I had some sliced potatoes and random flavorful liquids that needed using up, so this is lunch.

This is a very simple soup. Simmered gold potatoes, puréed fine with equal parts of chicken stock and coconut milk. After it’s fully blended I worked in a pat of butter and adjusted seasoning.

For garnish I had some tiny shiitake mushrooms, which I tore up and seared, and in the same pan I added some shaved shallot right before plating, just enough to take some color.

At the last second, soup hot in the blender, I added the parsley to keep it bright. Plated with chili crunch (the expensive one this time because I was cooking for someone with specific dietary restrictions recently) and the mushrooms.

Brandywine does a collaboration for Halloween with Fellow Drops, which is an interesting service from Fellow that promotes one or two high end coffees a week. I’m a sucker for a good special occasion edition, key word being good. Brandywine is the roaster I trust to deliver good, so this is my Halloween week coffee.

This coffee is pretty tame, relatively speaking to my recent fare and Brandywine in general, a pure Ethiopian natural process coffee from the Chelbesa station in Gedeb, reasonably lightly roasted. 15g coffee, 40 second bloom, 250g water total starting around 95 degrees. Brew time was 2.55. Fellow recommends a more coffee heavy recipe, which I’ll try, and I’ll grind a bit finer next time, but my default recipe handled this very well. Just a beautiful, plump Ethiopian coffee. I didn’t get the big red fruit notes mentioned in their listing, but I do get the creamy body and as expected lovely sweetness.

A cup of one of Luminous’ El Mirador offerings, roasted on September 17th and brewed today with the trusty Aeropress. 12g coffee, 200g water off the boil maybe fifteen seconds, three minute brew, swirl, 30 second wait, plunge.

This coffee was anaerobically cofermented for 130 hours in 200 liter vessels beside 80 liters of “prepared fruit based culture”, so at most 120 liters of coffee cherries. Then, naturally processed.

The finer details of what fruit was used to coferment aren’t listed nor do I think they are important. The listed flavor notes are there, I definitely get red fruit, definitely get lime. But I’ve had weirder coferments. I think this coffee is most notable for its pinpoint perfect body and acidity. Gorgeously rounded, perfectly tart balanced against the expected sweetness of good specialty coffee. I won’t go back to the Aeropress with this one, my two V60 brews of it have been a bit more expressive, it just bursts out of the cup. It was also particularly easy to brew, my first pourover was excellent.

The trade off for lab manufactured perfection is the cost. Luminous has a lot going on, which I’ll talk about in a comment. I initially wondered how much of the cost went into the coffee, but there are some financials on a little card on the box: they paid $31.37 per kilo for these beans, $14.23 in freedom units. If you’re not familiar with coffee prices, that is a whole lot. I paid them $30 plus tax for 200g. I have bought ultra premium coffee for more, but those were halo products or competition coffees, intended to be the very best a roaster can make. This is just what Luminous sells. So is it worth it?

To me, yes. A typical 15g cup is around $2.50 accounting for the filter. Its engineered perfection is not something I’d want every day, but it's a great coffee.

I had a request for a beet dessert, so here one is. Recipe was very much assembled by eye, but this is close:

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Beet Bread Pudding
Yield: 6 servings

• 250ml half and half (the specific dairy is not important, milk or full fat cream would be fine)
• 3 eggs
• 100 g sugar
• 30ml ground ginger
• 300g sourdough, medium dice
• 2 beets, grated
• 50g butter, small dice

Whisk together dairy, eggs, sugar, and ginger.

Fold together dairy mixture, sourdough, beets, and butter. Rest in refrigeration at least one hour.

Preheat oven to 180C/350F.

Scoop mixture into oven safe vessels and bake approximately 15 minutes, until the bread pudding has puffed up and springs back to the touch. I suspect internal temp will be around 95C/200F. If you use a very tall vessel it might take a bit longer.

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Bread pudding is super, super easy to throw together by eye, it’s just a matter of whipping together eggs and liquid, then folding in bread. After resting an hour or so, it should barely hold together as a sticky mess. Stale bread is not actually necessary, though it is a good use of stale bread. You can add any other ingredient you like to flavor it as long as you keep the water content of the flavoring in mind.

The end result on this one is extremely good. Beets have great sweetness and color but mostly they brought a rich, savory weight, depth sweet bread pudding really enjoys. I topped it with a mascarpone sour cream cinnamon thing; 2 parts cheese:1 part sour cream, blend in food processor with sugar and cinnamon to taste.

After a thread a week or so ago I decided to add some decaf coffees.

This is Black and White’s Hambela Natural, an ethyl acetate decaf grown and processed in Ethopia and then decaffeinated in Germany.

This is a very young coffee, roasted last week, but I am impatient. I used a pretty typical V60 recipe. The drawdown was a little long even accounting for a long bloom, over 4 minutes, so I’ll need to grind a bit coarser going forward. Extraction is pretty close, so to compensate for the quicker brew I’ll go up a hair on temp from 92 to probably 94.

