Cooking with Coffee Part 1: Cold Brew

For Thanksgiving dinner I made pumpkin pie. The secret ingredient? Coffee! I used our Honduras Linda Vista because I felt the sweet, spicy notes of this coffee would pair well with the spices typically added to pumpkin pie. To preserve the clean sweetness of this coffee I decided to cold brew it the night before I was planning on baking.

Photos by Devorah Freudiger, Gimme! Coffee.

Cold brewing at home is very easy to do, and it's my preferred method for recipes that call for coffee flavor because I find coffee that has been brewed hot and then cooled to be quite sour most of the time. Especially cooled espresso! I set my grinder about as coarse as it would comfortably go, even coarser than for french press. You can see the obvious space in between the burrs.

Cold brewing is often called Toddy coffee because Toddy is the most popular brand of cold brew equipment. I really enjoy most coffee brewing equipment, but for cold brewing I grab a mason jar. For my "bootleg" Toddy recipe I need a quarter pound of coffee. The Skerton top just barely holds enough.

The secret to cold brewing is the long extraction time. You are missing the heat element key to most brewing, so you need to give the water much more time to fully extract all the flavors from your coffee.

To my coarse ground coffee I added one liter of cool water. That's about double the 55 grams of coffee per liter of water average for most brew methods. This ratio yields a very concentrated cup, but it's very smooth because of cold water brewing.

After I added the water to my coffee in my fancy brewing jar I gave it a stir to thoroughly mix in all the grounds that float to the top. If your coffee is roasted and ground fresh you should get a nice bloom of grounds at the top, similar to brewing in a Press Pot.

I know people who get good results with more or less coffee, and more or less time. Have fun playing around with these parameters next summer! I give this ratio a good twelve hours to brew, which is why I started the process the night before baking. Good night coffee! Sweet dreams!

In the morning my toddy coffee is brewed and ready to strain. I used about half of this toddy in my pie, and half I drank over the week. This ratio of water to coffee yields a concentrate that I find most pleasant for iced coffee when I cut it one to one with cold water. Concentrated cold brew keeps for a week in fridge and is so easy to make.

I strained my Toddy coffee with a gold filter because of the amount of grounds I knew were going to come clumping out. I didn't want the cone to get choked up and take forever to drain or overflow, I've got to get baking!

Were this Toddy simply for drinking I would throw it in my fridge and be done. I wanted a slightly cleaner taste for my pie, so I ended up running the strained coffee through a paper filter to remove some of the oils and solids. That's how I cold brew at home. Super easy to bootleg, if you don't need it first thing in the morning your french press works well to both brew and strain cold coffee. However, if you are REALLY in to equipment there's always this guy.