How perfectly appropriate
As noted above - you don’t want to run anything other than pure hot water through the grounds. Even a change to the mineral content will lead to changes in flavour. Adding a lipid will result in all sorts of oddities.
Sugar is an odd one - sugar in the water used to extract coffee does also change the flavours - as it changes the relative extraction of the various components. However there were baristas that deliberately placed the sugar for coffee on top of the grounds in the portafilter in an espresso machine. They claimed this lead to a superior sweetened coffee.
The whole trick to making good coffee is to extract all the stuff that tastes good from the beans whilst leaving all the stuff that tastes bad behind. It is important to realise that there really is stuff that you really do want to leave behind. Most important thing is the temperature of the water, but you can spend a lifetime working on the nuances.
This is the guy who thinks moldy green bacon is mmm-mmm-good eatin’ and that the best place to get your groceries is from a dumpster, so take anything he says about food with that in mind.
Making sure there is fresh refrigerated cream in the house is too stressful. And the sleepless nights of life-threatening danger of letting cream sit out at room temperature. And “going through all that” to make coffee with a Mister Coffee machine, which is wasting all that space on my countertop and has to be cleaned regularly, and requires the added stress of making sure I don’t run out of factory-made filters.
By the way, adding cream and sugar would not be too stressful for me (I refuse to let it be), but it seems to be for a lot of other people. to whom my lifestyle advice is directed.
Just wanted to say, I am a straight coffee drinker and the only reason I thought of powdered creamer rather than actual cream is because the cream would work its way through the grounds and drip into the pot…Then again, I have never tried it.
Making sure there is coffee in the house is too stressful. Me, I just go grab a couple handfuls of dirt outta the yard, squeeze it real good to kill the worms, then cram it in my gob a fistful at a time. I’ve never had a better [del]cup[/del] fist of coffee! :rolleyes:
You could eliminate the stress of boiling water for yourself, as well. Cold brewed coffee uses the same procedure, but with cold water. Dump the grounds into the cold water in the morning. Next morning, do your usual, then do the setup again for the following morning. Cold-brewed beats boiled hands down. It also keeps for a number of days, so you could really make several days worth at one time.
However this just made me think of another question. What if you used coffee instead of water? I imagine it would be bad for a coffee maker, but would it make “stronger” coffee? Or some horrible liquid?
(I don’t know why I have so many odd questions today, maybe I shouldn’t have had the extra cup)
You would be pretty sure of eventually gunking up the boiler.
Probably would, for the most part, just make stronger coffee. Not too different to just putting more coffee in the filter. But coffee does change over time. Putting day old coffee though is not going to be quite the same. There are lots of nuances.
Considered using a French Press instead of a drip maker? Makes better coffee and there is actually less faffing about.
a) coffee maker on a timer. you arrive, you (aka me, the coffee zombie), grab your mug and pour your hot coffee into it
or
b) there’s the french press thing, which involves pouring water at the right temperature into the press thingie and WAITING, then pressing, then pouring
option b fails for “coffee zombie” at the WAITING step. Candidly, possibly even at the get the water to the right temp step. The sum total of faffing may be the same or greater, but if I can redistribute the work to the evening before, and minimize the waiting in the morning, well, things are just better. For everyone, really.
Dunno what dangers lurk from room temp milk. I barely use the fridge, but that’s not the reason I go through a litre of soya milk ( for tea ) every 2 days which has stood on the kitchen counter *. It’s because it doesn’t go off even in summer. It would be ridiculously dainty to fear most foods not kept in a fridge.
Why not just use milk in your coffee like the rest of the first world? Set your coffee machine to brew it in the morning, take your cup, fill it with coffee, add sugar, stir in milk, BAM, caffeination.
I use Malaysian-style “Three-In-One” sachets (Powdered Coffee, Sugar and Milk) when I’m camping or somewhere without access to a fridge, but I can’t see that being an acceptable option for people who really, really take their coffee at hipster-levels of seriousness.
Nondairy milk is produced and packaged under closed conditions in a factory, so when you buy it it’s basically sterile. If you’re using it up every two days that doesn’t give microorganisms time to proliferate. If you left that same carton sitting out for two weeks I bet the results would be different.
Cows, like all living creatures, have all different microorganisms all over them, which is picked up by the milk no matter how cleanly the dairy is run. The milk is full of nice fat and protein and vitamins to form a nice microbial buffet.
Pasteurized milk isn’t heated enough to kill off all the microorganisms, only kill off some and weaken others. Remember, they’re floating in a nice food source, and increased temperature encourages microbial reproduction.
That’s why you can’t leave dairy milk sitting out at room temperature for very long. I once forgot to put a carton of half and half back in the fridge before I left for work, and when I got home that afternoon it was already starting to stink, and that was on a fairly cool day.
There is some milk that is fairly shelf stable. Those little individual containers of half and half with the peel-off lids, and larger containers for campers and other people who won’t have access to refrigeration. It takes a longer time to spoil since the microbes can only get in once it’s opened, but it won’t stay good forever either.
“Hey, Marie, we’ve got another one who was, ahem, washing vegetables in the shower. What’s that make, two carrots, a parsnip, and a rutabaga this week?”
