Recipes

This webpage is an ongoing list of recipes: annotated, simplified and often modified. I have tested and like the results of all of these recipes.
All photos are of the specific recipe taken by me.

Index

• Bread
• Brownies
• Making Coffee
• Roasting Coffee with a SR800

• 400g bread flour
• 8g diamond kosher salt
• 3g instant yeast from freezer
• 300g warm water (~120f)
• 1/8tsp (a few drops) white vinegar

1. Day 1: Take out a large and medium bowl. In large bowl, combine dry ingredients and mix by hand for a few seconds.
2. Add warm water and vinegar and mix until fairly homogeneous (not more than 1 minute or 2). Seal with medium bowl (covering dough) and let rest for 20 minutes
3. Dip fingers in water if needed to avoid sticking, pinch a side, stretch out slightly and fold inward. Repeat 5 or so times working around the dough. Finally, flip dough so top is on bottom and replace medium bowl as lid
4. Repeat step 3 once every 15-25 minutes, for 2-3 hours.
5. Once 2-3 hours is completed and dough is supple, solid and not that sticky, refrigerate for 6-18 hours with lid on.

1. Day 2: Remove dough in large bowl with lid from refrigerator. Leaving lid on, let warm up for 1 hour.
2. After warmed up 1 hour, punch and poke dough until as much air as possible is removed.
3. Pull 5 points around dough at edges one at a time, to the center point to shape dough into its final form. Dust it with flour.
4. In a bowl lined with a flour dusted towel, place the dough folded side down into the towel—so it will be flipped upside down as its moved into the towel.
5. Dust the newly exposed side of the dough with flour.
6. Then cover the dough in the floured towel with something to keep it from drying out (e.g. a flat baking sheet) let dough rise for 2 hours.
7. Right after folding the bread (with 2 hours left) set oven to 440 and put a covered dutch oven in it to preheat.
8. After 2 hours, once bread looks a bit raised, transfer to parchment paper lined baking sheet by placing the baking sheet over the bowl then flipping the whole thing
9. Remove lid from dutch oven, with oven mits lower bread with parchment into the dutch oven. Replace lid. Cook for 27 minutes.
10. Remove lid and cook for another 7 minutes or until you like the color of the bread

• I think this is about the best bread you could hope to make in your kitchen. It has a chewy, crunchy crust and a moist flavorful crumb. Simple, yet complex if you eat it mindfully. Baguette like.
• If its your everyday bread it works well if you cut it into slices and freeze them for later individual use.
• Even if frozen for over a month, eating this bread toasted with just good quality butter is really good.
• There are no preservatives here, so it's only optimal for a day or so after baking. You can add preservatives to make it last longer without freezing.
• This is a hybrid of a Lopez-Alt and Lahey recipe. I basically memorized it, did it 100+ times over years, then re-wrote the recipe from memory.
• Lopez-Alts NYT version is almost 5000 words. I tried to be a little more focused and concise.

• 113 grams unsalted butter (1 stick), some extra for greasing
• 200 grams granulated sugar
• 86 grams dark or semisweet chocolate chips
• 2 large eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 47 grams unsweetened cocoa powder
• 64 grams all-purpose flour
• 0.5 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1/8 teaspoon baking soda

1. Set oven 325f
2. Put stick butter + sugar in large saucepan, cook on medium until simmering, stirring occasionally
3. Turn off heat, add chocolate chips and stir until combined. Move pan off heat and let cool for 10 minutes (at least)
4. While cooling, put 8x8 parchment cutout at bottom of 8x8 tin and grease tin
5. Once saucepan is warm to touch, vigerously whisk in eggs and vanilla for 1 minute
6. Whisk in cocoa powder until incorperated
7. Stir in flour, salt and baking soda with spatula
8. Move batter from large saucepan to prepped tin, even out, cook for 25 minutes (testing with toothpick or examining to determine when done)
   • This part is tricky: How long to cook it depends on your oven and on your 8x8 inch baking sheet, its cook time really varies.
   • Test it with a toothpick and see if it comes out clean after ~25 minutes
   • Look at the edges, when the very edges become dry and cracked and start to seporate from the sides of the sheet, its probably about done if you like your brownies medium/medium-rare like I do.

• I highly recommend this recipe. If cooked the right length of time the end result is, in my opinion, the ideal brownie.
• This is a fast and easy recipe without much cleanup once you've done it a few times.

