Archive for May, 2010
The saw goes that if it tastes good it’s bad for your health. This, of course, is not always true. Take the case of hot cocoa.
Recent studies have shown that hot cocoa is a good source for antioxidants. In fact, a better source that both red wine and tea. Hot cocoa was found to have twice the antioxidants of red wine and three to five times the antioxidants of tea.
Don’t get too excited though, the caloric and trans fat content of hot chocolate can contribute to obesity and dental problems. This is mostly due to the cocoa butter and added sugar. Hot cocoa has the cocoa butter removed but may still have added sugars.
In moderation, however, you can enjoy hot cocoa as part of a healthy diet.
Until next time – happy sipping.
A strong cocktail with rum and brandy, and lots of espresso . You’ll be the hit of your next party if you serve Cappuccino Royales for everyone. Found on the coffeeteabout.com site.
Ingredients:
* 1/2 cup half n half
* 1/2 cup espresso
* 2 tbs brandy
* 2 tbs white rum
* 2 tbs creme de cacao
* Sugar
Preparation:
Whisk cream until frothy. Split espresso between 2 mugs. Add 1 tbs of each liqueur into each mug. Top with whipped cream, and add sugar to taste.
Serves 2
Until next time, happy brewing.
Modern gourmet decaf coffee is a marvel of chemistry. The techniques developed in the last century have done much to preserve the flavor of the coffee while removing the caffeine. Here are a few things about gourmet decaf coffee you may not have known.
* Decaf coffee is not caffeine free. The decaffeination process removes from 97% to 99.9% of the caffeine. This leaves about 5 milligrams of coffee in an six ounce cup.
* Not all coffees are the same. Coffees made from Robusta beans contain twice the caffeine of Arabica beans. By definition the coffee must be made from Arabica beans to be considered gourmet coffee.
* More decaf coffee is consumed annually than the combined amount of both Fair Trade and organic coffee.
* Approximately 17.7% of all coffee consumed worldwide is decaf coffee.
Until next time, happy brewing.
It can be a real struggle to eat healthy. Making sure you get the proper portions of each food group can be difficult in our hectic lives and often unhealthy food choices.
One aid in getting your appropriate fruit portions is drinking fruit smoothies. Squeezed fruit and smoothie drinks deliver all the good vitamin benefits of eating raw fruit. Carefully choosing your fruit choices will also stretch the health benefit of your smoothies. Strawberries, bananas, citrus fruits, blueberries, and kiwis are excellent choices to ensure a healthy smoothie.
With summer here you also get the hydration and energy boost benefits of a smoothie. Enjoy in good health.
Tea bags have become a fixture of the tea drinking world. They’re convenient and less messy to deal with. So why should you consider drinking loose leaf tea?
First, tea bags are made up of broken tea leaves called fannings. These pulverized remnants of the tea leaf have a shorter infusion time, but many of the flavoring oils are lost to evaporation resulting in an inferior cup of tea. Also, due the to mass production nature of tea bags it is made from mass production, low quality teas.
Pyramid tea bags strike a middle ground preserving more of tea leaf and giving expanded room for the tea to expand. The trade-off is the additional expense of the packaging.
Whole leaf tea is made up of whole leaves or part of of the leaves. This preserves the flavoring oils essential to give a superior cup. Secondly, loose leaf tea has room to expand and unfurl releasing more of the flavoring oils. Quality loose leaf tea will also stand up to multiple steepings, bringing the price per cup of tea very close to the cost of tea bag tea.
As for the mess a wide variety of steeping balls, steeping sticks, steeping baskets, steeping bags, etc. are available to manage the mess and appeal to the the aesthetic taste of everyone.
Until next time – happy steeping.
Ah Summer! Warm weather, barbecues, hanging out at the pool. Here’s a tea treat to take some of the sting off the summer heat. The source for the recipe is the Monin signature recipe series.
Cupid’s Tea
* .5 ounces Monin Raspberry tea syrup.
* .5 ounces Monin Strawberry tea syrup.
* 8 ounces freshly brewed tea.
Combine the tea syrups in a 16 ounce glass with ice. Add the tea and stir. Garnish with fresh berries. Enjoy.
For dieters and diabetics substitute a sugar free tea syrup instead, Monin offers both flavors in the sugar free format.
Until next time – happy steeping.
A friend related an amusing story the other day. He had a box of camping supplies that he hadn’t opened in several years. In it he found an unopened bag of gourmet coffee.
He opened the bag. His comment was, “It smelled like coffee, but not good coffee.”
So just a reminder – coffee has shelf life, about two weeks once you open the bag. Even a sealed bag will experience some degradation in the quality of the coffee, but you can expect to get about 9 months of shelf life for an unopened bag.
Note that whole coffee beans will hold up better than pre-ground coffee. So grinding your own beans is always the freshest possible choice.
Until next time – happy brewing.
One of the pleasures of a good espresso coffee is the proper crema, that layer of foam that sits at the top of the drink. Getting a great crema at home can be very difficult on a home espresso maker. Here are a few tips from The Joy of Coffee, an excellent book by Corby Kummer.
You need fresh beans for the espresso. You won’t get any crema if your coffee bean are not fresh.
Your crema is off-white and dissipates too quickly – underextracted espresso. Try the following: make sure the water and the everything the water passes through is hot. Do a dry run with only water to heat your espresso maker and consider tossing the first cup as it will likely be subpar. Try a finer grind on the coffee. Try tamping harder and stopping the brew sooner.
If the crema is dark and burnt looking means the espresso is overextracted. Try a coarser grind. Ease up on both the amount of coffee and the tamping.
Until next time, happy brewing.
The cancer prevention component of tea is in the polyphenols in the tea. The processing of green tea maintains more of these polyphenols making it better than black tea overall for its health benefits. But does the process of decaffeinating green tea reduce the health benefits of decaf green tea?
Two processes are used for decaffeinating tea. One, which makes use of the solvent ethyl acetate, retains only 30 percent of the polyphenols. The other process uses only water and carbon dioxide and is called “effervescence.” It retains 95 percent of the polyphenols. Be sure to check labels to see which process was used.
Don’t like decaf green tea, there is good news. The first steep of the tea leaves contains the most caffeine. Each subsequent steep contains less caffeine and by the third steep the caffeine content is reduced to almost 2%. To take advantage of this, steep the green tea for 50 seconds and discard the tea, but not the leaves. Add new water and enjoy your reduced caffeine gourmet tea.
Until next time – happy steeping.
Many people today are gravitating toward organic products. The dual concepts of organic farming methods designed to be more ecologically friendly and the use of natural fertilizers and pesticides appeal to both one’s sense of social consciousness and the health concerns about chemical pesticides and their effects.
Organic Coffee offers a few health benefits for the coffee drinker. The first is increased antioxidant content due to the absence of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. To get the most antioxidant benefit drink coffee with a medium roast. Darker roasts experience a degradation in antioxidant benefit. Also stay with an Arabica Coffee as it has higher flavanoid content than Robusta coffee. (Source: coffeescience.org)
The second is increased nutrient content because it is shade grown. The soil preservation techniques employed in organic farming also lead to soil with greater nutrient content.
Third, all coffee has a diuretic and laxative effect, so it can be beneficial in weight loss.
Finally, it’s delicious! Any good food contributes to stress relief. If the caffeine is problematic for you, decaf options in organic coffee are readily available.
Until next time, happy brewing.