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On Coffee-making

A method for roasting coffee berries and grinding them into coffee.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Coffee and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,442 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

On Coffee-making

Ingredients

Directions

Roast the berries

  1. Melt a little butter in a small sauté pan over low heat.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of coffee berries and stir until they turn a light brown.

  3. Discard any berries that turn darker.

Grind and store

  1. Grind the roasted berries immediately after roasting.

  2. Store the ground coffee in a dry canister, secured from air.

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. Coffee + buttertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,442 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Coffee berries
Browning and aroma develop as the sugars and proteins in the berries roast.
Butter
Fat carries heat evenly across the pan so the berries roast without scorching.

The step that matters

Discard any berries that turn darker. Berries roast unevenly, and once sugars pass light brown they quickly turn bitter and burnt. Removing the darker ones keeps the roasted flavour even and clean.

“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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