Home › Food Drinks and Fun Drinks › Coffee
Coffee
The best cup of coffee in South America can be had in Brazil or Colombia. Brazil grows four fifths of the world's supply, but Colombia produces an exceptionally flavorsome bean at a high altitude, and many coffee tasters say that a judicious mixture of the two makes the finest blend. In such coffee-conscious cities as Santos, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro you'll see shiny metal trays set with tiny white porcelain cups and saucers, bowls of heavy, dampish sugar, and little steaming coffeepots being carried about in offices, homes and the streets at all times of day and night. In every factory and workshop, indeed, apprentices are kept busy brewing the national drink or running out for it to the nearest sidewalk cafés which are set with tables for coffee topers, some of whom think nothing of downing 30-40 cups a day.
Coffee in Brazil is always made fresh and, except at breakfast time, drunk jet black from demitasses first filled almost to the brim with the characteristic moist, soft coffee sugar of the country that melts five times as fast as our hard granulated. For breakfast larger cups are used, and they're more than half filled with hot milk, not cream. This café com leite doesn't require so much sugar as café preto-black coffee.
Every Brazilian household takes a great interest in new coffee-making devices, both imported and domestic, tries them out and then goes back to the time-honored method of the cotton bag. (A clean white sock will do in a pinch.) The bag produces the best results after it has been used a number of times, and Brazilians insist that nothing else will bring out the full, rich coffee flavor. Made of a special fabric, cut or woven in cornucopia shape, the bag has a wire run through its hem to hold it open in a wide circle. You can fashion one yourself by cutting 2 isosceles triangles from Canton flannel, 9 inches long, or high, and 8 1/2 inches across the base. Sew the long edges of the two pieces together with a double seam, making a pointed bag. At the top run a narrow hem to put the wire through, bending it into a circle. Scald or boil the bag to take out the cottony taste.
Real Brazilian coffee is usually made from the best grade of "Santos" and is always "high roast," roasted until it's dark brown, then ground to the fineness of granulated sugar. Put into the bag 1 tablespoon for each cup and 1 extra for the pot. Have water freshly boiling. Hang bag down inside a coffeepot or over a small-mouth pitcher. Pour in slowly the number of cups of boiling water you want of coffee and a little extra to allow for what's absorbed by bag and grounds.
Do not pour it through more than once, and be sure to pour it slowly, according to the New Orleans Creole saying: "If you can hear it dripping, honey, it's dripping too fast." If your taste for coffee is highly developed you'll be delighted with the result. The bag should be kept in cold fresh water after using and must be boiled and hung in the sun two or three times a week.
Coffee made in Brazilian style is so good that even the patio parrot goes for it, so you musn't be surprised if when having outdoor breakfast in Santos or Rio you see a green or golden head dipping into your cup. And European zoo 1 keepers have found coffee so essential to the diet of Latin- American parrots that they fill the birds' drinking cups with good strong coffee several times a day.
You may not have heard about painted coffee, but Brazil dyes the unroasted beans with several colors of painted earth to please the eye of customers in different countries- Africans, for instance, insist on bright red beans. There's no harm in this, of course, since the paint is roasted away and the beans cleaned before being ground.
This is a working description of café coado — coffee filtered through a cloth sock — along with instructions for sewing the filter. The method still produces excellent coffee; most of what needs updating is the water temperature and the care of the cloth.
- What a "cup" means hereBrazilian coffee is served in demitasses of roughly 2 to 3 fluid ounces, so a tablespoon of grounds per cup is a strong ratio scaled to a small serving. If you are filling 6-ounce mugs, work from about 2 level tablespoons of ground coffee per 6 ounces of water instead.
- Water off the boilWater at a full 212F scalds fine grounds and pulls out bitterness; let the kettle stand half a minute and pour at 195-205F.
- The grind"Fineness of granulated sugar" means a medium-fine grind, finer than drip but coarser than espresso. A grind this fine would clog a paper cone.
- Pour rate is the hingeThe Creole line about hearing it drip is the whole technique. A slow, steady spiral pour over two to three minutes gives full extraction; a fast dump runs through the bed and gives thin, sour coffee. Pour once only — recirculating extracts the spent grounds.
- The bagCanton flannel is a napped cotton, sold now as outing flannel or brushed cotton; unbleached muslin or a purpose-made Brazilian coador de pano works as well. Scald any new cloth before first use, and wash it in plain water with no detergent, which the fabric will hold and pass into the coffee.
- Storing the filterKeeping the wet bag in cold water is correct in principle — coffee oils in a dried cloth turn rancid — but a jar of water left on the counter will grow mold. Store it submerged in a covered jar in the refrigerator, change the water daily, and boil it every few days as the original directs.
- Sugar and milkThe "moist, soft coffee sugar" is an unrefined, damp Brazilian sugar; demerara or a soft light brown sugar is the nearest thing on a supermarket shelf, though it dissolves more slowly than the original. For café com leite, scald whole milk rather than heating cream.
- Roast"High roast" means dark. Modern specialty Santos and Colombian beans are usually roasted much lighter, so ask for a dark roast if you want the cup the text describes.
The cloth filter this entry describes is the coador de pano, still a common everyday brewing method in Brazilian homes and roadside cafés; filtering coffee through fabric predates the paper filter. The passage belongs to a mid-twentieth-century vein of American travel-and-outdoor cookery writing that treated foreign domestic technique as something worth carrying home, and it catches Brazil while it dominated the world crop — the São Paulo hinterland behind the port of Santos was a major source of internationally traded coffee, and "Santos" functioned as a grade and shipping name taken from the port of export rather than a single place of origin. The claim that the same drip discipline governs New Orleans practice is fair: Creole coffee was likewise made by slow pour-over, and the drip pot was a fixture in Louisiana kitchens. The remarks about parrots and dyed beans are travelers' color and should be read as such.