The best coffee for on the go travelers

by Grant Martin on

We all become time and sleep managers over the course of our travels. Whether shaking the grip of jetlag after a seven-time-zone-jump or getting over the sleep lost from a weekend trip to Hong Kong, managing our time in bed is critical to building future productivity, so we plan well – and we occasionally cheat.

Our favorite way to stay ahead of jetlag at Gadling is with caffeine, ideally enjoyed at the corner cafes in small Parisian neighborhoods but most often brewed in our very own homes and offices as we recover from our trips abroad.

For the traveler, coffee-on-the go is a necessity. We learn to live out of the single serving pods that come in our ensuite hotel rooms and order proper cappuccinos in Italy and café au laits in France. We learn the difference between Guatemalan and Ethiopian beans, between a medium and a dark roast. And we hate (although sometimes we love) the sight of a Starbucks in our favorite picturesque tourist destination.

We also tend to bring that coffee affection home, though usually more in a single serving environment. (After all, since we’re always on the move it makes little sense to brew a twelve-cup batch). And that brewing technology ranges from the most simple, analog device to the most high-tech brewing symphony. Let’s start at the bottom.The analog siphon (our favorite, the Yama tabletop)

There’s a hand made, wooden-framed version of the analog siphon sitting on our editor in chief’s desk, used infrequently to brew a batch of simple coffee for the visiting colleague. Brew is made by filling the bottom portion of two lobes with hot water and then heating the section with a candle, or Sterno. Once the water reaches a critical temperature, it flows up to the top of the lobe where the coffee is contained. As the grounds saturate and the brew thickens, the consumer can design how strong the drink will be. Then, once the heat is removed, the brew falls to the bottom lobe and the top section can be removed and washed. The resulting beverage is mild in intensity and full in flavor.

The stovetop siphon (our favorite, the Bialetti Moka Pot)

High heat from the stovetop requires that most efficient siphons are made out of metal, and the classic iteration of this design is the Italian made Bialetti. In principle, this works the same way that the analog siphon works. In this case, the main difference is that there is more gas under the hood to speed the process, so the water pushing through the coffee is also mixed with steam.

Compared to the analog siphon, most Bialettis use a higher percentage of coffee versus water in the process, thus producing something closer to (but not exactly) an espresso as a product. It’s not the right strength for every single coffee drinker, but for a few, the ratio is divine.

The French Press (our favorite, the REI Tabletop French Press)

There’s a certain, simple feel about a French pressed coffee that makes drinking it enjoyable. Perhaps it’s the quiet time spent watching the coffee grounds steep or the pleasure in pushing the steel mesh to the floor of the glass. Either way, the result is a clean cup of coffee that’s highly customizable to your taste.

The variables, of course, are the volume of grounds and the amount of time the grounds steep, both of which you determine. It’ll usually take a bit of time to find the right combination that suits your palette, but for the experimental epicurean, the press is a delightful retreat. Freakonomics has a great resource for brewing the best French Press if you’re looking to get started.

The Pod Launcher (our favorite, the Delonghi Lattissima Premium)

On the digital end of the spectrum, a variety of pod-based technologies are making well done, single serving cups of coffee a common reality, and if you’re looking for aesthetic, Nespresso has the competition beat. All that one needs to do to produce a ready-to-consume cup of espresso or Americano is load up the pod, lock it in place and press the brew button. Seconds later, a delicious cup of steaming coffee is ready to go.

Most of these devices benefit from the fact that coffee pods can be vacuum-sealed and shipped around the world, guaranteeing freshness and quality control. Those who want a completely fresh-ground experience, however, may have to look elsewhere.

The Full Digital (our favorite, the Philips Saeco Xelsis Digital ID — pictured)

For those looking for the fresh ground experience there’s no better place to look than the superautomatica. In contrast to the pod launcher, the superautomatica pulls beans in from an onboard hopper, grinds them, tamps them and then runs water (also onboard) through the system to produce an excellent stream of coffee. Everything is programmable here, from the number of beans used in the process to the length of the pull to the granularity of the grind. Depending on the model, milk can even be incorporated (steamed or not) through an inline system, and if you want to steam your own then there’s also a wand. Short of having your own espresso bar with a barista attached, the superautomatica might be the best single-serving cup of coffee that one can produce. Just be willing to pay for it. Models range in price from around $500 to well over $3000, with the above Xelsis Digital ID running just under $3000. Yes that’s a fingerprint reader on top of the unit – it’s used for identifying users and their favorite coffee configurations. For the cost, expect excellence, and with the superautomatica you’ll get it.

With contributions and mentorship from Charlie Habegger at Intelligentsia Coffee in Chicago.

