Saturday, June 23, 2012

Make your own cold-brewed iced coffee



You might be thinking "an iced coffee recipe? What is there to explain?"

And on the part of the ingredients, you'd be right. Obviously iced coffee is... cold coffee and ice, and whatever else you want to add to it.

But I recently bought a cold press coffee maker, and it has been a definite win-win situation: better iced coffee, one, and also cheaper and more environmentally friendly (compared to buying iced coffee at a coffee shop).

It's hot in DC all summer long, and this week was our first hot, in-the-90's, gross week. At times like this, I end up buying coffee from coffee shops a lot more than during the winter, both because I don't like the iced coffee that I made at home as much, and also because the way I was doing it before (cooling down hot coffee by putting it in the refrigerator) took longer to do every day than buying it somewhere.

Process

I bought the Toddy T2N Cold Brew System for about $35 on Amazon. It's an interesting process to do the first few times: you put what seems like a lot of coffee (12 ounces with several cups of water) into the top chamber, which has a filter and a plug at the base, and let is sit for at least 12 hours at room temperature. After 12 hours, you take the plug out of the bottom of the chamber, and the water filters through into a glass carafe. That part takes a bit of planning ahead, but what is produced is actually a concentrate that you later add water to. You should be able to use the amount from one batch for at least a week, and it keeps for up to two weeks in the refrigerator. (I'm not going to write super specific directions for the process, since it comes with instructions, and if you buy a different brand the process is probably slightly different.)



After that, you have a carafe of the concentrate that you can keep in the refrigerator and make iced coffee all week, which is great. When I made mine, I mixed about 1/3 C of the concentrate with enough ice, water, and milk to fill a large pint-sized glass. I like a lot of milk in it without sugar, but you can add whatever you want to it!

The coffee itself is delicious. I think that iced coffee made from cooled-down hot coffee turns out fairly bitter tasting, and with the cold press it seems to be much smoother tasting.

Cost & Environmental Factors

The first time I did this, I wasn't sure if making iced coffee this way was going to be cost effective, because you use more beans per cup than you would for hot coffee. But after seeing how many cups you can get out of the concentrate, and shopping around for some cheaper coffee, I think that the cost is actually really reasonable, especially considering that I think it tastes better. I found a couple of packages of 12-ounce coffee for five to seven dollars that was still pretty good quality, and got around seven servings out the concentrate that that produced. (I didn't include the cost of the cold press in the calculation, but you can see how it would be pretty quickly recovered.)

Cost: About $4

Cost: $0.70 to $1.00 (plus milk/sugar if added)

Lastly, there is an environmental reason to make your own iced coffee: if you've been buying your iced coffee from a coffee shop, you have to throw away the cup after each one. By making it yourself, you're skipping out on the waste that comes from the cup! You can even find a travel re-useable iced coffee glass with a straw at a lot of places - I bought the one in the picture at the top of the post at Target last summer. As I wrote about in a previous post, avoiding using food packing as much as possible has multiple environmental advantages.


Friday, June 8, 2012

Restaurant review: Thai X-ing

I went to a Thai restaurant here in DC on Sunday night that I've been wanting to try for a long time, so I thought I'd break my long no-posting spell with a new type of post: a restaurant review!

Thai X-ing is a home-cooked-style Thai restaurant in the Shaw area of DC (http://www.thaix-ing.com/). The restaurant itself fits into some of the themes of this blog, mainly the idea of seeking out interesting and novel food experiences (seen in this prior post), since Thai X-ing is definitely one of those places not just to get something to eat but to have a food experience.


The restaurant is located in a row house that I believe the owners live in the top floor of. It definitely (and uniquely - I can't say I've been to a restaurant with the same feel) has the feel of being in someone's home. We sat in the first floor, where there were only three tables, all of which were unmatched and set right up against each other.

Magical entrance:

But really the main star is the food. I love Thai food, and went to Thailand for work in November, and this is probably the best Thai food I've had in DC. The downside is that you don't choose the dishes you eat (we went to the vegetarian night, which is Sunday, but I believe each night is a fixed menu). 

You will be very happily stuffed - for the vegetarian night, we ate spring rolls, green mango (I think) salad, and lemongrass soup for the first course, pumpkin curry (their specialty I believe) along with mushroom and tofu curries for the second course, Pad See Ew (again, I think) with some kind of green vegetable after that, and then sticky rice with mangoes for dessert. 


All of it was delicious. I was particularly impressed with the lemongrass and tofu soup, mushroom and tofu curries, and green mango salad. All of them had really complex and interesting flavors, and, not that I'm an expert, but everything tasted really authentic.

You might spend less if you were to out to another Thai restaurant and just ordered one entree (the meal is $30 or $40 per person, depending on group size), but the up side is that Thai X-ing is BYOB, so you are at least not spending a lot on wine or beer. And the other up side is that it's worth it.

In conclusion, go! It's a meal you won't soon forget.