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Drink

Roasting Coffee

Roasted coffee beans are prepared by heating raw beans, adding an egg, and brewing with water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Roasting Coffee

12 cups

Ingredients

Directions

Roast the coffee

  1. Put 1 pound of raw coffee in a small frying pan over medium heat.

  2. Shake and stir occasionally for 15 minutes until the coffee turns yellow.

  3. Cover the pan, increase the heat, and shake until the coffee is a deep cinnamon or chestnut color and oily. Be careful not to burn the coffee.

  4. While still warm, add 1 egg and its shell to the coffee and beat until every kernel is coated.

  5. Keep the coffee in airtight tin cans and grind only as needed.

Brew and serve

  1. For brewing, use 18 heaping tablespoons of ground coffee for every 12 cups of coffee.

  2. Boil water and scald the percolator.

  3. Place the ground coffee in the upper part of the percolator and pour in boiling water (about 2 cups). Let it stand for a few moments, then pour the first drawn coffee back into the upper part.

  4. Add boiling water as needed, and let it brew for 10 minutes before serving.

  5. Serve with white sugar and rich cream.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Coffee + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,339 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  3. Coffee + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Raw coffee
Roasting turns the green beans brown and develops the deep, aromatic flavor of coffee.
Egg
Coats the warm kernels so the coating helps bind and settle the roasted beans' surface.
White sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the bitterness of the roasted coffee.
Rich cream
Adds fat and body, softening the coffee's bitter edge.

The step that matters

Roasting the coffee to a deep cinnamon color. Roasting is where flavor develops, and the beans can scorch quickly once the heat is raised. Burnt beans taste acrid and bitter, so the color must be watched closely.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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