Started to make coffee at home

I was recently in Seattle and had the pleasure of sharing a meal with the author Neal Stephenson, a lovely man who’s also a part-time inventor at Intellectual Ventures. (He has worked on, inter alia, I.V.’s hurricane-busting device.) As delicious as the food was, it was nearly eclipsed by the coffee Neal served afterward. He made it in a French press, which is how I make coffee at home. But it tasted far superior. I’m not the kind of person who typically asks for recipes — especially for coffee. But in this case, I did. Turns out that Neal picked up his coffee technique from Chris Young, the acclaimed Fat Duck chef (and food scientist/writer) whom Nathan Myhrvold brought on board at I.V. to create Modernist Cuisine, the landmark cookbook featured in our two–part podcast “Waiter, There’s a Physicist in My Soup!” Chris was good enough to send along his coffee recipe, which I’ll reproduce below. I’ve started to make coffee in this fashion and, while the placebo effect may be polluting my reality — I haven’t done any blind tastings, nor much experimentation yet — I have to say that the coffee is amazing. One key step is to “skim” the grounds from the top of the coffee before plunging. This is a weirdly satisfying thing to do, especially when you let the grounds “bloom” in the press pot, as described. (It also makes cleaning the French press easier in the long run.) So if you’ve got the energy, desire and resources to try to make the perfect cup of coffee at home, take a look. Experiment. Let us know how it works out. Thanks to Neal, Chris, and the assorted forefathers of the technique.