a mm apart on the dial, when it comes to taste in the cup (and even with milk). The espresso machine can tell the difference too, because even a minute difference in grind size can make a significant difference in the coffee puck’s ability to withstand the water pressure.
You see, when you make espresso there’s a pretty narrow range of grind sizes that produce acceptable coffee. Too coarse, and the water gushes through the puck without building much pressure. Too fine, and the puck essentially turns into coffee cement and the machine isn’t able to squeeze out more than a drop or two of (very bitter) espresso.
Within that narrow range you can find the needle on the water pressure gauge hitting numbers anywhere between 4 and 10 bar (I’ve set my machine’s overpressure valve to 10 bar so that excess water pressure is shunted away and circulated back into the brew circuit). I find the coffee tastes best when I can hit the sweet spot between 9 and 10 bar without the OPV kicking in. This is subject to uncontrollable factors such as differences in tamping but generally occurs at a very specific grind setting that I find after dialing in a new coffee.
As for differences in flavour? It’s all about extraction. Underextraction (from failure to reach a high enough pressure) results in sour, thin coffee. Overextraction yields very dark, bitter coffee with a powdery mouth feel. Proper extraction avoids both of these problems and tastes sublime, nutty and chocolatey (with medium-dark roasts) or fruity and juicy (with lighter roasts).
There may be a lot of gadget-headery going on in the espresso world but I can confidently say that correct grind size makes an enormous difference in the quality of coffee. Whether you need a $2000 grinder to achieve that is debatable, but you absolutely will not achieve it with a $40 blade grinder (which cannot control grind sizes at all).
Do you live in Europe by chance? When people in the USA talk about coffee they are typically not talking about espresso, which is a different beast altogether, and something I have no experience with.
I live in Canada. I’m not Italian. I only got into coffee a couple years ago.
If you ask the experts, much of the physics of espresso apply to pour-over coffee as well. Grind size and distribution, water flow rate through the coffee bed, channeling, fine migration and filter clogging.
Of course, the ‘typical’ coffee drinker is just looking for some caffeine with sugar and milk to help start their day, so they don’t care about this stuff. But if you make pour-overs and drink black coffee made with specialty roasts then all of this technique applies, and so a good grinder can help a lot.
Pour-over fans tend to prefer lighter roasts and flat burr (as opposed to conical burr) grinders, which are said to produce a more unimodal grind distribution with fewer fines.
This entire paragraph reads “because the experts say so”. As an avid coffee drinker and experimenter for many years now I’d challenge you to question that “more unimodal grind distribution” effect on pour overs especially as it relates to very minor differences in distributions measured across grinders.
This entire paragraph reads “because the experts say so”
Well I have to say that because I am not a pour-over drinker and I have no experience with grinders other than my Niche. I think I was pretty clear about the fact that I was relaying hear-say rather than speaking from my own experience.
Seriously? The grinder is the most important part, in my experience. When I first got into aeropress and pourovers, I was frustrated for years with bland and inconsistent brews. It was only after I upgraded to a decent burr grinder that everything fell into place. It’s just impossible to tweak anything else without first starting with a good grinder. I make adjustments of a few micron at a time with my grinder, and the difference is significant for both espresso and pour over. It’s much rarer that I make adjustments in water salts, brew temp, and brew method.
>Lol, no you don’t. Microns are much smaller than you think.
You absolutely do.
Many stepped grinders will have steps on the order of magnitude of 5 microns, EG-1 being probably the easiest one of the bunch to prove [1].
But note that this is talking about the difference in the _burr distance_, not the ground particle size difference.
In a world where we figured out how to make perfect burrs that produce uniform particle sizes these _might_ be the same, but even the most expensive and fanciest coffee grinders produce a relatively wide distribution of particle sizes.
Speaking as a someone who does DIY CNC, it's easy to add an adjustment dial labelled in 5 micron steps. But those labels are basically decorative if other imprecision in the machine means adjustments aren't reliably reflected in the output.
Even if your coffee grinder is in a room temperature-controlled to within 1 degree, the heat output of the motor could easily cause more than 5 microns of thermal expansion.
But obviously, if the coffee tastes good to you, then that's a coffee making success regardless of how precisely you're grinding things.
