EDIBLE ESPRESSO PUCKS

Time Active: 30 minutes

Total Time: 2hr 30 minutes

Yield: 5 double basket pucks

  • Edible Dirt:

  • 100g white sugar

  • 30g water

  • 70g Good 70%+ dark chocolate

- Add sugar to pan, distribute evenly

- Add water to pan

- Heat on medium high. Do not stir.

- Once the syrup reaches 135C, or as it begins to brown at the edges, add the chocolate

- Immediately remove from the heat and stir aggressive with a whisk until it becomes soil-like in texture

- Cool on silicone mat or baking paper. Work aggressively to get everything out of the pan.,

- Once cool, blend in a blender or food processor to a fine powdery texture.

Scaling the recipe:

- Weigh your yield (it should be 140g to 150g)

- To calculate your butter requirements multiply by .2 to .235%

- As I starting point I’d recommend 30g of butter, but substituting 5g of that for dark chocolate

- Add 5g (approx 3% of the yield) cocoa powder

- Add 1.5g of salt

Finishing the recipe:

- Melt the butter and chocolate together

- Make sure the dirt, cocoa powder and salt are fully mixed

- Stir in the melted butter and chocolate to the dry mix and combine throughly

- Form in double espresso baskets by filling and tamping

- Add a screw indentation if you’d like

- Tap out onto a plate, or into a freezer bag

- Chill in the fridge for 2 hours

- Allow to return to room temperature a little before serving

- Enjoy!

Coffee And A Donut

Here’s the recipe for Drinking Donuts. It’s pretty simple.

Start the day before you want to serve the drinks.

  1. Start with 1 donut per 100ml of milk/mylk that you want to use.

  2. Chop each donut up and flatten slightly

  3. Put the pieces into a saucepan and add your milk/mylk.

  4. Cook on low heat until it reaches between 40 and 50 celsius.

  5. Turn off the heat and leave to infuse for 20-30 minutes

  6. Strain through a sieve, pressing out any liquid from the wet dough

  7. Put in the fridge overnight

  8. The next day take it out and strain again to remove any solidified oils.

  9. Strain again if desired through muslin, or a tea towel or a fine mesh sieve.

  10. Weigh the yield and add up to 5g of sugar per litre. I would start at 3g and taste and adjust.

  11. Steam as you would with normal milk/mylk.

  12. Add to espresso in a 1:1 to 1:2 ratio.

  13. Enjoy!

For the vegan version I recommend Rebel Kitchen’s Barista Mylk, but I am biased!

Espresso Tonic Recipes

Here are a few of the related recipes, for the base tonic syrup, the acidulant, and the tonic water.

After there are a few ideas on potential pairings of different botanicals for different origins/styles of espresso - let me know if you come up with something cool!

NOTE: Cinchona bark is a natural source of quinine. Excessive consumption of quinine can be dangerous and it can have contraindications for some medicines.
ADDITIONAL NOTE: People have kindly shared some concerns about making your own tonic. I would STRONGLY recommend reading these articles before proceeding:

Base Tonic Syrup

20g Cinchona Bark (ground to powder)

750g water (plus more to top up later) 750g sugar

2g orange zest

2g lemon zest

  1. Make sure the bark is ground to a powder.

  2. Mix with the water and bring to a boil, and then gently simmer for 5 minutes

  3. Switch off the heat and allow to cool, and mix in the citrus zest.

  4. Once cool strain through a fine sieve, then strain again through a coffee filter paper. Strain again through coffee filter paper, the thicker the better.

  5. Weigh the liquid, and add water to bring the total mass back up to 750g

  6. Add 750g of sugar and blend.

Acidulant (Lime Acid)

120g water

5.1g citric acid

2.6g malic acid

  1. Combine all ingredients and blend

  2. Store

Tonic Water (Small Batch)

50g Tonic Syrup

30g acidulant

3 drops saline

250g water (sparkling water if you are not carbonating the mixture)

If you are carbonating:

  1. Combine all ingredients in the vessel you’ll be carbonating in.

  2. Chill in the fridge.

  3. Carbonate.

If you are not carbonating:

  1. Use sparkling water instead of still

  2. Make sure all ingredients are fridge cold

  3. Mix all ingredients aside from water thoroughly

  4. Gently mix in sparkling water

  5. Use immediately

Espresso Tonic

35-40g espresso

120g tonic water

Ice

  1. fill the glass with plenty of ice

  2. Add your desired amount of tonic water

  3. add your espresso, or serve on the side and let the guest add it.

  4. Stir or swirl or don’t!

  5. Enjoy!

Ideas for custom tonics

You could add a lot of different, and complimentary botanicals quite easily to your espresso tonics. You could choose to infuse small quantities into your base tonic syrup after you had made a batch, or infuse alongside the zest in the process.

