Straight from the mountains of Ecuador, we here at Dave’s Coffee recently came across a very old school way of roasting coffee beans…right on the griddle.
They call it, “La Esencia.” With a bad ass name like that, how could you go wrong? Coffee, be it Europe, North America, Africa, Asia, or South America, seems to hold the same mystical properties as an elixir to appease the mind. Oh yeah. It’s good.
So after a recent trip to Ecuador, David and Sandra Lanning (owners of Dave’s Coffee and Galapagos) brought back some “green” beans, a molar (a coffee grinder), and a “chuspa” (a special kind of coffee brewer). Pan roasting green beans bought for the farmer’s market is a method that has been used for hundreds of years by families all over South America. We decided to give it a go:
First, you take the green beans and place the in the pan, sans any oil or teflon, and gently stir over medium-high heat with a wooden spoon. In the picture to the right, you can see the beans just as they begin to get a nice toasted color to them.
As the beans start to gain color, stir more often. This sounds easy now, but at this point, you should be around the tenth minute of so or solid stirring.
Around minute 17: Try to maintain a positive attitude about the stirring and the increasing amount of coffee smoke starting to waft up from the pan and into your lungs. Just keep stirring.
And stirring.
And stirring.
And Stirring.
And stirring…..
Almost there….
Almost…
Success. Check out that nice char all over the beans. While it might be tough to see in this picture, all those little green beans that we had roasted have shed their husks during rosating and are now not opnly emitting a godly smell of hot coffee, but also a very fine oil which helps make the coffee more paletable. Everything looks good here, apart from the occasional smoke up. But how will it taste?
