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Coffee

A method for brewing coffee using a tin cafetière and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Coffee

Why it works: Coffee and beans work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 289 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Coffee

Oven, in the book's wordsA gentle oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Preheat a tin cafetière by filling it with boiling water and letting it sit until hot.

  2. Discard the water and add the ground coffee to the upper compartment.

Brew and serve

  1. Press the coffee down with the piston.

  2. Pour boiling water gently through the strainer into the upper compartment.

  3. Cover the cafetière and let it sit in a warm place for a few minutes.

  4. Once the coffee has drained into the lower pot, it is ready to serve.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Coffee + beanstop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together289 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Freshly ground coffee beans
Provide the main flavour and aroma compounds that the hot water extracts.
Boiling water
Acts as the solvent that dissolves flavour compounds from the grounds.

The step that matters

Pour the water gently. Pouring slowly avoids disturbing the grounds and keeps the coffee bed even, so extraction is uniform. Steeping too long extracts bitter compounds, so the timing matters as much as the pour.

“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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