Pro Chefs Make Their Favorite Coffee at Home

It makes it a lot easier to be liked trapped

in the house with these little monsters

'cause they keep me busy, right?

What's going on, Vitto?

You cool?

[upbeat instrumental music]

Here you go, you want the full view?

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Coffee.

Hey, everyone, I am not in the test kitchen.

I am in my home kitchen.

I'm in the desert.

I'm here at home.

Still at my parent's kitchen in South Jersey.

We're working from home these days.

And I'm gonna show you--

My coffee routine.

This is the first thing I do in the morning.

Hi.

Very important, I'm gonna show

you how I make mine at home.

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Yeah, that's better.

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Coffee, how do I make coffee?

I guess I'll put the knife down.

It's a little aggro, as the kids say.

Today, what we're gonna be doing

is making my perfect coffee.

Just so happens I've recently invented,

I don't know, someone must have done it for God sakes

but I'm gonna just say I recently invented

a coffee drink called, I call it the cafe oo la la, okay.

I only drink coffee in the morning.

I'm not an afternoon drinker.

Every now and then.

But I like my two cups in the morning.

So I usually do a drip

but then I got this little machine here,

a little espresso machine,

and I don't really drink too much espresso

but I really love

is the steam.

Barista Brad makes it happen.

No big deal.

So the cafe oo la la is just drip coffee,

steamed whole milk, and then I get brown sugar,

dark brown sugar or light, whatever you're into

and I shave, I get little shavings

and I just drop drop it on to the steamed milk

on top of the coffee.

[Dan] Let's make this thing.

Yeah, we're gonna make it, Dan.

[Dan] All right, well let's see it.

[bleep] I got the drip coffee already made.

Check this out, this things great.

Gonna steam some milk.

Fill this up about, you know,

a little bit over half way okay.

Lactose free, my one kids lactose intolerant,

what ya gonna do?

And we're just gonna steam it!

I'm gonna go on a little angle, just the tip.

Here we go, we're hot.

You don't wanna go

gettin' all bubbly, you want it just frothy, right?

Not big bubbles but like moose.

I don't know if you're supposed to use cold milk.

Or, uh-oh, all right, I think I did it!

Look at that.

Look at that, nice frothy, this is great guys.

Look at that, beautiful, nice froth.

So here we go, got my cafe oo la la mug.

Okay, my coffee, fill that up.

Oh, leave a little room for our oo la la.

Okay, this is where I always screw it up is gettin' a nice,

oh I nailed it, oh my God I did such a good job.

So what I do sometimes, everybody does this,

I don't care, unless you're really good.

And look I just, oh look at that!

Oh my God.

And then the little brown sugar, oh my God,

that's it right there.

Little brown sugar just sits in there, little pillows.

Good angle, huh?

I'm a good camera guy!

[Dan] Landscape!

[Brad] Ugh, take two!

Look at that.

That's the stuff, it's like a dessert,

you can't have this for breakfast.

That's like eatin' candy for breakfast, look at this,

this is dessert, a delicacy.

I like this!

You know, take your first sip there.

[Brad] Yeah look at these guys, huh?

You guys workin' hard or what?

[Dan] We're watching you work hard.

Well I did a good job too!

Oh man, it's heavenly, suitable for a king!

That's it, perfect, perfect mind, perfect coffee.

Cafe oo la la, camera cuts.

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If you know me, you know I don't drink coffee.

I drink our national drink from Argentina

that is mate, I love the smell, I really do.

Mate is a traditional tea drink in a special

mate cup.

And mate bombilla

Mate is something that is drinked in South America,

the South of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay

and in some parts of Chile.

See my mate cup collection,

they're very interesting looking.

Covered with silver, with very intricate work.

This one is made of glass,

covered in leather with a cute little doggy surround.

This guys the one I love.

So the bombilla has two holes,

one is where you wanna drink, like any other straw

and the other has all these tiny wholes like the tea

baskets you will use when you make loose tea,

it's the same idea.

If you were going to compare it to something,

I will compare it to like a green tea.

