Cold Brewed Coffee

I don’t know why it took me so long to try cold brewed coffee. It is easy to make, convenient to have on hand in the refrigerator and the taste is superior to regular brewed (less bitter). I started with a recipe from Dairy Made Easy (review of book to follow), but I then looked online for other recipes and tips on making this.

Here is the basic idea: mix coffee grounds with water, steep for 12 hours and then strain out the coffee grounds. It is kind of like sun tea.

The one thing that annoyed me about cold brewing was the mess of straining out the coffee from the water. I was taking out my coffee pot, putting a filter in it and then straining the coffee through that filter. It took more time than I would like and was messy.

Looking online, I saw that some people deal with this by using a nut milk bag to hold the grounds (kind of like a giant tea bag). You just pull out the bag with the grounds inside and discard the grounds. No filtering! You do have to clean the nut milk bag.

Here is my solution: fill a paper coffee filter with coffee grounds, staple the filter closed so that the grounds can’t escape and then brew. When the coffee is done steeping, just pull your homemade coffee pod out of the water and toss it.

I have played around a bit with how much coffee and water I use. I find that the most that the coffee filter can hold (and still be easy to staple closed) is between 6-8 tablespoons ( 1.5 to 2 ounces). I add 3 cups of water to this, but if you like your coffee stronger, you can add less (about 2 1/4 cups).

Bean Thinking of You Mishloach Manot

I was feeling kind of uninspired . . . For a mishloach manot theme, I was leaning towards “Random Stuff I found in Amazing Savings.” I didn’t even want to make any hamantaschen. I racked my brain for something that could get me excited about baking again. Then I remembered these coffee bean cookies from Carine Goren’s Sweet Secrets.

This is a soft cream cheese dough cookie, with a strong mocha flavor. To get the shape, you form the dough into an oval, and then press a toothpick down the center to make an indentation (I used a piece of uncooked spaghetti to mark the cookies).

You could make these cookies using any coffee flavored dough, as in this Martha Stewart recipe for espresso bean shortbread, which is shaped the same way. I have also seen cookies shaped like this dipped in chocolate, which makes them look even more like coffee beans (or more accurately, like coffee bean candy). But, I was feeling too lazy to go to the trouble of dipping the cookies in chocolate.

Then I realized that I had already bought a bunch of bags of black bean tortilla chips and a theme was born. Coffee bean, chocolate bean, vanilla bean, black bean . . . A bean theme. If I wanted to throw in candy, there are jelly beans, too. I’m planning on adding in a bottled coffee drink and mocha cupcakes (Amazing Savings had these cool Purim-themed cupcake liners with decorative flags).

Okay, it is kind of a lazy theme, because vanilla, chocolate and coffee cover almost everything. But, it is still a theme!

I ended making hamantaschen after all, with a coffee ganache filling (8 ounces bittersweet chocolate melted with a 4 ounce of strong coffee).  I used my regular hamantaschen dough, but you could use a chocolate dough, too.