While I agree in general, a good quality burr grinder is surprisingly consistent. I'm not sure you could reliably get distinct results one notch apart, but at a given notch you will have a very narrow spread in grain sizes and a couple notches apart they will be visually distinct. James Hoffman has some videos comparing several cheap and expensive grinders, including looking closely at the grain size, and you can see the difference clearly.
Surprisingly consistent when measured using coffee that is ground to hundreds of microns is not an indicator about consistency at the few microns level. Use high quality calipers on the burrs, you’ll be shocked how much variance you see run to run at one adjustment, never mind what happens when you move the dial. Micron marks on grinders are pure marketing.
I'm more than willing to admit this being true on like... 98% of grinders out there; would be a little surprised to see that in a insanely expensive and _very_ overbuilt grinder like EG-1.
I’ve spent ten years in the specialty coffee industry (not selling grinders). If you’re controlling other variables properly you should definitely be able to tell the difference.
I think this is an important insight. Some people don’t have much experience in making repeatable coffee, and whether you make the coffee well is more important than how good the grinder is.
But once you have repeatable steps and that are good (water, quantities, temperature etc.) the grinder becomes the most important piece even in espresso.
I would say it's most important for espresso, at least in espresso machines that do everything else well. You essentially control the duration of the pull via the grind, and the taste of the shot comes predominantly from how long and hot you pull it.
As you said, once you are dialed in, really the only variable I am tweaking per bag of beans is the grind.
Not really, almost everything else matters more. Bean quality and water quality in particular are at the top of the list. Good beans bad grinder > bad beans good grinder. The grinder is the last place to look, even though it does matter.
The mistake you’re making is that not all variables are under your control.
Getting better and better beans is very hard. You’re stuck with what is available. You’re stuck with what water is available (if you’re a reasonable person). You’re stuck with the local roasters.
So of the variables you can control, the grinder is the most important piece of equipment you can buy.
Of course they are, don’t be so helpless. Getting good beans vs Starbucks is trivial. You’re obviously not limited to local roasters, google “specialty coffee delivery”, it needs to rest for around a week anyway. As is getting filtered water (in-line under your sink for less than $100, filter pitcher for a fraction of that) and saline drops (you can buy them for next to nothing online or mad-science your own for even less). All of those things will make a huge improvement compared with a better grinder.
Again. Grinders can make a difference, but they’re the last step in the chain. Do everything else first.
The other mistake you’re making is thinking people haven’t tried all of this and this is new information to them. And that trying all that results in a product that someone else prefers.
The fact is, there is a certain level of spend needed. If you’re not making espresso, this is very low these days. You can get very cheap, good gear. If you are making espresso, you’re spending several hundred minimum. Although you can lower your spend quite a bit if you’re willing to hand grind for espresso.
It's not an important insight at all - it's a credentials fallacy. "I was in industry so I am right". Many people have spent many years nerding out on coffee, myself included, but you'll note I don't use that as an argument for being correct.
It’s exactly what you’re talking about. The claim was “i was in industry -> therefore i know if you control the other variables you can tell the difference”.
For one, controlling the other variables is an obvious step you need to take when testing the effect of particle size. For two, it doesn’t follow that the OP is magically correct in his hypothesis about the effect of grind size just because he thought of this step and works in industry.
Your posts are very curious. Why do you think that the credential (10 years in the specialty coffee industry) mentioned is fallacious or somehow irrelevant? It seems to me that a decade spent finding ways to control variables and improve the quality and repeatability (both in a cafe setting and for customers with home setups) of coffee is like.. super relevant here.
Also - is controlling the other variables actually obvious to most as you say? Are those variables even easily identified by the average home coffee maker? I'm not so sure.
Look I hope I’m not insulting your profession but controlling the 5 or so variables that go into brewing good coffee is not exactly rocket science. To claim to be an expert in it is akin to claiming you are an expert in sharpening knives or picking a lock. It’s something basically anybody can take up, the rules for success follow a general formula, and if you experiment just outside of this formula you’ll find the way that works best for you. Hell, even the prices of growing, preparing (fermentation), and roasting coffee beans is infinitely more complex than the brewing process imo.