It does have caffeine but it doesn't have the same

amount of octane that coffee does.

So to make the mate, you are not supposed to fill up

this cup all the way to the top,

so I put four of these, because you're going to be adding

the water and the mates gonna expand,

you don't want it to overflow.

The one thing that we like to do in Argentina

is shake it to remove any excess powder.

You can see it on my hand, and then you're ready

you have to tilt the mate a little bit so you have

a little diagonal and then you insert the straw,

slow stream, you don't boil the water,

I put it at 180 degrees on one side and then

you are ready to rock and roll,

the dry mate wells up and the wet mate stays in one corner.

It's not that you put the water and you drink it once,

perfect, you continue to drink throughout

until the mate leaves just don't give flavor anymore.

This is a mood guys, you don't know it.

Oh, I'm still shooting [laughs].

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My coffee routine is actually my husband's coffee routine

I drink black tea in the morning with milk

and my very nice husband, often brings it to me

while I am still in bed

because I'm the queen of the house and that's how that goes.

So when I want to be really nice to him

and repay some of this tea in bed that I've been getting,

I make him a really nice aeropress.

We've been making coffee with this thing for many many years

and it's also amazing if you're ever on the road

or camping and I actually take a lot of pleasure in doing

it with the timer and the scale and the whole

kit and kabootle, it's got the kind of main chamber thing,

they sell paper filters but we switched over to this

fine mesh stainless steel filter and that sits

on top of this, so you put the filter into the bottom tray,

you attach that to that and then the other piece

is a plunger and it's got like a hard rubber

stopper majiggy and then the other piece is this paddle

which you use for stirring the grounds into the water.

I feel like I read something about the inventor like,

is he like an aeronautical engineer type of guy?

Yeah?

I keep thinking I'm gonna come up with some great invention,

I just [laughs] haven't come up with it yet.

Okay, so the first thing I'm gonna do is preheat the cup,

preheating the cup makes a huge difference

in how hot your coffee is, when it hits the cup

and how hot it stays.

I'm just gonna fill that cup up,

so now I need 18 grams of coffee, nailed it!

The cup feels hot on the outside,

dump out the water, set the thing-a-majobber

on top of the cup, I am gonna start the timer.

So the first thing is just a little bit of water

to bloom the grounds, it's important.

That's been about 10 seconds.

I'm gonna pour, this is supposed to take about 30 seconds,

it gets stirred for five.

And then you use your little stopper bopper

to just create like a vacuum seal, so now we wait,

90 seconds.

No ones really timing me,

but I think that was about 90 seconds

take the plunger off but keep it nearby,

take the stirrer guy,

get another stir, that's done

and then you plunge!

One thing to look for is that the coffee grounds form

a mound when you get to the bottom and then look for a hiss.

[coffee hissing]

As soon as you hear the hiss you're done.

All right so that's it, regular cow's milk.

A delicious cup of coffee, that's the color he likes.

Fred, Fred!

Yeah, he's on a call,

should I drink his coffee?

[laughs] What are you gonna do?

I truly believe that once you experience

truly exceptional coffee, it's very hard to ever go back

and I'm not saying that I won't happily get some

Dunkin Donuts on a road trip,

that's a beautiful experience

and I don't mean to minimize that for anybody.

When I let my apartment in New York City,

I had to choose the things that were very important to me,

things that I felt very passionately about,

and clearly my entire pour over set up

[laughs] was one of those things.

So I make my coffee with a little ceramic pour over cone.

This is a Hario V60 ceramic filter holder.

I like a Hario V60, they make a glass version.

I've been traveling around Mexico for the last six months,

so I found this, a silicone collapsible V60.

Here's the thing about great coffee,

it's a little bit about the coffee,

well it's a lot about the coffee.

Beautiful, lovely coffee.

Never buy pre-ground coffee.

The minute you grind a coffee bean,

the flavor is essentially leaking out.

And it's a little bit about the equipment

but actually it's a lot about the equipment.

This is my kettle.

I do find it really important to use a kettle

that has this particularly thin kind of spout.

