Credible Coffee

(Photo: My mornings - black coffee and a hardcopy of the New York Times.

Every day I'm one step closer to turning into my father.)

It feels like a betrayal, somehow, but I just don't have refined taste for coffee. I know when it sucks and when it's good, but it's become so institutionalized that it isn't about the actual coffee anymore, it's about the company selling it to you and about their method. It's like arguments surrounding fast food - you know, instinctively, that McDonald's must go through some ungodly quantity of potatoes every day, but if you start critiquing their fries, at some point you hit a wall and end up talking about McDonald's itself. You can't get past it because there's no real conception among normal people of what an industrial farm looks like, or how the potatoes make it into your hands. I keep trying to picture it, but all I keep coming back to is an image out of Faulkner, hardscrabble and backbreaking labor and bad luck, not machines that can harvest, shuck, and mulch acres at a time.

It's the same thing with coffee; it's always been a means moreso than an end to me, which probably explains why it's taken me til now to figure out how to brew a decent cup of the stuff. It was about time - I was sitting at my desk glowering at whatever just got spit out of the office Keurig and realized, if I was going to be drinking that much of something, I should realistically have more of a hand in preparing it than pushing a button and accepting whatever came out of it.

It turns out it wasn't as hard as I had built it up to be in my head and is more about the water/coffee balance that your beans need to achieve maximum awesomeness than anything else. It's also about being able to articulate and refine what, precisely, it is about coffee you like to help bring that out while de-emphasizing the things you care less about. I learned, though I knew this at some level, that I like lightish roasts and drip coffee, black, in obscene quantities, hot enough to warm my gut but not so hot as to keep me from drinking it fast. Essentially, I like diner coffee that's been cooling in a cup that never seems to empty.

I didn't realize that until I just typed that out, but...huh. Neat.

It's probably all very mundane and individual - talking about coffee is a bit like listening to somebody prattle on about their previous night's dreams - but I'll leave you with this one, tiny thing: apart from the coffee being fresher, more potent, and infused with the tiny bits of ownership and pride that come with being involved with the process of making something yourself, the warm, bubbling, swirling sound my coffee makes being poured from Thermos to cup at my desk at work is so transcendently pleasurable that I actually look forward to it when I'm making it in the morning.

It makes me never want to be near my office Keurig's spitting, kvetching machinations ever again.

So. Let's talk about food.

Let's talk about food (bay-bee).

Too often people eat without thinking about it. I don't mean in as much as they aren't concerned with what's sandwiched between the top and bottom bun of whatever they picked up at their fast-food joint of choice, moreso that they eat because it's necessary without actually thinking about what they like about their food.

Take the prototypical fast-food cheeseburger. Its ubiquity belies its construction - such a burger is a work of genius.

In its most fundamental form, you've got a bun, some beef, a slice of cheese, onions, ketchup, mustard and pickles. Not exactly rocket science - I could make some variation of that burger at home in 10 minutes flat that would have the added advantage of not having lived under a heat lamp for any length of time. For reference (and to give me the chance to show off a little) it'd look like this:
The purpose of the fast-food burger is to provide a buck's worth of caloric intake in its simplest form. Of the seven ingredients, the omission of any of them leaves you with something less than ideal: Forget the pickles and you lose the crunch; lose the ketchup and you lose the sweetness necessary to support the tartness of the onions and the bulk of the beef. Not a penny is wasted in its delivery. It's an intricately thought-out, edible wonder which, in my head, deserves the same level of thought on its eater's end as was expended in its construction.

I like to talk about food, and food prep, and food theory. I like thinking about why I like what I eat, why I cook how I do and how I can make my cooking better. I'm not about to tell you that you shouldn't go to Wendy's. I love Wendy's. But it's probably worth stopping every once in awhile and thinking about why you occasionally wake up a 3am in the throes of a vanilla frosty craving.

Or is that just me?