Come visit us at the Taste of Clayton, this Sunday (June 1) in Shaw Park, located in downtown Clayton. We'll be sampling some of our most popular drinks and treats, including Iced Coffee and Iced Tea, Chocolate Chip Brownies, Butter Crunch Coffee Cake and Gooey Butter Cake. We'll be brewing coffee there all day long, from 1:30 to 9. Stay late for the awesome fireworks show!

We’re serving a new brownie at Kaldi’s Coffeehouse. It’s a big, thick classic brownie, with an even fudginess –to –cakiness ratio, studded with chocolate chips. Eating a good brownie makes you realize why this chocolaty square is such an American classic: It is unpretentious yet decadent. The Ralph Lauren of bars.

The brownie was created by American ingenuity. Folklore has it that a Boston baker forgot to put leavener in her brown molasses cake. It baked up denser and richer for the omission. The recipe was later altered to include chocolate instead of molasses. The Palmer House Hotel in Chicago sold brownies at the 1892 Columbian Exposition. A few years later, the first brownie recipe appeared in print in the The Boston Cooking School Cookbook. And by 1897, Americans could buy brownies from the Sears catalog. Dubbed “The Consumers’ Bible,” the Sears, Roebuck Catalog was the first nation-wide source for stuff of all kinds, from trousers to entire house kits, and is likely the reason that the brownie rose above its regional status to become an enduring all-American favorite.
The Chocolate Chip Brownie we’re now selling at Kaldi’s Coffeehouse is about the fifth brownie recipe we’ve served. We’ve made all kinds of brownies over the years. We’ve baked chewy brownies with marshmallows inside; rich chocolate syrup brownies; and chocolate cake-style brownies. We used Duncan Hines brownie mix for awhile, and embellished it with extra chocolate. “Premium brownie mixes make great brownies,” our baking supply rep reassured us. “Millions and millions of dollars of research and development are in those boxes.” In fact, according to culinary magazine tasting panels, brownies are one of the few pastries that are often as good, if not better, from a quality mix than they are from scratch.

Our penultimate brownie recipe was from scratch, in fact, and it flopped. For a limited time, from about March through mid-May of this year, we stocked our pastry cases with the Nice, Nutty and Naughty Brownies. Nice was a plain brownie dusted with powdered sugar. Nutty was frosted with chocolate buttercream and sprinkled with pecans. Naughty was laced with spice and topped with a chocolate cayenne glaze. But alas, they were too frou-frou and fussy for our purist-brownie customers. Good for you! we say. We shall gild the lily no more! Back to the straightforward American way. Let the French nibble petite fours; leave the Linzer Tortes to the Austrians. We’ve got brownies!

Naughty Brownies
Line an 8” pan with parchment paper. Grease and flour the parchment.

Ingredients
6 oz. 70% premium bittersweet chocolate
3/4 cups butter
1 1/2 cups sugar
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp finely ground espresso
1 cup flour
Melt chocolate and butter in microwave until completely melted but not bubbling, about 3 minutes, stirring after every minute. Pour into mixing bowl. Stir in vanilla, then sugar. Mix well. Beat eggs in a separate bowl until fluffy. Add eggs to chocolate mixture. Combine flour and espresso well, then stir it into the chocolate mixture just until blended. Bake at 350 until edges are just set, about 35 minutes. Center will still be soft. Cool completely before glazing.
Naughty Glaze
3 oz premium semisweet chocolate, chopped
6 tablespoons unsalted butter
½ teaspoon cinnamon
¼ teaspoon ground cayenne pepper (ground, not flakes)
Combine all ingredients in the top pan of a double boiler set over simmering water. Stir very well until melted and smooth. Chill until set and spreadable, about 15 minutes, stirring often. Spread on cooled brownies.

Our troops are back from the Specialty Coffee Association annual convention, where the United States Barista Competition (USBC) took place last week in Minneapolis. Kudos to our two competitors, Mike Marquard and Alex McCracken, for both making it to the semi-finals. That means that they rank among America's 25 best baristas! Mike reports that he enjoyed speaking with the farmers who grew some of the coffee in the espresso blend he brewed at the event. "On Sunday, I met two of the farmers from Cerro Las Ranas, El Salvador - luckily, they spoke great English and I was able to tell them that their coffee played a crucial role in my competition blend and my success over the weekend," Mike says. "They were able to watch my routine and afterward conveyed pride that I talked about their coffee so confidently."Both Alex and Mike picked up on trends in espresso drink preparation during the convention. While the hot new thing in coffee the past couple of years has been different ways of brewing drip coffee, such as using the Clover coffee brewer, this year the focus was on perfecting espresso, Mike observes. "Espresso is making a strong resurgence," he says. "The USBC was a mix of old style blends (Brazil+Indonesia+Ethiopia), direct-trade single origins (El Salvador or Brazil), and heaps of something in-between. What was more evident was that baristas are learning their espressos bean by bean, not just throwing everything in a hopper and hoping for a good profile. USBC champ Kyle Glanville won overall using a single-origin direct-trade El Salvador and did not win on technical scores. This defeats the common belief that single-origin espressos lack complexity and fullness."

Coffee pros are also always analyzing how espresso is brewed, or extracted. Alex says that baristas in pursuit of the perfect shot are experimenting with the effects of water in the process. "One new thing everyone will be messing with will be preinfusion," he says. Preinfusion is a fancy word for wetting the espresso grounds before the hi-pressure water forces its way through. "There is speculation that a few seconds of low pump pressure will let the coffee puck expand or de-gas and therefore the extraction would occur differently. I'm not so sure it would make a difference, but we will see."

"Getting Back to Our Roots" is the catch phrase in our industry this spring. It's a warm and fuzzy notion that evokes the lofty goals of originality, creativity, authenticity and simplicity in preparing and selling coffee. Howard Schultz, Starbucks chieftain, has promised Wall Street he will take the company back to its roots. He's even reissued the original logo, which is definitely a warmer, fuzzier (not to mention rounder, fishier, chestier) version of the stylized mermaid. The Specialty Coffee Association of America is holding its annual conference in Minneapolis right now, featuring the "Roots" theme and another hairy hippy-trippy logo. Many of our guys are there right now, attending cupping and roasting labs, listening to lectures on sustainability, meeting coffee growers. And two -- Mike Marquard and Alex McCracken --are competing in the United States Barista Competition (USBC.) Two other Kaldi's folk, Josh Ferguson and Howard Lerner, are judging the competition. You might be able to see them live. We caught Alex's show. The internet is amazing. Go to conference.scaa.org, and click on the Live Blog link. Then, click on the USBC Live Video On link. You will be watching the national barista competition. The competition runs today and tomorrow, with finals on Sunday.