27.1 Breakfast drinks

Coffee is often the first thing a guest drinks in a meal, or the last. Tea, hot or iced, tends to stay on the table from start to finish. Both reward a cook who learns to make and serve them properly.

Water

Bottled water, spring water, mineral water, still and sparkling water, and how to serve them, are set out with breakfast and brunch. see chapter 15: Drinks

American restaurants once set down a glass of iced water as soon as the menu came. Nobody now knows how the habit began. Some people thought water helped the guest wait, and some thought it helped digestion. In countries where the tap water is doubtful, a guest who asks for water is usually brought a bottle.

Kinds of water a guest may ask for.

Coffee: where it came from

Some anthropologists think the first people to use coffee were warriors in central Africa. They ate balls of crushed beans and animal fat before battle, for food and for the lift the caffeine gave.

A hot coffee drink may have been made in Persia in the ninth century A.D. It was boiled from ripe beans and was probably thick and harsh. By about the year 1000, wealthy Arabs drank it regularly, from beans grown in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and sold by Egyptian traders. The drink, called kahwa, spread to every class of Arab society, and coffeehouses opened across the Levant.

Europe took to coffee in the 17th century. In 1669 Suleiman Aga came to the court of Louis XIV of France as the Ottoman ambassador and served coffee at his lavish parties; the French nobility soon made it their drink. In Vienna, the Turks fled a battle in 1683 and left sacks of green coffee beans behind. Franz George Kolschitzky took them and opened the city's first coffeehouse, The Blue Bottle.

Coffee stayed very costly while the sultan controlled the trade. That ended when the Dutch took plants from Arabia and grew them in Java before 1700, and the French carried seedlings to the West Indies early in the 18th century. From there, plantations spread through the Americas.

Coffee: the bean

Coffee grows on a small tree in tropical and subtropical places. Its fruit is a bright red cherry. Inside the clear flesh sit two seeds with flat sides, and these are the beans. Pickers gather ripe cherries by hand. The fruit is then cleaned, fermented and hulled, which leaves green beans ready for roasting, blending, grinding and brewing. Any bean can be roasted light or dark, ground coarse or fine, and brewed by any method.

Two species matter. Arabica gives the finest coffees and is the most important in trade. Robusta makes a less flavorful drink, but the trees are hardier and bear more, so it is growing in importance. Robusta also carries more caffeine.

Soil, sun and air shape the flavor almost as much as roasting and brewing do. So beans are sold by place name, among many others:

• Colombian
• Chanchamayo (Peru)
• Kilimanjaro (Tanzania)
• Blue Mountain (Jamaica)
• Java and Sumatra (Indonesia)
• Kona (Hawaii)

Some gourmet coffees use one kind of bean, but most coffee sold across the United States mixes several beans.

Roasting brings out flavor, darkens the bean and draws its oils to the surface. Beans were once sold green and roasted at home; now experts with the right machines do it. No international body fixes the names, but roasts fall into light, medium, medium-dark and dark. The common names, from city roast to espresso roast, are in a table with breakfast and brunch. see chapter 15: Drinks

Coffee: grinding and keeping

Leave the roasting to experts, but grind the beans yourself, close to brewing.

• Whole beans keep fresh for a few weeks. Dry and sealed away from other smells, they can be frozen for several months, and you can grind them straight from the freezer.
• Ground coffee keeps three or four days, sealed airtight and kept from light and heat.
• Never refrigerate coffee.

Coffee: brewing

Good coffee comes from the right amount of coffee for the water and the right contact time. Both depend on the machine.

Drip coffee. A drip machine heats water in a reservoir and lets it fall slowly over the grounds and through a filter. The usual best measure is 2 level tablespoons of ground coffee for each 6 fl. oz. (¾ cup) of water. A "cup" of coffee is ¾ of a measuring cup. A pound of coffee gives about 80 level tablespoons, enough for about 40 cups. The Coffee Brewing Institute designed a scoop, the Approved Coffee Measure (ACM), that holds exactly the 2 tablespoons.

For commercial machines:

• They usually take premeasured packs, sized for a single pot or a large urn.
• For stronger coffee, add more coffee; a longer brew does not help.
• For weaker coffee, brew it at normal strength and then add hot water.
• Never brew the same grounds twice.

Espresso. A pump forces hot water at high pressure through coffee that is very finely ground and packed tight. The coffee comes in bulk or in premeasured pods for even quality. One serving takes about ¼ oz. (7 g) of coffee and 1½ fl. oz. (45 mL) of water. A longer pull with 2 to 3 fl. oz. (60 to 90 mL) of water, popular in the United States, is called espresso lungo. Work fast: if water runs through too long, the cup fills with thin coffee and loses its strength. Because so many drinks start from a single or double shot, this matters.

A good espresso is strong, rich and smooth, never bitter or sour. A golden-brown foam, the crema, sits on the black coffee. Warm the small cups first. In Europe the saucer often holds a lemon twist, with a small glass of water alongside.