That is very hot.

I don't have my kettle at home so, all right--

Right now I have my kettle set to 207 degrees.

Let's call it 206.

A little bit below boiling.

I am going to grind my coffee beans.

This is a bur grinder.

A bur grinder means that there are actual circular burs

that turn in opposition to each other.

Think of it like a pepper grinder.

This is actually Chris Morocco's old grinder

which he gave to me because he like didn't want it anymore,

he probably bought some like much fancier one.

[Chris] I have a Breville bur grinder,

evenness is key when it comes to coffee.

I don't have an electric grinder, I have this guy.

You can grind other things in here if you wanted to

but this has only been used for coffee,

I would like to go on record saying that.

I generally use about three tablespoons.

I'm going to measure my beans by weight by using a scale.

I keep a little scoop in my jar,

two of these is roughly like 21 grams.

I'm not a fanatic about my coffee

in the way some other people are,

I know like Delaney and Chris Morocco would freak out

if they knew I wasn't using a scale.

I'm using 20 grams of beans.

[coffee grinding]

So anyway, that's how you grind the beans.

This guy just comes off,

there's a bunch of ground coffee.

It's not super fine, it's not super coarse.

So good.

Okay, back in my coffee cabinet,

this is also where I keep my coffee filters.

I like these ones, they're the brown ones.

[Chris] So I love pre-wetting my filter.

Sometimes the filter can have a little bit

of a papery taste which is not pleasant.

It kinda just flushes it out.

So, beans are going into the filter holder.

Pop my beans in here.

So now I'm gonna bloom the coffee.

I wanna wet the grounds without actually pouring water

through them, it basically opens up the coffee

and gets it ready to actually be brewed.

This I usually let hang out anywhere

between 40 seconds to a minute.

And now I'm gonna start my first pour.

We wanna go to 352 grams, 22 times 16 is 352.

I guess in total this takes about two minutes.

Try and go in a circular motion,

although there are mornings where I just kind of dump it in.

It's sort of a nice, meditative time,

and it's nice to just,

normally I guess what I would be doing is not

staring into my coffee, I would be like frantically

emptying the dish rack or unloading the dish washer

or something but--

[Rick] Almost there, oh, nailed it!

352, the touch of a pro.

All right, so our extraction went to about three minutes

10 seconds inclusive of the bloom.

Uh, smells so good!

It smells like morning even though it's noon.

It's 5:20, if I drink this right now

I am not going to bed until like three AM.

Okay, all the waters through,

the most important step when it comes to coffee,

is drinking it out of a mug that you like

and that's for me like a novelty mug,

something you'd buy at a souvenirs shop

or the airport or whatever

or your local public radio station.

My director informs me that Delaney said something

about the best mug being like a [bleep] novelty mug

with something stupid on it [deep exhale] Delaney.

This is a layel ceramic mug, it's from upstate New York

in the kind of greater Kingston area.

I hate a fancy coffee mug, look at that, perfect amount!

This size is perfect for a 320 gram pour over.

It smells so good and I cannot drink it right now

it would be so bad, it's 5:20!

I'm gonna drink a little bit.

That is so good and I'm gonna have to stop drinking that.

Kinda green apple flavor with

a little bit of milk chocolate.

This [bleep] tastes like [bleep] blueberries

and it's incredible.

Uh, so good.

That's a perfect cup of coffee.

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Today we're making on of my favorite morning beverages,

I'm not much of a coffee drinker,

but I love chai.

This is kind of the short cut way that my mom makes it

at home because when we're in the morning,

we need or boost of energy,

we like it fast [laughs].

It usually involved black tea, milk, spices,

the spices vary but the way we make it at home,

we focus on one spice which I think is the star of chai

and that's cardamom.

So you're gonna start with black tea

and then you're gonna just crush cardamom pods,

you don't need to remove the shell or anything,

you're just gonna give them a nice pounding

so that they've released the seeds.

So I just put these in shells and all.

Chai is traditionally sweetened, we add quite a bit of sugar

like a heaping, heaping teaspoon, but you do you.

