Made by Hand (10 page)

“Yeah. I give you some babies, and if you grow them for thousands of years, without planting them every year you get some and they give babies and every year you will have them.” I assumed he wasn’t telling me to stick the garlic directly into the compost but just hopping from subject to subject a bit faster than technically comprehensible.

I was trying to memorize Alfie’s compost recipe while he led me away. “I want you to try something else.” We wound our way through the dense foliage. We passed by a fig tree, and I asked him about it.

“Oh, in March or February I give you cuttings. I have figs you’ve never tasted in your life. You don’t see them in the market. I have four or five kinds. When you eat them—like chocolate. If you close your eyes and eat them, you think it’s chocolate.”

He stopped at a row of pepper plants and pulled a couple from each plant. Some were round like marbles, some were like small jalapeños, others were like cayennes. But they all tasted sweet. “You never get these peppers in America,” he said again. “If you chop this and you put one or two hot also with them and make an omelet with eggs—ah,
delicious
!”

Since we were on the subject of food preparation, I asked him if he made his own yogurt.

“It’s very easy. You know how?”

“No, I’ve been reading how to, but I don’t really know.”

“You boil the milk. It has to be whole milk. One or two boilings. Put it aside for a while until you can put finger in and it doesn’t burn. Then you put one or two or three spoons of yogurt and mix it and cover it and put it in the oven for a little while without the oven on and you wait a little while.”

Before I got the chance to ask him how long you have to wait, he had plucked a few small greenish-yellow fruits from a nearby tree. They looked like unripe grapefruits. “These fruits you’ve never tasted in all your life.” He pulled a knife that was sticking blade down in a pot of dirt, rinsed it under a hose, and cut one of the lemons into quarters, handing it to me. I bit into it, expecting it to be tart, but it was just the opposite—sweet, like a kid’s drink, without acidity.

“This is good!” I said. “Will it grow from a seed?” I was thinking of saving the seeds from the piece he’d given me.

“No. No.”

“Is it something you got in the Middle East, too?”

“Yeah, yeah. And I’ll tell about this. If somebody has cold, if you eat eight, ten of this, he’s gonna jump back up after a day.”

My pockets full of peppers and sweet lemons, I said goodbye to Alfie and his wife and rode my bike home.

Since moving from Tarzana to Studio City in the spring of 2009, I have had to start over with a new garden. Unfortunately, the difficulty of the move and predator problems with the chickens have kept me too busy to establish the large garden I’d planned. And besides, the new property doesn’t really offer a good gardening spot. I ended up buying several “Earth Boxes,” plastic containers with a reservoir at the bottom that stores water, which wicks up into the soil, preventing it from drying out. The benefit of the system is that you don’t have to water the plant every day, as you do with a normal container.

Earth Boxes come with a bag of soil and organic fertilizer. In early summer 2009, Jane and I transplanted some pepper, basil, and sunberry seedlings (from seeds I’d ordered the previous August) into them, and I was shocked at how fast the plants shot up. As our new deck is quite large, I could easily put twenty or more Earth Boxes on it and grow a bountiful fruit and vegetable harvest. But I won’t grow sunberries again. They ripened and looked like delicious blueberries, but when Jane and I sampled them, they were loaded with hard, slimy seeds and had an offputting aftertaste. Jane was so disappointed in them that she almost cried. Fortunately, chickens love them.

I’ve also begun planting fruit trees, designating the steep undeveloped slope below the chicken coop as the orchard. I hope to establish fig, feijoa, grapefruit, citrus, and persimmon trees here, as we had at our place in Tarzana, as well as a variety of more exotic trees, such as dragonfruit, banana, pineapple, mango, cinnamon, and maybe even coffee, all of which have been successfully grown in Los Angeles. I’m sure it will take a long time for the trees to bear fruit, but I’m in no hurry.

Growing things to eat and making foods like yogurt, sauerkraut, and kombucha have only encouraged me to learn more, to try new gardening techniques, to preserve my harvests using different methods. When I meet a fellow food gardener, we end up talking endlessly about our experiments, failures, and successes. I can’t think of anything more fascinating or engaging than the magic and science of converting tiny seeds into beautiful, tasty fruits and vegetables. I’m sorry I didn’t start doing it earlier in life.

4

TICKLING MISS SILVIA

“I define a Godshot as a better shot than I’ve ever made before. Each time I pull one, the bar goes up a little and it will be harder to pull the next one.”

—KARL RICE, ALT.COFFEE NEWSGROUP, 2001, REFERRING TO THE PERFECT SHOT OF ESPRESSO

 

 

 

 

Milanese manufacturing plant owner Luigi Bezzera was upset. In his opinion, his workers spent too much time making coffee and not enough time on his assembly lines. Bezzera devised a steam-powered solution to speed things up: a machine that shot steam through coffee grounds directly into a cup in just twenty seconds—coffee made to order. Now his employees could get their caffeine and get right back to work.

Bezzera’s employees back in 1901 may not have appreciated their truncated breaks, but they loved the strong, caffeinated nectar. Figuring he was onto something, Bezzera patented his “fast coffee machine,” now regarded as the first espresso machine. The coffee was somewhat bitter because the steam was too hot (higher temperatures produce bitter coffee, lower temperatures produce sour coffee), but it caught on. A few years later, Desiderio Pavoni bought Bezzera’s patent and immediately went to work on improving it, the main modification being a pressure-relief valve. His “Ideale” machine was introduced at the 1906 Milan International Fair, and while it was more successful than Bezzera’s original, it still used the steam-extraction method that caused bitterness.

