5 Crimes Against Coffee

Blue Bottle Coffee shops in San Francisco and New York are famous for serving phenomenal house-roasted coffee, prepared using meticulous methods. But founder James Freeman maintains that if home brewers just avoid common mistakes, it doesn’t take much to brew a great cup at home. “People think it’s so hard and difficult, but just a few simple things can really make a big difference,” he says. Here, Freeman explains how to bypass the five worst crimes against coffee. Given his perfectionism, chances are you’re committing several of them. Blue Bottle Coffee founder James Freeman. Photo © Clay McLachlan/ ClayPix.com.

“Make sure you choose a coffee with a roast date, not a ‘best by’ date. Preferably, that date should be no longer than a week ago. Then use it up, share it with friends, or buy smaller bags so you move through it quickly. Sometimes lightly roasted coffee can be good for a couple of weeks after opening, but in general, fresher is better.”

“Buy whole-bean coffee. Ground coffee gets stale really easily. Buying a grinder just isn’t that hard: It’s not that expensive, and doesn’t take that long. If you’re doing the pulse-and-shake method on a cheapo blade grinder, I think you’re still better off than buying pre-ground coffee that’s been sitting in a bag for a week or God knows how long. And there are better options that are getting cheaper—Hario, Porlex, Zassenhaus and Baratza make some good grinders that are not that expensive.”

“Don’t buy a coffee pot with a plug. If you’re going to make coffee, make it yourself. There’s the symbolic layer: Do you want to entrust something so important to a machine? And then there’s the brass tacks layer, which is that almost every machine doesn’t make very good coffee. I love the shininess, the slipperiness, the cleanness of a good pour-over made with a paper filter or a cloth filter.”

“Don’t rely on your eye, and don’t rely on volumetric measurements—they’re just not accurate. Buy a gram scale and weigh your coffee, weigh your water. You’re going to be so much more in control of your brewing ratio.”

“Don’t buy a national brand if you can help it. We’re lucky enough that a lot of people want to have our coffee shipped, but I think more and more, people are opening up little roasteries and doing interesting things. You’ll be less apt to see coffee as a commodity, and more apt to see it as something that’s precious and has been meticulously cared for, from when it’s grown far away to when it arrives in your cup.”

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5 Crimes Against Coffee

Blue Bottle Coffee shops in San Francisco and New York are famous for serving phenomenal house-roasted coffee, prepared using meticulous methods. But founder James Freeman maintains that if home brewers just avoid common mistakes, it doesn’t take much to brew a great cup at home. “People think it’s so hard and difficult, but just a few simple things can really make a big difference,” he says. Here, Freeman explains how to bypass the five worst crimes against coffee. Given his perfectionism, chances are you’re committing several of them. Blue Bottle Coffee founder James Freeman. Photo © Clay McLachlan/ ClayPix.com.

“Make sure you choose a coffee with a roast date, not a ‘best by’ date. Preferably, that date should be no longer than a week ago. Then use it up, share it with friends, or buy smaller bags so you move through it quickly. Sometimes lightly roasted coffee can be good for a couple of weeks after opening, but in general, fresher is better.”

“Buy whole-bean coffee. Ground coffee gets stale really easily. Buying a grinder just isn’t that hard: It’s not that expensive, and doesn’t take that long. If you’re doing the pulse-and-shake method on a cheapo blade grinder, I think you’re still better off than buying pre-ground coffee that’s been sitting in a bag for a week or God knows how long. And there are better options that are getting cheaper—Hario, Porlex, Zassenhaus and Baratza make some good grinders that are not that expensive.”

“Don’t buy a coffee pot with a plug. If you’re going to make coffee, make it yourself. There’s the symbolic layer: Do you want to entrust something so important to a machine? And then there’s the brass tacks layer, which is that almost every machine doesn’t make very good coffee. I love the shininess, the slipperiness, the cleanness of a good pour-over made with a paper filter or a cloth filter.”

