Roasting coffee in a cast iron covered deep skillet.
This is a five pound bag of green beans from Dean's Beans. There are a number of suppliers out there. I happen to like organic fair trade coffee and that's Dean's thing.
Your basic cast iron covered deep skillet.
Starting to roast. Every minute or so I lift the cover and stir the beans with a wooden spoon. Coffee makes a popping sound when it's roasted. That's called the first crack. If you want a darker roast continue until it makes a second, quieter pop -the second crack. Be careful to stop roasting before it becomes expensive charcoal.
Nearly there.
Cooling.
When cool I take the beans outside and gently blow the chaff out of the beans. For best flavor it should rest for 12 hours or so, but you could grind and brew it now. Green coffee takes years to go stale, but once it's roasted it should be used within a few days.
Most coffee you buy off the shelf already roasted is stale.
Enjoy the good stuff.
-Sixbears
I'm sure it would smell good, and my wife would love it, but I'm a tea drinker (non-pinky lifting type).
ReplyDeleteIf you don't lift your pinky where do you hang your donut?
DeleteSix, thanks for this post. I never tried to roast my own coffee but with the store cost for ground coffee at $13 when not on sale for the down sized plastic can leaves me no choice today but to either cut back to a couple cups a day, or give it up (that would be the same as a drug user giving up drugs) or find a lower cost alternative. You make roasting my own beans look easy and worth the effort. Now I need to find a good source for green coffee beans because I suspect trendy specialty food stores will be very expensive also.
ReplyDeleteAgain thanks!
It's not rocket science. Hope you have some fun with it.
DeleteI can almost smell the stuff! Gonna have to try it5!
ReplyDeleteI happen to like my house smelling like a coffee shop.
Delete