Pairing suggestion:

Ethiopian washed coffee: Bergamot zest, early grey tea, lemongrass, coriander seed, ginger

Kenyan washed coffee: Grapefruit zest, pink peppercorns, rosehip, angostura bark

Colombian washed coffee: angostura bark, juniper, lime zest

These are just suggestions and not hard rules - I’d love to hear any ideas you have! Tag me in on Instagram if you make anything too!

Crema Resources

Hey there!

Thanks for watching the video and coming to check these out. A number of these are not easily available or are behind paywalls. Sci Hub (which I’m not going to link to here) is an option.

I’d recommend starting with this paper, as it is a great overview with tonnes of links to other papers:

Neglected Food Bubbles: The Espresso Coffee Foam

This was my starting point, and the references alone should keep you busy. For more:

Rheological interfacial properties of espresso coffee foaming fractions (pdf)

Foamability, Foam Stability, and Chemical Composition of Espresso Coffee As Affected by the Degree of Roast

Understanding the Formation of CO2 and Its Degassing Behaviours in Coffee (pdf)

There were three papers I bought from ASIC, and annoyingly I don’t think I can share them. I’ve asked about sharing them, and will update if I hear back. They aren’t really available anywhere I’ve found (like Sci Hub)

  • Espresso Coffee Brewing Dynamics : Development Of Mathematical And Computational Models

  • Impact of Crema Quantity and Appearance on Actual Coffee Perception

  • Physicochemical Characterization of the Espresso Coffee Foam

Share anything interesting you find in the comments below!

Water for Coffee Resources

This is a difficult topic, and there is no one single universal answer. The best I can offer is guidance, here are the three main scenarios:

Hard water:

  • Soften with reverse osmosis (effective but expensive)

  • Soften with ion exchange eg.a Brita (not as effective, cheap)

  • Bottled mineral water (wasteful)

  • Recipe water - homemade or Third Wave Water (extra work, relatively expensive if demineralised water is not cheap to acquire)

Soft to Medium Hard water

  • Soften with ion exchange eg.a Brita (not as effective, cheap)

  • Bottled mineral water (wasteful)

  • Recipe water - homemade or Third Wave Water (extra work, relatively expensive if demineralised water is not cheap to acquire)

  • Do nothing, if the water isn’t too bad. (The best option of all, but only useful to those whose water is in the range around ideal)

Soft Water

  • Remineralise your water (cheap, but extra work)

  • Bottled water (wasteful)

If you want to read more about water:

Water for Coffee (out of print for now, hard to get hold of - but excellent)

The Water Quality Handbook

https://baristahustle.com/blog/diy-water-recipes-the-world-in-two-bottles/

https://baristahustle.com/blog/diy-water-recipes-redux/

Jim Schulman’s Insanely Long Water FAQ (pdf)

Thermal Loss in Reusable Cups

Here’s the chart:

Cup Start 10m 20m 30m
Fellow Carter Everywhere 70 65.4 64.2 63.1
Hario 70 65.3 63.5 62
bru 70 65 63 61.1
Kinto 70 65.1 62.8 60.8
Miir 70 63.5 60.8 58.3
Stokke 70 63.3 60.5 58.1
Kleen Kanteen 70 64 59.1 56
KeepCup Stainless (XS) 70 61 58 55.5
rCup 70 56.3 51.1 47
Hip 70 58 51 47
Frank Green 70 57 51 46
KeepCup OG (S) 70 56.4 49.5 44
eCoffee Cup 70 55 48 43.4
Huskee Black 70 53 46.9 41.6

Coffee Soda #1

Hey there, welcome to the first of perhaps many coffee soda recipes.

The idea here is that you can make a batch of these, rather than just one. What I’d recommend doing is scaling this recipe, depending on how much paper filtered espresso you have or want to make. I’m using 50g of it here to make the scaling side a little bit easier.

  • 50g paper filtered espresso (From a 1:2.2 ratio espresso, or espresso with approximately 9-10% strength)

  • 235g filtered water

  • 35g simple syrup (2 parts sugar to 1 part water)

  • 1g Fee Brothers' Aztec Chocolate Bitters

  • 0.7g saline (20:80 salt to water ratio)

Mix well and refrigerate before carbonation. Charge with CO2 and leave for 1 hour. Open carefully. Pour gently. Enjoy.

Note: If you want to use a Sodastream, then combine all ingredients except water and then chill. Carbonate clean water and then to serve add the required weight to your coffee syrup. (Sodastream don’t like it when you put things other than water in there, so may not honour warranties if you were to have issues.)