Stuff a Third-year Medical Student Actually Has Time to Cook

As a med student living in a tiny NYC apartment with accompanying tiny kitchen, I wasn't very optimistic about how much I'd be able to cook this year, but since being recruited to this blog I've surprised myself over the past week. Some real food will follow, but I thought a fitting first post would be on something near, dear, and positively chrono- and inotropic to my heart: espresso.

I credit former roommate and current co-blogger Pat Savage '07 and his humble, leaky, but dependable Krups machine for starting my coffee-making addiction back in 2006. I invested in my current setup near the beginning of senior year, since then I've probably pulled over a thousand shots and it's still going strong.

Quick primer on espresso: All coffee-making is basically chromatography. Coffee beans have all kinds of chemicals in them, like caffeine, sugars, aromatic compounds, and acids. By passing hot water over ground coffee, the goal is to get the good stuff (flavor, sugar, caffeine) to dissolve in the water while leaving the bad stuff (mainly acids, which is why bad coffee is sour) behind. The variables you can control are amount of coffee; fineness of grind; quantity, temperature, and pressure of water, and time of extraction. Espresso uses a relatively small amount of very finely-ground coffee and is extracted with a small amount of high-pressure water at about 90 degrees C.

There's a lot more to it (If you're interested, mosey on over to the CoffeeGeek.com forums to read the discussions of neurotic coffee addicts), but I'll stop here to avoid boring everyone with more science. Having had this machine for over four years, I can say that it's definitely paid for itself considering how much coffee I drink and the low cost of ingredients (an $8 pound of coffee beans and a $3 gallon of milk can make about 30 lattes, ~$100 at Starbucks), and has all sorts of fun cooking implementations. Any espresso grinder can grind coffee much finer than your typical blade grinder, so I've used the coffee powder as seasoning rubs on pork chops and added it directly to cookie batters without any grittiness in the final product. The espresso itself is basically concentrated coffee flavor, and so you can add that to baking recipes pretty easily or, one of my favorite things to do, use it to make coffee-based cocktails.

Anyway, here are some action shots:

Gaggia Coffee Deluxe Espresso Machine ($299 new) with Gaggia MDF Grinder ($150 used) and coffee grounds (Gorilla Coffee, Brooklyn NY, $13.99/14 oz) everywhere

Double-shot of espresso with some decent crema

Double-shot on ice, my preferred delivery method in the summer

A latte. Still trying to get the hang of this free-pour latte art, but one of the better rosettes I've done.