It is great fun to roast your own coffee beans. This is taking espresso coffee to the next level by roasting your own coffee beans. When it comes to coffee roasting there is a history of serious effort to produce the perfect cup. The good news for us is that coffee can be roasted at home on a domestic scale. Personally I use a Gene Cafe roaster which happily roasts about 300 g of coffee at a time. My approach is 3 batches of 300 g. [Read more…]
Making fresh pasta from scratch is great fun and comes with the added gadget appeal of requiring a pasta machine. Here I am making Fettuccine as an example. The basic rule of thumb is one egg (70g) to 1cup (100grams) of flour. In this example I have used 400 grams of flour so 4 eggs needed. As eggs vary in size the dough may need a little more flour or a little water. When I am making fresh pasta I prefer the dough to be a little on the dry side.
Pizzelle are a thin Italian waffle. When just cooked the waffles may be bent into various shapes such as cones or tubes. Lets face it, actually finding some where to buy the iron to cook the waffle is half the fun of cooking these. Any importer of Italian kitchen equipment should have these with a range of patterns and sizes. I prefer the low tech approach with a gas stove top and iron but you can also get an electric version.