- Now, be honest with me.
You ever make an espresso
and it's a really good espresso, right?
But afterwards you knock out your puck
and you look at the puck.
Maybe you pick it up.
And it looks delicious, right?
Like it looks tasty.
Are you ever tempted to maybe take a bite?
(upbeat music)
Welcome to something a little bit silly.
Today we're gonna try and recreate
the look, feel, size, shape of a spent espresso puck,
the coffee after you've finished brewing,
and see if we can make that delicious.
Because why not?
Because it looks like it should be and it should be
so let's just do it.
Now, your first thought might be like my first thought,
which is like, just do a chocolate shortbread.
And I thought, yeah,
but no.
The first thing that I wanna try is actually edible soil,
chocolate, dirt, whatever you wanna call it.
It's kind of a thing you see on kind of modernist menus.
Now, I know soil doesn't look like coffee,
but I think it could.
So I'm gonna try to make some.
And there's two different techniques.
I'm going to try them both one after the other.
We'll compare them,
see which one might make for the better
spent ground coffee replacement.
So here's the first recipe.
So for this method,
we're gonna take 100 grams of sugar,
just 70 grams of water,
and very carefully turn that into a syrup.
As it starts to brown,
we're gonna whisk in 70 grams
of good quality dark chocolate,
and keep whisking and whisking and whisking,
then turn it out and let it cool.
So what I wanna do now is get it down to like
a finer texture.
So I'm gonna sift out with just a regular sieve
any of the sort of finer pieces,
cause they're good enough.
And then the big chunky pieces,
I'm gonna throw into a blender,
grind them down a little bit more really quickly
and then sift through that
until we have a pretty fine ground powder, like espresso.
So the second recipe, very easy.
You can do it almost all in the blender,
then you do have to melt some butter first.
Anyway, you need 220 grams of sugar,
120 grams of cocoa powder,
add a pinch of salt.
And then blend this a little bit just to mix it all up.
And then with it running,
you're just gonna drizzle in the melted butter
and combine it all together.
Pretty simple.
So we've got two very different edible dirts,
two potential contenders for ground coffee.
Now, the color on the first one
doesn't look quite as spent coffee puck, right?
The color on this one just has a bit more of that
kind of wet coffee feel to it
and that's the butter doing that.
Lets have a little taste though.
Quite Sandy in a good way.
That's not a phrase I thought I'd use. Like crunchy,
nice chocolate flavor.
Very pleasant.
Let's try the second soil.
Much soilier looking.
I don't love the taste of this one
because it's dominated by the cocoa powder.
And for technical reasons
that aren't worth going into right now,
really high quality cocoa powder
that matches the quality of craft chocolate
is pretty much impossible to come by.
It's certainly very difficult to come by.
I've used a more commercial product here
and I just taste it.
It doesn't taste as good in terms of flavor as this here.
Now, the second, all important test,
will it puck?
So I've got a little basket here or seminary basket.
I'm just gonna fill it reasonably,
and we'll give it a little tamp.
Now, let me get my (mumbles) mat.
Just throw it on here
cause I'm not 100% convinced
this is going to bind nicely.
Ooh, it's like a little puck.
Okay?
Number two.
I mean, this has gotta puck, right?
A little tamp.
Now, that doesn't look quite as good,
but it looks like it's holding together better.
Can I..
No.
If you knock out a puck before you brew it,
it's like this.
You can't pick it up.
It's like ground coffee that hasn't been brewed yet.
This picks up.
I don't wanna get into baking these things
for reasons I'll get into in a second,
but definitely the butter is playing an important role here.
I think we might be able to get the best of both worlds.
What I'm gonna try and do
is just work through into this.
What I've got here of the first one,
a little bit of butter.
I'm gonna melt a little bit of butter.
I'm gonna work it into it
and see if it'll add that kind of binding agent,
especially once I've cooled it down a little bit.
So let's give that a try.
So to get things close,
I've taken the ratio of butter to other stuff
from the second recipe,
I'm gonna add it in to the first recipe
and see what happens.
I probably should be doing it in the blender.
That'd be sensible,
but I'll do it by hand cause I'm not smart.
So reasonably incorporated.
Let's have a little taste.