So no, the fact that you claim to have spent a decade professionally controlling the water temperature, bean roast,ratio, brew time & process, and grind level, does not make you any more knowledgable than any one of the other million nerds (including myself) who do this on a daily basis as well. Yes, controlling all of the variables when taste testing is obvious to most coffee geeks (people responding here). Americas test kitchen has been doing this for decades with recipes that have many more variables than the coffee brewing process.
No, those variables are probably not easily identified by the average home coffee maker. That’s because the average coffee maker is a boomer with a keurig. I still don’t think it was a particularly insightful comment though, regardless of this fact. This forum is not made of keurig drinking boomers.
So in your home coffee nerd experience coffee made from grounds with a narrow size distribution is not noticeably different than coffee made from grounds with a broad size distribution?
No, in my home coffee nerd experience the realized size distribution across multiple grinders is minimal enough that it has no effect on flavor profile. When all other variables are controlled, of course ;).
Exactly! Just like how all of the “experts” liked blade-ground coffee when it was blindly tested (https://youtu.be/O7LAzSKgeoQ?feature=shared), in what seems to be the only blind test that brings together experts on the internet. They liked it, so that’s what counts.
It’s easy to like something though when that something’s “taste” (when drilled down into the realm of unrealities) is largely social.
That’s why John Manzo noted as such in coffee, connoisseurship, and an ethnomethodologically-informed sociology of taste.
That's nonsense unless your the kind of person who says a cup of instant is indistinguishable from a freshly ground brew (and post covid there probably are many more people who can't).
The size and consistency of the ground coffee makes a huge difference in extraction of coffee and therefor the taste, so a grinder that can make a consistent, repeatable grind will be noticeable (perhaps not as noticable as purchased ground vs freshly ground), but for some the difference between instant, and fresh ground with a $50, $500, or $3000 isn't worth the price.
>That's nonsense unless your the kind of person who says a cup of instant is indistinguishable from a freshly ground brew
No, it isn't nonsense. And yes, I can tell the difference between a cup of instant and a cup of freshly ground brew.
This video actually proves my point. James not only avoids tasting the coffees blind, but you can see that at 6:35 the particle volume is all basically the same size with extremely minute differences - looks like a factor of less than 10% volume density with very little distribution difference between grinders.
It matters if you’re brewing pour-over coffee. If you don’t use a burr grinder the fines settle towards the bottom while pouring and clogs it up. Takes forever!
The difference in filter and espresso is quite a lot at the blender to burr grinder stage and a little bit from 200-1000$ getting better throughout. I’m sure you’ll be saying you can’t tell the difference in lots of areas because you can’t tell the difference. Which is fine btw!
You can absolutely taste the difference between a crappy grinder and a good grinder. I'm not sure what a carbon fiber grinder is, but a proper flat burr grinder that produces a relatively uniform grind size makes the biggest difference in coffee taste, as long as the coffee you're drinking hasn't been burned to ash.
Comparing my cheap spice chopper and my cheap burr grinder, I noticed a clear improvement. Maybe that's because the spice chopper was so bad at chopping coffee beans. I doubt the fancy burr grinders make much difference, but then again I was skeptical of the cheap burr grinder until I tried it.
Tangential, but related: my partner claims that putting oil and garlic in a cold pan and warming them together yields a different flavor than heating the oil, and then adding the garlic. I'm pretty convinced that she's right.
Has anyone experimented with this rigorously? I'd happily nerd out reading a similar article in that subject.
I make a "Mediterranean" version of this with olive oil and I cut up some chilies and just let them soak. Completely different use case than an Asian chili oil IMO... but a little bit easier to do as you don't need to heat the oil (and you probably wouldn't want to heat olive oil that much anyway).
Yes, chilis should be dried out before you use them. For me its been shelf-stable outside for 2-3 months. Obviously, with botulism you would smell it right away if its off.
1) You can't smell botulism bacteria
2) Oils are notoriously shelf stable
3) Botulinum bacteria need oxygen deprived environment and relatively stable ~10°C to proliferate.
4) Botulinum bacteria spores must be present in the bottle
I use Korean red pepper flake, the same type I use in my kimchi, and it had provided fabulous results. I generally build on flavours like spring onions and lots of garlic first, pulling them out before leaving black cardamom Sichuan green chilis (for a more woody note) star anise cinnamon and coriander seed for a brighter aroma. I also mix black vinegar and salt in with the chilis first before decanting the seasoned oil atop them. I make a litre at a time but can't ever keep it in the house. The whole effort is 1-2 hours but its mostly just watching the garlic and onion and making sure to pull it out before it burns. The decanting doesn't generate smoke or anything troublesome but beware, the smell of chili oil will permeate the kitchen for about three days.