• A instant gram scale that measures to a tenth of a gram.
  • I use the KitchenTour Coffee Scale with Timer 3kg/0.1g High Precision ($20)
• A coffee grinder
  • At home I use a OXO Brew Conical Burr Coffee Grinder with Scale ($160), which measures out in grams exactly how much coffee you want each grind. I had to modify it after it came to get it to work—a famously poorly constructed product. But the idea of a grinder that weighs grams is a good one and if something like that exists in a better form I'd recommend it.
  • At work I use CEVING's World's First 60g Large Capacity Manual Coffee Grinder ($30) and its fantastic and very well made. For 16oz of coffee I grind 30 grams of coffee beans. This grinder takes about 50 seconds to that, at the middle coarseness setting. It's compact and requires no electricity but you have to turn the crank.
• A kettle that can set an sustain temperature
  • I use a Fellow Stagg EKG Pro Studio ($230) at home because it can keep warm any temperature and can boil at a scheduled time. You get something similar for $70 if you can forgo the scheduling feature. I would make sure it's gooseneck, you can adjust temperature to the degree and keep warm works up to 205f.
• A cone to brew the coffee in
  • For a 16oz thermal coffee cup, I use a $6 Collapsible Coffee Dripper silicone cone from Amazon with a #2 coffee filter. It can make coffee as good as anything else, and since its collapsible its very easy to store. Other options are more expensive and aesthetically pleasing.
  • When making 30oz of coffee, I use a $50 6-cup Chemex with an official filter. Very aesthetic.

1. Set water temp to 205 for washed beans (most common), 200 for honey process beans and 195 for dry process beans. Enable temperature hold if you have it. Prescheduling can save time before work.
2. Grind 30 grams of beans to medium fineness for 16 oz, 60 grams of beans for 32oz.
3. Add grounds to filter in cone over double walled stainless steel 16oz tumbler. Put chemex over low heat on stove if using chemex.
4. Just wet all the grounds in first pour, wait 45 seconds and watch grounds expand from releasing gas.
5. Then just pour water until cone is mostly filled and let drain before next pour. Multitask between pours if you are getting ready for work.

• All coffee is different, so keep notes on water temperature, grams brewed, and type of coffee. Overly mild coffee might need hotter water, biting or funky tasting coffee less.
• If it's a scheduled morning boil and you multitask between pours, this isn't any messier or signficantly more time consuming than Keurig. Toss out the filter, rinse the cone when you're done.
• French press coffee is out of style now, but I think it can be a treat sometimes—you save a coffee filter but cleaning after is much more of a hassle. It can be richer, denser, grainy and thick.
  Instrunctions with same measurements for pour over:
  • Note current grind setting and set grinder to coarser setting before grinding.
  • Put the grinds
  • Pour in the hot water
  • Give it a little stir
  • Replace the top with the plunger up
  • I like to wait 5 minutes (coffee geeks would say 3 but I like to go all in), then press the plunger down.
  • After finshed, clean by adding water to base and pouring through sieve to throw away most coffee grinds before rinsing off the rest.

• 215-220g green coffee

1. Do not buy this if you plan to roast a lot of coffee. It's a good learning tool with good results but its smokey, messy, stressful and time consuming. My ITOP "Skywalker v1" clone ($500 on Amazon) makes it logistically realistic for me to roast all the coffee I drink, where as that would be too much work for me to justify with my FreshRoast SR800 ($300). I would avoid air roasters in general.
2. Ventilate area with fan, be aware of smoke alarms which may be easily triggered
3. Measure beans (215-220g)on scale in vessel that pours well, preheat SB800 to 390-400f (fan around 3, heat around 9)
4. Once preheated, add beans, set fan speed to 8 or 9, set heat to 3 or 4. Start stopwatch. Watch temperature, it should land around 320 or 330—adjusting as necessary.
5. When beans turn beige (very little green left, should happen after about 3 minutes) set fan to 7 and set power to 8. Temperature should land between 370 and 380—adjusting as needed to get within that range.
6. After 3 minutes and light brown, increase power to 9 and decrease fan to 6 to get temperature around 400f. When stopwatch is around minute 6.5 to 7 you should hear beans popping.
7. Cook at 400-420f for about 2 to 2.5 minutes after popping starts to get light-medium roast.
8. Put fan at 9, power at 1 and put in SR800 in cooldown mode
9. Transfer to quart-sized mason jar and label. 2 batches of 217g coffeee should fill a quart jar to the top. Use a jar with a loosely screwed on lid to allow degassing for a few days.

• The power and fan levels necessary for each stage are very subjective—it depends on the temperature of the room, the voltage of your outlet and the mileage on your SR800. The original guidelines I made for myself now wouldn't get the beans hot enough. It's inadvisable to trust instructions that are just fan levels, heat levels and time.
• The built in thermometer should also be treated with a degree of skepticism. If first crack is early or late adjust the handycap you give the thermometer.
• If you get uneven roasts (light and dark beans) try doing smaller batches or buying a longer tube.
• I've roasted hundreds of batches of offee with the SR800—and the results were great—but I wouldn't recommend it to others and I don't use mine anymore. In my opinion, the SR800 demands too much constant active attention to get each roast right. It's smokey, it requires a fair amount of cleaning after each roast, and it only roasts half-a-pound at a time. I roast all the coffee I drink fresh—its just not sustainable with the SR800.
• I currently use the NIASIA PFK 500g roaster, which is an example of a first generation (v1) Skywalker style chinese roaster. They can be purchased at around the same price as a SR800 from AliExpress.
• The Skywalker allows you to vent smoke out a window with ducting, which sounds inconvient but is actually much nicer than flooding your home with smoke.