Coffee, Tea, Herbs and Spices

Freshness is the thread that binds good coffee, tea and herbs. If you freeze your coffee, caddy your tea and hide your herbs in the dark; it matters not. These things do not improve with age, nor can you retard their deterioration with temperature control or storage containers – not much anyway. With all three, you need to buy often or grow your own and only pluck as much as you can use in a reasonable amount of time.

Coffee – There are four ingredients necessary for good coffee; whole beans, freshly roasted, recently ground and water that doesn’t come from a tap. Never make coffee, tea or soup in any liquid you might use for a bath or a shower.

Most packaged whole beans are no better than packaged ground coffee, if you don’t know when they were roasted or ground. And it doesn’t make any difference whether you drip, perk, squeeze or use forced steam – although steam (an espresso machine) will extract the maximum flavor from beans. A can of ground coffee will be fresh for a day. After that, you’re drinking muddy water.

There’s no secret to making a good cup of Jo; find your local roaster, buy beans in small quantities, grind your beans just before brewing, and use good water like Deer Park. If a good water source is necessary to brew a good beer, you can bet your biscuits it’s crucial for good coffee and tea.

The best tool for the best coffee is an espresso machine – the most popular unused gift in every bride’s wedding booty. This is a boon to all coffee lovers; many yard sales and almost every estate sale will part with an unused or hardly used espresso machine for nickels on the dollar. A cheesy new German machine goes for $200, a middling unit for $500 and a stylish Italian semi-pro machine will set you back $1200 or more. Many folks complain about the trouble and expense of home brew, so let’s do the math.

We bought a $500 Italian machine at an estate sale for $30. A pound of beans from our local roaster goes for $10. We buy a pound every two weeks; that’s $260 per year. Our grinder was $12. We pay $60 a year for potable bulk water and let’s say an equal amount for coffee milk. We drink two double cappuccinos a day at a cost of $402 annually, including hardware.

Were you to buy two double shot coffee drinks at Starbucks at let’s say an average price of $8 (a conservative estimate) a day your bill is nearly $3000 per year. If you only have one double or two singles the bill is still $1500. If you went to Dunkin’ Donuts for two smalls a day, the cost would be over $750 a year without the donuts. Think of it this way; if you make your own favorite coffee drinks at home, with the money you save, you can buy a brand new Italian espresso machine in a year or a new car in four years.

Tea – Here again the key is fresh, the freshest leaves you can buy. Most of the stuff in tea bags is not leaf; it’s more like tea dust. These days almost every good sized shopping mall has a tea monger. Buy your leaves often and in bulk. Loose tea is like loose women, if you buy quantity, there’s a substantial savings.

Co-ops are also a good place to find selections of bulk tea, as are oriental markets. By weight, if you purchase loose tea, you can buy four to five times more tea for the same price you pay for bags - and the bags make crummy tea.

The only tools required are a stainless kettle, a good ceramic tea pot (English, Irish or Japanese) and a mesh stainless ball infuser. A level spoon of tea for each cup of boiling water is just about right in most cases. Don’t let the tea steep for more than ten minutes. Very strong tea goes bitter before you can say; ‘one lump or two’.

Sun tea is a great alternative to brewed tea. Just fill a half gallon clear glass jug with water and a tsp of tea for each cup of water and let stand in the sun for a day. Strain, refrigerate and enjoy. Before we leave tea and coffee, a word about plumbing.

Aged tea or coffee is a natural laxative. Take a cup of strong coffee or tea, with a little milk or cream, and age it for a day in the fridge. Consume rapidly and walk briskly to the room with the bidet. Talk about your stimulus packages!

Herbs – Fresh and dried herbs are a world apart. Take oregano. The dried variety has a very distinctive barnyard smell; while the aroma of fresh oregano is much more subtle, less like autumn leaves and more like spring flowers. And so it goes with most herbs. The dried variety is usually stronger but that taste works well in some dishes. But like tea they don’t have much of a shelf life. When your dried herbs start to turn lighter or darker, they have oxidized and it’s time to throw them in the round file. Spoiled herbs as spice is not nice and like old fishes, ruins many dishes.

Compare the price of a jar of supermarket herbs to the price of loose or bulk herbs at a co-op. You will not believe what you’re paying for that label and that jar.

Without digressing into truck farming, there are many annual and perennial herbs that can be grown in your yard, on your deck and in your kitchen window. Tending a robust herb garden can be a fun project for your kids or a maiden uncle; and they’re a lot cheaper than five cats or a pony. You don’t have to walk your plants either; and indoor plants, unlike indoor cats, will sweeten your indoor air.

How bout the economics you say? We have a single parsley stalk in a flower pot that has been throwing sprigs for three years. We bring it into the kitchen in winter. One small bunch of parsley at the grocer costs $2 to $3. Our rosemary bush in the yard is older than most of the neighbors. A laurus nobilis (bay leaf) can be passed to your children. Sage grows like a weed, as does mint. Our basil patch in the garden seeds itself every fall and new plants appear as if by magic every spring. A tub of cherry tomatoes will do the same thing. There are some varieties of green onions or chives that you couldn’t kill with an air strike. You get the drift I’m sure.

Before we leave the seasonings, let me say a few words about garlic and shallots. As bulbs go these are pretty expensive items by weight. And when you store them, you can’t tell which have gone south until you peel them. If you shop at a Korean grocer, you can buy peeled garlic by the half or full pint for the same price you might pay for a few bulbs elsewhere. Garlic and hot red peppers are the literal spice of life for Koreans. Their passion is your buying opportunity.

Store the closed container of garlic in the fridge and use as required or cover the cloves with olive oil and after a few days you have your cloves and infused oil - a ready made Busch Etta spread. Cloves stored in oil will last until the Mets win a pennant. Korean families roast garlic cloves like peanuts and serve them salted as a beer snack. Roasting tames the pungent taste and smell. Try it!

Spices – Most spices have a better shelf life than herbs; but for most of us they are a little impractical to grow. Any spice that can be bought whole kernel, like pepper corns, should be ground just before use. Indeed, if you are making something like pepper steak, the powdered stuff from a jar doesn’t get it. Ginger can be had in the crystallized form and used like the fresh type if you scrape off the sugar and soak it for a couple of minutes. Cloves and the like age pretty well in a cool dark place. Like coffee, tea and herbs; buy at a bulk outlet and you can save a bunch.

A final word on coffee, tea, herbs and spices. These industries exploit economies of scale. You are sold small amounts at modest prices, or so it seems; the per capita outlay is just a few dollars. Even then, you get an amount of product that probably will probably spoil before it’s used. However, over time these small but frequent purchases represent a small fortune. With coffee alone, if you price it by the retail cup over a lifetime, you can spend nearly a quarter million dollars. Add up the other “smalls” over a lifetime and, well – you get the picture.

America is the greatest food producer and distributor in the history of creation. This doesn’t mean that you as a consumer should throw caution or prudence to the wind. Be frugal in small ways and the big ticket items take care of themselves.