The coffee itself has bite from its youth, but interesting flavor notes are showing. Cocoa, cranberry, tart cherry. Not a lot of natural sweetness, but I think that has more to do with the age and me needing to refine my brew. I’m not sure it’s remarkable enough that I’d favor it going forward over their standard decaf, but we’ll see. Black and White, in its usual style, does have a funkier decaf among its rotating options that I haven’t tried.

This is Black Acres Roastery’s Colombia Aponte Honey process coffee. Black Acres supplies Trader Joe’s, so it’s easy to find this across much of the US. This bag has a best by date of November 26th and is drinking well right now.

This is a pretty dark roasted coffee, per the bag and visually. V60 brew, ground a bit coarser than usual, 4.0 on an Ode 1 with the upgraded burrs, and started with the water at 85c. I don’t think I could dial it in better, the coffee doesn’t have much more to give. Total drawdown time was three minutes almost on the dot.

This coffee has a lot of natural sweetness. Decent acidity, some overripe fruit (figs, dates, something like that) on the palate. Once it cooled to warm a little almond paper bitterness came out, nothing aggressive. At room temp, more bitterness, more fruit, and finally some cocoa powder. It does not drink like a typical heavy roast.

Trader Joe’s does an incredible job at stocking small selections of good enthusiast product. Their wine selection is staggering and their coffee is solid. It’s also well priced; dollar for dollar this is the best coffee I’ve bought in a long time. Pretty good overall.

My morning coffee today is Booberry, from Brandywine. Roasted in mid-March, this is the last of the bag.

10.1g of coffee, since that’s what I had left. 30 second bloom, two 60g additions of water. Drawdown finished around 2:40.

This is a berry cofermented blend from Colombia. Sometimes these go too far, but the berry in this was pleasant. It had a lot of natural sweetness, noticeable slightly underripe blueberry flavor, mild acidity. The roast was very light, I mostly get the beans. This brew was very good, but at this age the flavor was starting to fade.

I bought this as part of a Friday 13th mystery coffee series, which was pretty great. I also bought a peach coferment at the same time that was incredible.

Link to the bear cup: www.amazon.com/dp/B01EVI5R7C

I appreciate the direction this community is taking, so:

Today’s afternoon brew is Promethium Coffee, French Laundry, roasted early in July. I don’t need the caffeine so it’s light, 9 grams of coffee. Hario V60 brew, using their standard papers, 40 second bloom using 30g water, 40g water in ten seconds, 10 second rest, repeat until I hit 154 grams. Total brew at the end of drawdown took just under 3 minutes.

This is a solid example of high end coffee. It’s pretty clean, with a tea-like astringency. Good balance of acidity. And unlike some high elevation light roasts it’s still discernibly coffee, it isn’t too lean and the roast comes through. My first two brews of it had a bit more depth, using a full 15g. Overall a good afternoon pick me up.

I don’t know in what way this yeast inoculation is supposed to be remarkable.

I opened a bottle of good shiraz and I needed something to eat with it, so I knocked together a little pasta.

Yield is two hefty servings, plus a bit for leftovers.

• 100 g bacon, diced
• 200 g mushrooms, split into bite sizes
• 1/2 onion, julienned
• 30 g gochujang
• 30 g tomato paste
• 20 g sesame oil
• Splash of red wine. You’ll figure it out.
• 3 green onions, sliced
• 10 g butter
• 150 g pappardelle pasta

In a thick bottomed pan, render bacon on medium heat until barely browned, not yet fully cooked.

Add mushrooms, tossing to coat in the bacon fat. Sweat the mushrooms until they are soft, cooking out the water in the mushrooms.

Bring 2L of water to a boil for the pasta.

Add the onions and increase heat to begin sautéing. Once the onions have softened and are starting to color, add the tomato paste, gochujang, and sesame oil and gently sauté.

Begin boiling pasta.

Once the tomato and pepper pastes begin to caramelize, deglaze with a splash of red wine. Add the butter and green onion. Toss to coat.

Once the pasta is al dente, ladle 50 g of pasta water into the sauce and stir to mix. Move the pasta to the sauce to finish cooking. Add additional pasta water if needed to thin the sauce.

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I really, really love gochujang. It’s cheap, stores well, and it’s so rich. If I need a little oomph while cooking at home I know gochujang, tahini, and miso paste have my back.

If I had some on hand I’d have used a Korean style pork. I also considered liver sausage; I might make a version of this in two days with a nice liver pudding I have in the freezer.

I could have skipped the green onion in favor of a little more yellow onion. The color didn’t come through. But I had them, so I used them.

This rocked. One of the best off the cuff meals I’ve ever made.

Mushroom galette with farmer’s cheese, onion, and dandelion greens. I ate it with a vin de France from La Rocalière, in northern Rhône, which was better than my dough. Flavor on the dough was nice, texture was decent to good, but I’d have been smart to use an egg wash.

I was cold, so I made soup.

I’m fascinated by the regional variation in borscht. It’s as much a concept as it is a food. This one is vegetarian, using parsnips, potatoes, carrots, onion, and of course the most ideal of ingredients, beets. For the stock I used parsnip, mirepoix, fennel, bay leaves, garlic, and peppercorns. Finished with a dill yoghurt sauce.

Borscht has no right being as good as it is. Sweet? With my savory? But fifteen million babushkas are right.