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To Roast Coffee in Coffee Roaster
Procure a small family coffee roaster, open small section that acts as a cover and drop coffee (two-thirds of a pound raw Java and one-third of a pound raw Mocha) into the roaster. If convenient have a good charcoal fire in range, remove one of the lids then set roaster over fire. See that the cover is firmly closed, and turn the small handle rather slowly but constantly for fifteen minutes. Remove roaster from its stand, thoroughly shake coffee in roaster in all directions for two seconds, reset on its stand and continue to roast, constantly turning until a good light brown colour, which should take from twenty-five to twenty-eight minutes. Remove cover to see when proper colour is attained, and when doing so do not let roaster stand over fire but shift to corner of range. Place in an earthen jar, tightly cover, keep in a moderate temperature and use as required.
By roasting your own coffee as above described, you may be sure to always have it fresh and retaining its full aroma.
A drum roaster turned by hand over a stove-top burner is still a perfectly good way to roast a pound of green coffee, and the method here needs almost no translation. What has changed is what we know about cooling and resting the beans.
- The hinge: keep the drum movingConstant, even rotation is the whole technique. Any pause leaves the beans resting against hot metal and they scorch on one side, which shows up as ashy bitterness in the cup. The instruction to shift the roaster off the heat whenever the cover comes off is for the same reason.
- Charcoal, gas or electricA charcoal fire in a range lid is no longer available to most cooks; a gas burner on medium-high gives comparable radiant heat. The mass of the drum evens out the difference, but expect to adjust the flame as the roast progresses rather than setting it once.
- "Good light brown" means a City roast"Good light brown" probably corresponds roughly to what would now be called a City roast -- a colour reached shortly after first crack, the audible popping at roughly 385-400F. It is a light roast by any standard, well short of the oily dark beans sold today, and it suits the Java-Mocha blend's acidity.
- The 25-28 minutesLong by modern practice, where a drum roast usually finishes in 10-14 minutes. A slow roast is not wrong, but past about twenty minutes the beans tend to bake rather than roast and lose sweetness and aroma. Judge by colour, smell and the sound of first crack, not the clock.
- Cool the beans fast, and do not seal them at onceTip the beans out into a colander or wide metal tray and stir or fan them until they are cool to the touch, or they continue roasting from their own heat. Freshly roasted coffee then gives off carbon dioxide for a day or two; an earthen jar "tightly covered" will build pressure, so leave the lid loose for the first 24 hours.
- Chaff and smokeRoasting a pound of coffee produces real smoke and a quantity of papery chaff. Run the extractor hood, open a window, and expect to sweep.
- YieldA pound of green coffee loses roughly 15-18 percent of its weight in roasting, much of it water, and gives about 13 to 14 ounces roasted. Roast at intervals rather than in quantity; the freshness the recipe promises fades within a couple of weeks.
- Sourcing the beansGreen Java and Yemeni Mocha are still sold by specialty importers, though "Mocha" on a modern label often means an Ethiopian bean of similar character rather than Yemeni coffee.
The two-to-one blend of Java and Mocha specified here is often called the oldest named coffee blend in Europe, pairing the low-acid, full-bodied coffee of Dutch-controlled Java with the sharp, winy beans shipped from the Yemeni port of Mokha. That a cookbook of this period explains home roasting at all reflects a trade in transition: through most of the nineteenth century coffee commonly reached households green, because roasted beans went stale on the road, and many kitchens had a hand-cranked roaster or a long-handled pan for the range. Pre-roasted coffee in sealed paper and tin, sold under brand names from the 1860s onward, steadily took the job over, and by the time this book appeared home roasting was becoming a connoisseur's practice rather than a necessity, which is precisely the case the last sentence is making.