> I’ve also thought about doing a really low and slow extraction, say by using a sous vide machine. You do run into food safety issues, since the chilies can contain botulism.
Sous vide was my first thought, since that avoids the evaporation and oxidation that decreases the intensity of the low and slow method. However I don't think botulism is any more of a concern here than any other sous vide dish and high heat doesn't kill botulism spores so it doesn't really matter how you cook the chilis.
Just keep it above 140F while infusing and keep it out of the <130F danger zone past a few hours. Quickly cool it below 45F using an ice bath after infusing if you're paranoid or cooking for someone that might be immunocompromised.
I did sous vide chilli oil by placing the oil and chillies in glass canning jars in the water bath. I let them rip for about 90 minutes at ~88°C/190°F and the results were pretty good. I like the roasty/mildly bitter results from flash heating, but this was quite smooth and pleasant.
I think some purists would think it tastes weird. It's a very "clean" chilli flavour. I think it would have been a lot better with more aromatics, and when I'm done with this oil I'll likely give that a shot.
I haven’t, but I wondered the same thing! Something else I’ve considered is letting the sous vide system run another hour or two, just to see what happens to the flavour. I guess I should give both a shot one of these days.
Yeah I might give it a shot (although I gave away my sous vide machine). But low and slow isn't always better for extraction. Coffee for instance extracts more with a fast infusion versus cold brew.
Coffee extraction usually happens in a closed vessel where the volatiles aren’t as exposed to air and can’t as easily evaporate. The advantage of sous vide isn’t just the cooking temperature but the fact that the ingredients are completely sealed. It has a significant impact on many ingredients like chicken or carrots, which can stew in their own juices instead of reducing.
That’s not necessarily true. A clever dripper does open air infusion and works great. Ditto with pour overs. But perhaps with oil more volatile aroma compounds are released? Either way the only solution is to try it!
When visiting various countries in Europe (Italy, Spain, etc) I've run across the equivalent of farmers markets where they have varying types of infused oils. The oils often have the seeds/herbs/etc. in the bottle. I wonder what method these vendors use.
I know people who have simply put herbs/peppers/etc directly into oil and go with that method. I've not heard of them getting botulism, but maybe it was luck.
> I know people who have simply put herbs/peppers/etc directly into oil and go with that method. I've not heard of them getting botulism, but maybe it was luck.
The article I linked to mentioned that fresh herbs could be a source as well. The article from OP mentions peppers can as well. So, I guess one has to be careful.
I wouldn’t do this myself, but theoretically heating the oil relatively high for a while before consuming would destroy any toxin buildup. The other route would be adding enough acid to prevent botulism from growing, but I think that can be a bit tricky.
Botulinum toxins are large, easily denatured proteins... by heating to 80°C
(176°F) for 20 minutes or > 85°C (185°F) for at least 5 minutes. Their heat resistance varies with composition of the food or other medium, and the concentration of the toxin. Reports suggest that HTST pasteurization (72°C/162°F for 15 seconds) is likely to inactivate most or all of the toxin in contaminated milk, while conventional pasteurization at 63°C/145°F for 30 minutes seems to be less effective. Chlorine and other agents can destroy botulinum toxins in water. The vegetative cells of C. botulinum are susceptible to many disinfectants, including 1% sodium hypochlorite and 70% ethanol, but clostridial spores are very resistant to inactivation. They can be destroyed in the autoclave with moist heat (120°C/ 250°F for at least 15 minutes) or dry heat (160°C for 2 hours) or by irradiation. The spores of group I strains are inactivated by heating at 121°C (250°F) for 3 minutes during commercial canning. Spores of group II strains are less heat-resistant, and they are often damaged by 90°C (194°F) for 10 minutes, 85°C for 52 minutes, or 80°C for 270 minutes; however, these treatments may not be sufficient in some foods.
The spores are, but the toxin is the problem and breaks down with heat so, in theory, if you boil the food for a bit before eating it, it would be safe.