Some boiling water on top,

it's nice and steamy!

So we're gonna let that steep for like a minute,

this is like that weird down time in the videos

where I say stupid thing that end up in the video

so maybe I should not say anything.

[Dan] What's on your mind?

[laughs] We're done steeping, just top it off

with as much milk as you want.

That's what it's supposed to be, a dark tan.

But you can make it more or less milky.

Mmm, this is probably not anything

the aunties back in India would approve of,

it's a very shortcut version,

but I think it's delicious,

it's a nice little alternative to coffee

and yeah, I drink it everyday!

Mmm, use fresh cardamom, people, mmm!

I like to start every day off with a cup of coffee,

I'm pretty particular about it,

I don't really love espresso unless it's like

a cappuccino but that's to me more of an afternoon coffee,

I like my first morning coffee to be American drip coffee

with hot whole milk in it,

sometimes half and half depending on the coffee.

This tiny corner of my kitchen is the coffee and tea area,

this is my chemex, it just makes a drip coffee,

this cone I like because it's metal with tiny perforations

and so I don't have to reuse a paper,

I don't have to use a paper filter every single time,

I can just wash this and reuse it which is wonderful!

And then I have crock-of-tools, I'll move it out of the way.

A bur grinder, I just eyeball this part,

in fact I am guilty of making coffee

that's too strong constantly.

[coffee grinding]

I eyeball this part too,

I do a couple of tablespoons,

this is how much I filled it.

I can't imagine with Chris Morocco's coffee routine is

at home but one of the most endearing,

most Chris Morocco things ever was when he brought

his whole coffee set up to Cape Cod

when we shot Making Perfect

and then opened like a little coffee bar

in the mornings at the hotel.

I like to heat up the milk so that the milk

doesn't bring down the temperature of the coffee.

I'm always shooting for this very particular

temperature of coffee where you can,

it's really hot but you can kind of gulp it

it's just perfect, so I'm gonna pop this in the microwave

for maybe 30 seconds, and while that's heating,

I'll start to pour the water.

One thing I've learned from watching

people in fancy coffee shops is that it's good

to sort of moisten all the coffee grounds first in a circle

I don't know why, I just seen people do it.

Whatever, my thing is like who has the coherence

and clarity of mine to do all that in the morning

before you've had your coffee?

To do all the weighing and the proportions,

that seems crazy.

That seems plenty for one cup, now I'm gonna grab my milk.

And then I slowly pour, I love this little pour spot

in the chemex that makes it very precise.

I'll hold this up so you can see.

And then I like pouring the coffee into the milk

because then I stop once I get the right kind of color.

I like it to be pretty light.

I love milk,

I've always been a milk-drinker.

That looks perfect and then that's it.

I'm gonna drink this whole cup of coffee

'cause I've been waiting until I've had to show you

to have my coffee this morning, even though it's almost 2:00

but this is the life of self-isolating.

So, you can drink coffee any time of day.

Perfect temperature, all right?

When I'm at home, I have an espresso machine

and every morning I make an almond cappuccino.

I'm not home, there's no espresso machine here,

it's also a little bit warmer here because I'm in the desert

so today I am gonna make a cold brew soda

which is basically equal parts cold brewed coffee

and tonic water with a squeeze of lime over ice.

Got my tonic, got a lemon, and then this has just been

straining cold brew

for the last couple of hours.

It's a concentrate,

it's really intense.

I'm cutting one lemon into wedges

'cause I'll have that as a garnish

and then squeezing the juice of half a lemon

into this cup of ice, catching the seeds,

and then I'm gonna fill it about half way with my cold brew

and if you can't find tonic water right now,

what you can do instead is top it with soda water,

seltzer, sparkling water and then just sweeten it

a little bit with agave or honey or simple syrup

to balance the acidity of the citrus, so there it is!

My coffee soda!

Tastes just like the test kitchen.

Miss you test kitchen.

I really do.

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We are all demonstrating our favorite ways to make coffee

but I don't really drink coffee

so I'm gonna make a white Russian.