In a surprise to exactly no one,
taking something delicious and adding butter is delicious.
Will it puck?
(chuckles)
Now, that looks,
oh, so close.
Pretty good.
It's still a bit crumbly.
So what I'm wondering is what if a chill this down?
I'm gonna form up a couple of these
and just chill them down in the fridge for a little bit
and see what that does to the texture.
So these have had a chance to chill.
I'm not gonna lie,
I'm a little bit nervous.
I don't know why.
I want this to work. I want this to be ridiculous.
Wish me luck.
So close.
So close,
but it's too crumbly.
We're so nearly there.
A little bit more to go.
A few things to tweak.
I've got some ideas,
but I just love where your curiosity can take you.
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So how did we do?
Should we have a little taste
of our recreated espresso puck?
I want this one.
Cheers.
(chuckles)
It's pretty good.
Holding together really nicely.
Taste is pretty great. Let me tell you how to make these.
First thing is make coffee butter.
Now, we've made coffee butter before
in the ultimate kind of coffee cake recipe.
Two parts butter to one part coffee.
So 100 grams of butter and 50 grams of coffee.
Let it steep and infuse on a very low heat
for about an hour and strain it out.
Next thing is to make the edible soil.
So it's 100 grams of sugar and 30 grams of water.
Heat that in a pan until at 135 degrees Celsius.
That's the point as the syrup just starts to brown.
Do not take it further.
Throw in the chocolate,
whisk aggressively,
and soon you'll have a kind of soil in the pan.
Scrape it out, cool it down and then actually clean the pan.
Best thing to do is throw some hot water in,
a little detergent and bring it back to the boil,
and all that chocolate that looks pretty baked on
will come right off.
Once your soil is cool,
we're gonna blend it to make it as fine as possible.
So into the blender,
run it for a little bit just to pulverize it down.
Now, if you wanna go to extremes,
you can sift it to get a really fine texture.
And if you really wanna go a little bit too far,
that stuff that won't sift,
you could put it in a Comandante and grind it
at a very fine setting,
but that might make you weird.
Anyway, the results are pretty good.
So you've got your very fine
kind of ground coffee looking thing.
Wave that.
Now, I had about 140 grams,
and that's gonna tell us how much butter to use.
So I multiply by .23
and that's how much butter you need,
but that's gonna include a little bit of chocolate.
So I needed 30 grams of butter,
but I substituted five grams of that
for five grams of chocolate.
This just helps set the whole thing up at the end.
It means we don't really have to bake it
and it will stick together.
At this point,
I added five grams of cocoa powder
and a gram and a half of the salt.
Gently incorporate that kind of warm chocolate butter
into the edible soil,
stir it all together and you've got everything you need
for a delicious little biscuit.
We're gonna form these in double baskets,
and make sure it's nice and clean,
like fully clean, clean, clean,
and then heap it in there,
tamp it down.
Sorry to the tamper.
And then if you're feeling like
you want the real attention to detail,
well, I chose to use a screen and a screw
just to add a little realism to the top of my puck.
Knock them out into a little freezer proof bag.
I just like to keep them that way
in case I wanna chill them quickly,
or you can just knock them onto a plate
to put in the fridge.
They're gonna need maybe two hours in the fridge
to fully set up and be ready to go. And at the end of it,
you've got this delicious little espresso puck.
Now, I used an espresso roast in my coffee butter
because I wanted just like a little tickle of bitterness
cause it is quite sweet, right?
It's ultimately quite a sweet thing.
And I wanted to offset that with a little saltiness,
a little bitter, a little sweet,
a little kind of sugary, good time.
All right, it's got some nice fattiness to it.
Feels quite crumbly at the start,
then the kind of the fat
and that kind of melts in the mouth a little bit
as you chew.
It would be great with espresso,
and it would really freak out people who were very confused
if they didn't know what was going on,
which is kind of fun.
I don't really know what this is in the biscuit world,
the cookie world, or the world of confectionary and baking.
Have I made a very obvious thing
and not really known about it?
Is there a smarter, easier, clever way to do this?
Let me know if you make these
and let me know if you find a better way,
a more realistic way to replicate a delicious espresso puck,
but for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching
and I hope you have a great day.