When I first picked up Coffee Love, the new book by Daniel Young, I figured readers would welcome its ’round-the-world anecdotes and succinct nuts and bolts overviews: Storing and roasting beans, selecting a coffeemaker, steaming milk, and so forth. After reading it through, though, I — perhaps slow on the uptake here — realized it’s a resource for making the sort of coffee drinks at home that are usually reserved for coffeehouses or bars or ethnic restaurants. Even for those with home espresso machines (required for some, but not all, of the book’s 50 recipes), it’s rare to find a home kitchen brewing up anything more complicated than a cappucino. If at-home baristas have been waiting for recipes, now they can do anything from a Thai iced coffee to a flambeed Cafe Brulot.
Young, former restaurant critic for the New York Daily News, kindly answered questions on the book by e-mail from his home in London. Don’t miss his message to Seattle readers and Starbucks haters, at the end:
Q: As we Seattleites like to think the coffee universe revolves around us, I’m glad to see you divide the world (in the book) into pre-Starbucks, Starbucks, and post-Starbucks. But it does beg the question: Where do you see the specialty coffee trade going from here?
A: If the industry follows the geeks, I think the next wave is lowtech. Up until now, everybody wanted a coffee at home like the one they got in their favorite coffee shop. Soon they will want a cup at the coffee shop like the one they can have at home. There has been too much coffee technology, too much automation, too much hype about $10,000 brewers. And there’s almost a stigma to the pod machines that do everything except harvest the beans. I see a return to the hands-on, coddling-the-coffee experience that’s possible with a pour-though manual cone filter (Chemex, Melitta), a Japanese vac pot (siphon brewer) or even a Thai coffee “sock” (muslin bag filter).
Posted by Rebekah Denn under Coffee, Cookbooks
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