[dog yelping]

Nowadays I'm drinking a lot more,

so white Russian in the morning

doesn't seem totally out of reason.

My working from home drinking rules

is still don't start until like,

maybe instead of five like four.

I'm one of those people when I have a lot to drink

I seem exactly the same, but nothing in there is working.

So, I don't really like to drink and work.

But I like to know that it's here for me.

So a white Russian is usually Kahlua, vodka and cream,

I think all of those things are disgusting.

So I'm gonna show you how I like to make a white Russian

with coffee, craft coffee, that then they turn into booze.

Like how can that be bad?

And then in place of the vodka I prefer to use bourbon.

Equal parts of both and then a splash of cream.

This is an antique jigger,

it's completely inaccurate,

I just like using it, makes me feel old timey.

I think this might be an ounce.

So I'm gonna crack my ice cube a bit before

I throw it in there.

So it kind of melts a little bit while

it's chilling the drink.

[dog yelping]

So I'm gonna stir that up,

you wanna stir your drink so your spoon moves along

the outside of your glass, you're kind of just pushing

the ice through the drink and we're just gonna do that

until the mixing glass feels cold,

that's how you know that your drink is cold.

Now I need a second giant ice cube.

Once again, oh my dogs are really into this, there we go.

So I'm gonna strain this into this glass now

and then finish it with a little cream.

Just a little drizzle on top.

So this is not your classic white Russian,

I'm sure people will get mad at me,

but it's the one that I wanna drink.

It's the coffee drink I want.

It's really tasty, the coffee liquors so so good.

It just tastes like cold brew, whiskey,

cold version of an Irish coffee.

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My normal coffee routine is very very simple.

I just do eight cups of water in the base, cover that.

The filter over here just goes on top, like that.

I'll do eight scoops, one scoop per cup,

put the top on, slide that in, lock it,

and then just turn it on,

and then we wait.

This is Goldie, she's perfect, she's beautiful

and she has a natural smoky eye.

Eh, okay!

I would say the biggest difference between

the coffee I drink in New York and at home

is that I usually drink it with like a splash of oat,

if I don't have oat, I'll do almond.

This is a half and half house,

so I've been drinking half and half and I have absolutely

no regrets and it feels [bleep] fantastic.

Ah, that wasn't that hot.

[upbeat instrumental music]

Okay!

Coffee time?

Hey everybody, so I'm going to--

Hey everybody, I'm in my home little--

Hey everybody I'm in my home kitchen and I'm gonna make

a pot of coffee the way that I do pretty much every morning

and every afternoon, the thing that I care about

the most is making sure my coffee stays hot

for as long as possible.

So here I have like a vacuum insulated craft.

See I like to drink like a little cup of coffee

and then wait a half an hour and then drink another

cup of coffee, just filled that with like nearly boiling

water one of my biggest pet peeves is making coffee

into a cold craft 'cause then it's just sucking

all of the heat out of your coffee

and like your first cup is lukewarm.

So I've got a little brown paper number four filter.

My trusty Maleda plastic dripper.

I used to have the like fancy ceramic or glass ones

but they all broke so gonna rinse that.

Dump this hot water, we're gonna grind our beans,

I really think the biggest thing is just making sure

that you're grinding your coffee fresh every day.

Okay cool, sling that into our clean filter.

The first thing I'm gonna do is just pour a little bit

and kind of like bloom them.

Okay, so now we're just gonna keep on refilling this

right around the sides, ah, keep on adding water

as it drains out, oh!

I'm gonna take this time to preheat my mug,

this is non-negotiable.

I love having really hot tap water for this reason,

I'll just fill this up and let it sit until

I'm ready to pour into it.

So our grinds are dry now,

all the coffee is dripped off, close the lid,

dump the water from my preheated cup.

Ah, and that is how I make a pot--

And that is how I make a pot of coffee!

[upbeat instrumental music]

Yeah that was good. Yeah, I'd say that's good!

Mmm, me cut?

I'm like waiting for someone to cut for me.