Coffee: what spoils a cup

• Water. Poor water makes poor coffee. Many machines are plumbed into the building supply, so the cook may not control it.
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• Dirty equipment. Coffee oil leaves a film you cannot see inside machines and pots, and it makes every later batch taste stale or rancid. Rinse pots and carafes well with hot water after each use, and take machines apart to clean as the maker directs. Scale on the heating element also makes it work less well.
• Waiting. Serve coffee as soon as it is brewed. Air dulls the aroma, then the taste goes flat and finally bitter. Drip coffee can sit on the hot plate for a short time at 85°C to 88°C (185°F to 190°F), but pouring it straight into a thermal carafe is better. Never reheat cold coffee; the swing in temperature ruins it.

Coffee: tasting

Tasters judge four things. How to taste like a cook is covered with flavor. see chapter 6: Tasting like a cook: the senses

• Aroma: coffee usually tastes as it smells, and some, such as Colombian, smell stronger than others.
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• Acidity: a pleasant tartness that gives the cup snap and life; Kenyan and Guatemalan coffees have a lot of it.
• Body: how heavy the coffee feels in the mouth, heaviest in Sumatran and lightest in Mexican and Venezuelan.
• Flavor: the hardest to pin down, and the most important.

Coffee on the menu

Drip, or filter, coffee is the usual cup in the United States. It goes to the guest black and unsweetened, and the guest adds sugar or milk.

• Black: plain coffee, no sugar, no milk or cream.
• Café au lait (also café crème): strong coffee, not espresso, with hot milk that has not been steamed; by tradition served in a bowl with no handle.
• Demitasse: strong black coffee or espresso served in a small cup; the word also names the cup itself.
• Iced coffee: strong coffee over ice. Sweeten it before it meets the ice. It may take milk or cream; Australians may add vanilla ice cream, and in Vietnam it drips from a small filter pot onto condensed milk. Never make it from leftover coffee.
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• After-dinner coffee: strong coffee with spirits, liqueur or spice, often sweet and topped with whipped cream. Irish coffee uses Irish whisky; café brûlot uses orange, cloves and brandy.

Drinks built on espresso.

A barista, Italian for bartender, is now a person trained to make espresso drinks. Steamed milk is heated by the steam from the espresso machine to about 66°C to 77°C (150°F to 170°F). Foamed milk is heated and whipped with steam and air, and ends up a little cooler. Any milk works; more fat gives a creamier drink. To froth, hold a jug of milk under the steam wand. Turn on the steam only once the tip is below the surface, and keep the tip under while you move the jug, until the milk looks like frothy cream. Milk itself is covered with dairy. see chapter 14: Dairy and cheese

Coffee: flavors, caffeine and other uses

Ground chicory root has long been mixed into coffee, and the French in particular like its bitterness. Other cultures have used toasted barley, dried figs and spices. Flavored beans, such as vanilla, hazelnut or chocolate raspberry, are tumbled with flavoring oils after roasting.

Caffeine is an alkaloid found in coffee, tea leaves and cocoa beans. It can make people more alert and less tired, but too much gives some people a racing heart or keeps them awake. A cup of filtered coffee holds 85 to 100 mg. Decaffeinated coffee has at least 97% of its caffeine taken out.

Coffee also goes into food: stews, sauces and pan gravy; rye and pumpernickel breads; cakes, custards, ice cream, dessert sauces and icings. It pairs well with chocolate, nuts and rum.

Tea and tisanes

Tea and tisanes are made by infusion: dried leaves, herbs, spices, flowers or fruit steeped in freshly boiled water. More than half the people in the world choose tea as their drink. In the United States, 85% of the tea drunk is iced.

All true tea comes from the leaves of one plant, Camellia sinensis, a tree or bush of high, wet, tropical places. What happens to the leaves after picking makes the three kinds.

• Black tea is fermented, which gives it an amber-brown color and a strong taste.
• Green tea is not fermented. It is yellow-green, with a bitter edge. Among Chinese green teas, Gunpowder is ranked finest, then Imperial, then Hyson.
• Oolong is part fermented, so it sits between the two. It is popular in China and Japan, often scented with jasmine.

Black tea is graded by leaf size, because big leaves brew slower than small ones. Chinese and Indian black teas use the same grades:

• Souchong means large leaves.
• Pekoe means medium leaves.
• Orange pekoe means the smallest whole leaves; the word "orange" has nothing to do with the fruit.
• Broken leaves, graded broken orange pekoe or broken pekoe, brew darker and stronger and fill most tea bags.

Green and oolong leaves are graded by size and age.

Like coffee, tea takes its character from where it grows, and many teas carry a place name: Darjeeling, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Assam. Many teas on sale are blends. A flavored tea has oils, dried fruit, spices, flowers or herbs added. Allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg and black pepper make teas for cold weather; mint and citrus brighten others, and bergamot oil is what flavors Earl Grey. A table of black, green and oolong teas is with breakfast and brunch. see chapter 15: Drinks

Tea is judged on three points. Astringency, or briskness, is a sharp, dry feel on the tongue that makes tea refreshing; it is not bitterness, which is a fault. Body is how thick the tea feels, from light to full. Aroma is its smell and flavor once brewed.

Tisanes, or herb teas, hold no real tea. They are made by steeping flowers, herbs, seeds or roots, fresh or dried; chamomile, ginseng, linden flower and lemon balm are favorites. Most countries have folk medicines given this way. In Europe a tisane may follow a meal to help digestion, or come at bedtime to help sleep. Herb teas usually have no caffeine. During the American Revolution they were called "Liberty teas." In a restaurant they arrive as ready-made blends.