“Don’t rely on your eye, and don’t rely on volumetric measurements—they’re just not accurate. Buy a gram scale and weigh your coffee, weigh your water. You’re going to be so much more in control of your brewing ratio.”

“Don’t buy a national brand if you can help it. We’re lucky enough that a lot of people want to have our coffee shipped, but I think more and more, people are opening up little roasteries and doing interesting things. You’ll be less apt to see coffee as a commodity, and more apt to see it as something that’s precious and has been meticulously cared for, from when it’s grown far away to when it arrives in your cup.”

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Elizabeth Karmel on the Crimes Against Grilling

“A lot of people marinate raw food in barbecue sauce, because they’re thinking, Oh, I want barbecued chicken,” says grilling expert Elizabeth Karmel. The problem is that sauce often contains sugar, which burns quickly, resulting in a lackluster version of the classic dish. Here, the Hill Country Barbecue chef reveals more ways home cooks ruin great ingredients, and how to avoid those mistakes.

It’s really important: Just like you’d heat a sauté pan before you put food in it, it’s very important to preheat the grill to cook any foods properly. Preheating also sterilizes the grill by burning off any residue.

You would never bake a cake with the oven door open, right? Just like preheating is essential to proper cooking, so is temperature control.

I’ve got a couple of good rules of thumb: If something takes 20 minutes or less to cook, use direct heat. If it takes more than 20 minutes, use indirect. And if you don’t know how long something takes to cook: The bigger it is, the denser it is, the heavier it is, the longer it takes.

The hotter the fire does not mean the better you’ll cook your food. Most food is delicate and needs a gentle heat after you sear it. You’re going to get a better result and coax the love out of the food by treating it gently and with respect.

A lot of people marinate raw food in barbecue sauce, because they’re thinking, “Oh, I want barbecued chicken.” Sugar burns quickly. You want to make sure that the inside of your food is done and juicy at the same time that the outside is browned. It takes 45 to 60 minutes to grill bone-in chicken pieces and only 5 to 10 minutes for sweet barbecue sauce to set and caramelize. So brush your food with sauce at the end of the cooking time.

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Mark Bitterman Names the Crimes Against Salt

“Sins against salt? I should come up with seven so we can make it Biblical,” says Mark Bitterman, co-owner of a store called The Meadow, which sell salts from all over the world. Here, the expert shares six shameful salt mistakes. Salt expert Mark Bitterman. Photo courtesy of Mark Bitterman. Kosher salt is one of the greatest sins against salt there is. It’s an industrial chemical; it’s not food. Most of what industrial salt makers manufacture goes to huge industrial applications—not just food processing but pharmaceuticals, pulp and paper and a bunch of other things. Kosher salt is designed to kosher, to draw out moisture. It’s basically an industrial desiccating agent. So when you put that chemical desiccating agent on your mouth, it’s trying to bore holes through the side of your head. That’s kosher salt’s role in life, to hurt you.To me the salt shaker is the symbol of industrialization's triumph over naturalness. Shaker salt is pure refined sodium chloride made into about the ugliest, most useless form possible—identically shaped cubes that all hit your mouth in exactly the same way. To make those crystals pourable, they add sodium ferrocyanide and dextrose, and a whole bunch of other junk. It’s sort of like turning all the cheese in the world into Velveeta. A shaker turns something that should be special and deliberate, this moment of seasoning your food, of enhancing the flavor of your beautiful ingredient, and turns it into something rote and dismissive.So many snarky little articles on artisan salt dismiss it as a pretentious ingredient that costs a fortune that you should only buy if you have nothing better to do in your life. But that doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny. Let’s take Maldon. That’s a relatively expensive salt compared to a cheap sea salt. But how much does it cost per serving? To put it into perspective, there’s no other ingredient except water that costs you less. And there’s no other ingredient, period, that does more. So you’re criticizing the most cost-effective ingredient on the face of the earth for not being some free industrial product. It’s kind of funny, you know?Salt is absolutely essential to your nutrition and your flavor. You have to use salt, and you have to use it with love and happiness and delight. The salt health debate has more holes in it than a sieve. They’ve shown there’s no correlation between hypertension and salt consumption. You get high blood pressure from being overweight, or from eating too much sugar, or carbohydrates, or being old, or from lots of other things that we don’t understand very well. But not from salt.Since the dawn of civilization, every single human population everywhere in the world that could make salt did. Every one of those salts that every single person has made for the last 12 millennia was different. Salt is the most diverse, distinctive food on the face of the earth. To call it something that is an innocuous, source-less, refined chemical that is just called salt is a crime against our culture and our traditions and our history.We learned it from the French, alas, this textbook idea that when you eat a food, every single bite should taste identical to the previous bite. Everything should be seasoned identically and uniformly. That’s what good technique does. And I beg to differ. I think that’s boring. I think that can lead to palate fatigue. A steak is a great example. You can season a steak very slightly and then more heavily with fresh crystals once it’s cooked. Then you have this beautiful play of salt crystal off meat that is far more dynamic and layered than a steak that’s been shellacked through and through and only once with salt.

