Grind & Steep

Eighty drinks built on coffee and tea, and deliberately not a brewing manual: every one has milk, sugar, spice, egg, cream or ice in it, which is what makes it a recipe rather than a setting. A cortado defined by the glass it is served in, Vietnamese egg coffee whipped from yolk and condensed milk, Turkish coffee boiled and settled, Scandinavian egg coffee clarified the way a consomme is, chai boiled hard with the leaf. Where a recipe wants a shot and you own no machine, it says what to use instead and what that costs you.

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What's inside

01 10 recipes

On a Shot

Drinks that are a shot and one other thing, opening with how to get a shot without a machine.

02 10 recipes

Milk, Foam and Temperature

Milk is sweetest at 60 to 65C and past 70C it does not come back. The numbers are printed.

03 10 recipes

Iced, Shaken and Over Ice

The enemy is dilution, so each recipe brews double, freezes the coffee or shakes it cold.

04 10 recipes

Sweet: Dessert in a Cup

The chapter where sugar runs away from you, so it is weighed in every recipe.

05 10 recipes

Coffee Around the World

Ten from ten places, several of them older than espresso and none a variation on a latte.

06 10 recipes

Chai and the Spiced Pot

The leaf boiled hard with milk and spice, which is wrong for tea and right for chai.

07 10 recipes

Matcha and the Whisked Bowl

Powdered tea never dissolves, it disperses, so every recipe starts with a sifted paste.

08 10 recipes

The Cold Larder

Syrups, concentrate and frozen coffee, so the other seventy take two minutes.

Sample recipe · page 12

Turkish Coffee, Boiled and Settled

Ingredients

14 g coffee, ground to a powder
150 ml water, cold
2 tsp sugar
½ tsp cardamom pods, crushed

Method

Stir the coffee, sugar, cardamom and cold water together in the cezve off the heat until there is no dry powder left.
Set it on a low heat and do not stir again. Stirring after this point breaks the foam that is about to form.
Watch for the dark ring of foam rising up the sides. Lift it off just before it breaks over, spoon foam into each cup, return it.
Bring it up a second time, then pour slowly into the cups.
Leave it a minute to settle. Drink down to the sludge and stop there; the grounds stay in the cup.

Page 12 of Grind & Steep — Turkish Coffee, Boiled and Settled recipe with dual metric weights and steps

Seventeen recipes carry a technique noteEach names one thing the drink turns on: why a moka pot comes off the heat at the first pale stream, why instant coffee is the correct ingredient for dalgona and real coffee will not work, why an egg clarifies boiled coffee, why pulling filter coffee from height cools and aerates it at once.

Ten pages carry no nutrition figures, on purposeFive are reference pages. The other five are black coffee -- an espresso, an americano, a ristretto -- which are about two calories a cup. A panel of zeroes says nothing, so those pages do not carry one, and this is the same honesty the shelf applies elsewhere.

Fifty-nine declare the short-list exceptionA cortado is two ingredients and a macchiato is three. STYLE asks for eight to thirteen and allows an honest shorter list where padding would be invention, so those recipes claim it out loud rather than quietly passing under a lowered floor.