No, that's not correct. Hence it being a (overblown US citizen internet commenter) concern with preserved food. Can something like tomatoes, not naturally that acidic in a preparation that doesn't lower the pH much, and even though you've heated it and killed things in the process and it's now in a vacuum, it can potentially still develop.
Have y'all tried steeping in anchovies for salty / umami flavor? It definitely moves away from Asian chili oils and into Mediterranean, but I find anchovies add quite a hard-to-describe depth to the chili oil.
Interesting! I've mostly added umami from mushroom powder and MSG. Anchovies or fish sauce could be an interesting addition, although that does make it more of a sauce than an oil.
Really love the Mala Su Chili Crisp here: https://yunhai.shop/collections/su-chili-crisp It's completely replaced my use of Lao Gan Ma Spicy Chili Crisp I enjoy the Lao Gan Ma, but I wouldn't say I "love" it like I would for the Su Chili Crisp Mala.
In Modernist Cuisine, Myrvhold et al advocate for a sous vide chili oil. Roast the chilis and other ingredients at about 250 in the oven, then sous vide at 158. Never made it myself, and it's not intended to be authentic Chinese chili oil. They also mention using a pressure cooker instead, which seems reasonable.
They talk about about how hot infusing causes the chili's to suspend in oil, I wonder if you could incorporate using a popcorn cannon somewhere in the infusion process.
My sister-in-law (Chinese, although not super-old) brings us a new jar of homemade chili oil whenever we finish the last one, and is constantly experimenting with new peppers, oils, spices, and preparations. If we ask nicely, she also brings bags full of homemade dumplings as tasting medium ;)
Old Asian ladies experiment too. Chili oil is very subjective so everyone has their own way to make it. They obviously treat it a lot more casually, but it's also common knowledge to them.
Indeed, travel writing is an entire genre. But I also get the gp's point, that especially with cooking it's easy to overcomplicate things while ignoring how the inventors actually worked.
My point is that it is silly to complain about people being nerdy about a specific topic, just because there are others with more expertise. Especially in cooking, the concept of "inventors" and "authorities" for such basic things as chilli oil, is a strange one.
For me personally, getting deep into a specific food item like this is bascally like traveling. I will first do my own experimentation, not because I think I will discover something new, but because I will more deeply understand why things are done the way they are when I (later) read "proper" sources and consult with others. At that initial stage, I am bound to overcomplicate things, but it's the good kind of overcomplication.
It is like traveling to a new place, and walking around randomly before opening a map. Of course I "overcomplicated" my path from A to B, but I've seen so many interesting (but not necessarily important) things on my way.
It's just another way of experiencing life. For many of us, the joy of exploring things this way isn't about removing the life or art from it; it's another way of witnessing and experiencing the life and art of it.
For example, I absolutely love aquascaping. I have a very scientific understanding and appreciation of it all, but it doesn't diminish how incredible and beautiful it all is for me. Some people look at it from a very aesthetic point of view, and to me it's often like some glorious chemistry and biology event occurring in front of me. I marvel at the fact that the nitrogen cycle is happening in this little slice of biotope. I love to test the water parameters and log what's been going in and out to better understand how it's working. I make nerdy little movies of the plants and animals. But you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who loves it significantly more, or finds it more beautiful in more meaningful ways. I just process it differently.
With the chili oil, understanding and experimenting with it can be part of how a more cerebral person engages with their appreciation, curiosity, or passion about the oil. Nerding out might just mean the person really loves it, and that's how they go about it. It's all good. Maybe they'll figure out a bad ass recipe that'll make the rounds eventually, and everyone can enjoy it.
Having hobbies is not only infantile but "hollow and sad"? Very strange take.
If it bothers you so much, don't engage with it. Taking time on a Sunday to write really nasty things about people sharing their hobbies on the internet doesn't seem especially full or joyful.
Yamada Seiyu Goma ra-yu (spicy sesame oil)
Ingredients are: sesame oil, red pepper, spring onion, ginger, sansho (zanthoxylum piperitum), cinnamon, star anise, mikan tangerine skin
Here is the manufacturers site: https://sesamepaste.jp/en/#Products
Although it's not on the Nijiya Market website, it can often be found there, mixed in amongst the lesser sesame chili oils. It's a favorite gift of mine to give, and nearly everyone who receives it mentions later to me how much they enjoyed it.