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Crimes Against BBQ Brisket with Austin’s Aaron Franklin

Aaron Franklin spends a lot of time thinking about brisket. Considering lines at his cult Austin joint Franklin Barbecue, a slew of accolades (he’s one of F&W’s best new pit masters in Texas), and the incredible number of hours and pounds of brisket he dedicates to his craft (Franklin starts tending his smokers daily at 2 a.m. and goes through 20,000 pounds of brisket a month), it’s probably safe to say he’s mastered his approach. The result is supertender and flavorful slices of beef served by the pound, plate or piled into sandwiches. Here, Franklin saves home cooks and their summer guests from the worst crimes against Texas-style barbecue brisket. Tips on how to cook BBQ brisket from pit master Aaron Franklin of Franklin Barbecue in Austin, TX. Courtesy of Franklin Barbecue.

Proper Texas-style brisket is made with the “Packer” cut from a cow. Many grocery stores will only sell the “flat” cut, which has the fatty point cut off the meat. “You really need that fatty half on there. If you only have that flat cut, then you’re just going to be doing a Jewish-style, pot-roasty kind of thing,” says Franklin. Most butchers will be able to provide this cut of meat.

To ensure a tender brisket and to prevent it from drying out, position the meat as far away from the fire inside the smoker, with the fatty end facing the flames.

It’s easy to over-smoke brisket due to its long cook time. This will result in a piece of meat that “tastes like liquid smoke.” To prevent this, it’s necessary to use very dry wood. Franklin prefers to use Post Oak that’s been cured for 9-12 months. This particular type of wood creates very little soot when it burns and imparts a mild smoky flavor to the meat. He uses 20-inch-long logs for his restaurant smokers, but suggests buying pre-cured wood chunks (“Wood chips should only be used to get a smoky flavor when using a gas grill,”) from a sporting goods store for a smaller backyard smoker.

It’s important to keep the temperature even and calibrated according to the size of the smoker. The meat gets much closer to the fire in smaller cookers, so for those, Franklin recommends keeping the temperature around 225 to 250 degrees (temps inside the trailer-sized custom smokers at Franklin Barbecue can get up to 375 degrees). Also be sure to position the smoker’s temperature gauge as close to the grate—and the meat—as possible. Many are at the top, which often leads to an inaccurate reading since heat rises.

“The biggest mistake I see is that people simply don’t let the meat cook long enough,” says Franklin. Trying to rush the process by taking the brisket off the smoker and finishing it in the oven, or wrapping the meat in foil to speed up cooking time will increase cooking time because the meat doesn’t have a chance to cook efficiently. Franklin recommends smoking the meat for 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours per pound of meat. Finally, let it rest to seal in all the juices. “You just can’t force it—when it’s done when it’s done. And then you eat it.”

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