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?
Whoa! Coffee roasting at my house takes place OUTSIDE! Haven’t tried the “skillet” method like you have, I use a Frankensteined convection oven (they call it a turbo-crazy), and it generates so much smoke my wife would kill me if I ran it inside.
I’m familiar with tons of ways to brew coffee, but I’ve never heard of a chuspa. What is it?
You can do this “popcorn” style by shaking a deep light pot instead of stirring. Some problems with this type of roasting are consitency of the roast and timing, you can’t stop the beans roasting by just taking them off the heat, they will still roast and burn from residual heat. You’ve got to cool them. I accomplished this by tossing them in a collander outside, this cooled the beans as well as let the silverskins blow away in the wind.
Thanks for the comments guys!
Grant, we WISH we realized just how much smoke those beans would generate! We omitted the picture in Part I, but we did wind up having to move the pan outside due to the smoke that was coming from the pot. As for the chuspa, check back for Part II next Monday for pictures and details!
And Phil, that’s a great idea with the collander, we’ll have to try that next time.