The Ritz-Carlton, Amelia Island helps guests up their sodium intake in a unique way

by Jessica Festa on

And you thought too much salt was bad for you? Well, it actually is, but The Ritz-Carlton, Amelia Island definitely makes eating salt interesting. Their onsite restaurant, Salt, features 45 unique salt blends to give guests an enhanced dining experience.

The venue is so obsessed with perfecting the art of salt, they actually have a Salt Sommelier on staff. Salt expert Sasa Jaramaz works with Chef Rick Laughlin to pair different salts with particular courses. Textures, flavors, and aromas are all taken into consideration during the pairing process. For example, you can enjoy fresh fish and Adriatic Citrus Salt, which contains peels of Meyer lemons, oranges and grapefruits. These peels are roasted overnight, cooled and finely chopped into the salt.

Furthermore, to help get guests involved, Jaramaz presents select varieties to set on the table each night, and visits patrons to explain how the salts enhance the meal. Moreover, daily salt tastings are held in the brand new Salt Shop.

Says Laughlin, “The secret to creating contemporary American cuisine is taking a recipe of an item people are familiar with and reinventing it for a totally new experience. That’s my passion.”

The Lost World: New York City’s Little Guyana

by David Farley on
In April 2011, in the Richmond Hill neighborhood of Queens, two rival Sikh factions, long at odds with each other, decided it was time to come to blows. As one faction prayed in a temple, the other entered. What happened next is straight out of a B-list movie you might see while traveling on a bus in Asia: members of each group reacted to the forthcoming fight by reaching for their swords — I’m not making this up — and a bloody sword fight ensued. A sword fight, in 2011 New York City.

And so, I decided I had to go. Last week a group of friends and I boarded the A train for the 40-minute subway ride to Richmond Hill. Our destination: Little Guyana. Indo-Caribbeans (Caribbeans of Indian descent), many from Guyana (and a few from Trinidad), have been settling here in droves since the 1980s. So many that while the country of Guyana has a population of 750,000, the Guyanese population in New York is said to be close to 200,000.


Guyana, a diminutive country in northeastern South America, is a mystery to many people. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle even used the country as the setting for “The Lost World.”
It wasn’t exactly a “lost world” when we got off the subway and began strolling down Liberty Ave., the main thoroughfare of Little Guyana. There were no sword-carrying men ambling down the sidewalk. Just cars cruising by and blasting soca music, which is something like calypso on crack. Roti and doubles shops competed for attention with real estate offices. Realty is a big deal in Richmond Hill. So are doubles (pictured).

We poured into a doubles shop — Sandy’s Roti Shop — where a corner kiosk sold everything from belts and flowers to cosmetics and neckties, and another guy offered soca CDs. Meanwhile, the scent of subcontinental spices pervaded the air. Described to me as something like a chickpea-filled taco, doubles consist of a soft, thin, spongy bread with channa (chickpeas and Indian spices) inside. It’s a mushy eating affair but so good I had to get seconds.

This isn’t the first time my friends and I have gone deep into Queens to have an outer-borough eating extravaganza. Two months ago we took the Long Island Rail Road out to Murray Hill, Queens, also known as Korean Town. We spent the evening at restaurants where we were the only non-Koreans. Locals were asking us — and not in a condescending way — what we were doing there and how we found the place. I found spending the evening absorbed in a totally different culture — accessed so easily by a short train ride away — to be the best antidote when travel is not a possibility.

About an hour after munching on some doubles and strolling the main drag again — more real estate offices, doubles shops and clothes stores selling saris — we entered The Nest, a narrow restaurant serving up traditional Guyanese fare. A procession of dishes soon began landing on our table, many of which were fusion dishing reflecting the diversity of Guyanese society: corn meal-encrusted shrimp, chicken and potato curry and even a version of chow mein. Finally, a basket of fried fish nuggets was passed around. When we asked the waitress what it was, she replied, “shark.”

Later in the night we filed into Maracas, a popular Little Guyana club where we danced to soca music and drank bottles of Red Stripe and Carib beer and tried our hardest not to get into a sword fight. Our group, mostly journalists and editors, all agreed that we hadn’t been to a dance club of this proportion in a long time. Well, at least not since many of us had gone to similar clubs when traveling. The experience was all the more reason to appreciate the ability to “travel” around the world in New York City.

Whiskey and chocolate: the next big food pairing?

by Jessica Marati on

Whiskey and chocolate are two of my favorite things — but together? I was suspicious. That is, until I attended a pairing event at Union Square Wines here in New York City, hosted by Pacari Chocolate and Compass Box Whisky. Somehow, the flavors came together perfectly, and not just because of my whiskey buzz and sugar high (though those were there too).