It wasn’t until 1947, when Giovanni Achille Gaggia patented a machine with a lever-operated piston—doing away with the need for high-temperature steam to push water through the coffee—that modern espresso was born. In addition to producing a coffee that was less bitter and more acidic (not to be confused with sourness, acidity is something to be desired in coffee), Gaggia’s invention yielded a delicious new component:
crema,
the dark orange foam that forms on the top of a well-pulled shot of espresso.

Like millions of other people, I’m an espresso enthusiast. (The last time I can recall going without a cup of the black gold was in 1995, when I spent an otherwise fabulous day on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific.) Espresso is an important part of my life, a twice- (often thrice-) daily ritual for my wife and me. I’d been drinking coffee for years but never really appreciated it until, in my early twenties, I tried an espresso at a café in Denver. For the first time, I could really
taste
the coffee. That weak, sour brown water I’d been drinking during all-nighters in the dorm was nothing like this rich-smelling, strong drink that was served to me in a comically miniature cup with a slice of lemon peel on the side. The instant it passed my lips, I became hooked. I’ve made my own espresso for the past fifteen years or so, but despite having read many how-to articles, I never felt as though I’d gotten the hang of it. That started to bug me. If I was going to be drinking at least two double shots of espresso daily without fail, I decided I ought to get better at making my own.

The first thing I did was go online and read about making espresso. I discovered that there were a number of variables:

Though I tried my best to control these variables, the appearance and taste of the espresso I made varied wildly from shot to shot. Sometimes the coffee gurgled out of the machine, weak and musty. Others, it dribbled out sour and muddy. Sometimes the grind was too fine, so the pump would choke on it, and only a few drops would come out.

But once in a while, my espresso was sublime, a rich layer of
crema
on top of a thick, strong shot of coffee. This kind of espresso, which tastes as good as roasted beans smell, is called a “Godshot” among professional and amateur baristas. The problem was, I had no idea why my espresso was heavenly some days, downright diabolical on others.

That’s why, one Sunday morning in June 2008, I loaded my espresso machine and coffee grinder into the back of my car and drove to a gritty industrial neighborhood in East L.A. to meet the best espresso maker in the country.

Kyle Glanville greeted me at the R&D headquarters of Intelligentsia Coffee and Tea. Rail thin, with penetrating eyes and an Anthony Perkins haircut, he’s perfectly cast for the role of “manager, espresso research and development.” I had been buying Intelligentsia’s Black Cat espresso beans by mail order for months. After seeing my favorable review of the beans on Boing Boing, Intelligentsia’s marketing manager invited me to visit its new Los Angeles-based operation (the company started in Chicago). I jumped at the chance to polish my espresso-making skills.

Glanville shook my hand and welcomed me into the espresso testing room, a sparklingly clean laboratory with two industrial espresso machines and an array of grinders, thermometers, color charts, and glassware. Glanville had recently returned from Minneapolis, where he’d won first place at the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s 2008 National Barista Championship. A panel of seven judges (four sensory, two technical, and one head judge) awarded Glanville top marks against the forty-nine other state champions for the taste and consistency of his espresso beverages, the creativity and style of his visual and verbal presentation, cleanliness, and demonstrated technical knowledge and skill.

I was taken on a tour of the facility. Behind the testing room is a rebuilt and upgraded fifty-year-old German coffee roaster with a cast-iron drum (which distributes heat evenly to the beans roasting inside). Off to the side were dozens of stacks of burlap bags filled with unroasted coffee beans. I grabbed a nearby scooper and scooped green beans from an opened sack. They had no smell as far as I could tell. I bit one and was surprised to find how tough it was to break with my teeth. It had a distinctly green flavor to it. Glanville then led me back to the lab to begin my education.

Throughout my decade and a half of espresso making, I’ve used a variety of inexpensive machines, ranging from a $15 Italian stovetop maker to a $200 machine from Starbucks. A couple of years ago, I bought a Rancilio Silvia espresso maker for $500 after reading high praise for it on
coffeegeek.com
, a Web site with discussion forums, guides, and product reviews about coffee and coffee making. The Silvia is a boxy, no-frills, fully manual espresso maker that looks like it belongs in the galley of a Soviet destroyer. I also bought an $80 burr grinder. Burr grinders produce a much more consistent grind than common cheap blade types, which lacerate beans into shreds of many different sizes. Glanville looked at my grinder approvingly and told me that he used the same model at home. He seemed to be purposely avoiding comment on my Rancilio.

“What do you think of the Rancilio?” I asked him, pressing the issue.

“It’s not very good, really,” he replied, almost apologetically.

“Really?” I asked. “What machine would you recommend instead that costs $500?”

“Oh, there’s nothing better you could buy for that price.”

In fact, Glanville was generally against the idea of homemade espresso. His reasons: The hassle of getting and keeping fresh beans, the overall messiness of the procedure, the high cost of decent equipment, and all the finicky requirements needed to pull a quality shot of espresso made it an unsuitable activity for everyone but the most determined home baristas. He said buying a brew system like a Chemex (a glass carafe popular with coffee geeks) would be easier to master and more fun.

Sensing my reluctance to take his advice, he added, “But there’s still a lot you can do to get it to make really good espresso. We’ll figure out how to do it today.”

We decided that the best way to get started was to have me make a cup of espresso while he watched. I poured some beans into the grinder, made sure the fineness dial was at the usual setting, and twisted the timer. Next I pulled out the bin containing the freshly ground coffee and inserted the black plastic scoop that came with the espresso machine. I deposited two scoops of coffee in the Rancilio’s filter basket, then grabbed the tamper and pushed down on the coffee, compressing it.