The tasting consisted of five pairings, some traditional and others more off-beat. The one that blew me away was a pairing of the award-winning Hedonism, a vanilla and toffee-flavored Scotch grain whisky blend, with Pacari’s Amazonian Lemongrass chocolate. When the high citrus notes of the chocolate hit the sweetness of the whiskey a whole other flavor emerged, which lingered nicely in my mouth for quite some time.

Another popular pairing was Compass Box’s Orangerie, a Scotch whisky infused with hand-zested orange, cassia bark and clove, with Pacari’s Aji Chili-Coriander Spiced Chocolate. The sweet and the spicy came together just right and the coriander added an extra kick.One reason the pairing event worked so well is that both Pacari and Compass Box are artisan brands. Pacari is the first single-origin organic chocolate produced entirely in Ecuador with biodynamically-grown ingredients. Compass Box is a boutique Scotch whiskymaker and craft blender, known for blending specially-selected whiskeys from Scotland using natural processes, without chill filtering or artificial coloring. Because both the whiskey and chocolate are produced naturally and in small batches, they are able to retain many of the lipids that get lost in large-scale manufacturing — a big contributor to the flavor explosions I experienced from many of the pairings.

Drooling over your keyboard yet? New York-area foodies hankering for a taste can attend a pairing event on March 27 at the St Giles Hotel New York — The Court. Tickets are $35 and available here.

Craft foods calling: nationwide schools, seminars and workshops teach you how to launch your own business

by Laurel Miller on

Most children don’t dream of selling cheese or hacking apart animal carcasses when they grow up, but it’s a popular fantasy for many adults. Like most romantic-sounding culinary vocations, making craft foods and beverages can be hard work, and a risky business enterprise. “No matter how passionate someone is about their product,” says Heidi Yorkshire, founder of Portland, Oregon’s Food by Hand Seminars, “without business skills, they’ll never survive.”

Yorkshire, a small business consultant and former food and wine writer, was inspired to launch Food by Hand in 2009 because she saw a niche. “Our courses are mini-apprenticeships in running a sustainable business.” Past curricula have included butchery and craft distilling.

Food by Hand offers two-to-three-day intensives that teach the “craft and business of artisan food.” While the courses are designed for prospective business owners, they’re open to anyone wanting to know more about handcrafted foods.

[Photo credit: Flickr user mystuart]Food by Hand has an artisan cheese program that teaches everything from tasting, buying, storage and shop design to creating a business plan. The course is led by esteemed Portland cheesemonger Steve Jones, the son of a Maytag Dairy herdsman. Additional instructors include an expert on business planning and a tax specialist.

Jones has been in the business for over 17 years and is now on his second retail cheese venture, Portland’s Cheese Bar. He’s an industry badass and the winner of the 2011 Cheesemonger Invitational (yes, it really does exist and let me tell you, as a cheesemonger, it’s a pretty intense occupation and competition).

Food by Hand’s fourth annual seminar on The Craft and Business of Retailing Artisan Cheese will be held in Portland from May 30-June 2, 2012, and costs $1,795 per person; a $1,595 early enrollment tuition fee is available if paid in full by April 1. Click here for details on how to register.

In Spokane, Washington, Dry Fly Distilling’s aptly named Distilling School teaches their “farm to bottle” ethos (they use only locally, sustainably-grown raw ingredients in their vodka, gin, bourbon and whiskey) in two-day and one-week courses designed to “provide a variety of hands-on training opportunities to aspiring distillers.”

Opening in Oakland’s Jack London Square in April is the Food Craft Institute. Supported by sponsors and partnerships with some of the Bay Area’s most renowned artisan food organizations, farmers and food artisans (some of whom are also the instructors) the new school aims to “reinvigorate the creation and success of artisan food craft business in the U.S. through a combination of…training courses steeped in technical techniques along with a rigorous entrepreneurship program.”

It’s easy to poke fun at the overuse of words like “artisan” and “handcrafted,” and even I cringe when I hear naifs dreamily speak of quitting their six-figure tech jobs and buying a goat dairy. The reality is that unless you put in the hard time doing internships and learning the business end of things — and that’s assuming you have real, honest-to-god talent and passion — you’re not going to succeed at any food business. Having seed money or disposable income doesn’t equal good product.

On the positive side, my former employer, a Seattle cheesemonger, did her homework and spent two years interning, developing a business plan and taking Jones’ workshop as well as making him her mentor. Her business has been a success from day one. If you’re serious about getting (food) crafty, you can run a viable business. Just don’t think it’s going to be easy.

Kickstarter and incubator kitchens such as San Francisco’s La Cocina have helped many craft food businesses get off the ground. If you’re considering a career in this industry, I highly recommend these and similar programs as resources. And don’t forget: craft foods make excellent travel souvenirs.

[Photo credit: lamb, Laurel Miller; cheese, Flicker user Mitchmaitree]

Why start a craft food business? Because you “can pickle that.”