Tag: DIY
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Organizing 35mm film scans with Apple Photos
I’ve started to use my film camera more regularly and recently decided I needed a way to keep all my photos organized on my computer. Here’s my process: The current version of iOS has some great options for batch renaming of files by selecting and right-clicking. Shared Albums, once set up in Apple Photos, can…
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Making hot cocoa from scratch
This past week we were out of hot cocoa mix and Chocolate Abuelita so I looked up how to make hot cocoa out of baker’s chocolate powder. Believe it or not I’d never done this before. Turns out it’s quicker than melting Chocolate Abuelita and tastes better. It’s one of those rare “from scratch” recipes…
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Developing my simple Vietnamese and iced coffee recipes
My last post was about Vietnamese iced coffee and searching for that ideal restaurant-style recipe. I bought a phin, which is a metal drip brewer, and I found some Trung Nguyen coffee in Chinatown. My first stop was the recipe on the coffee can, which suggested a 3:25:1 water to coffee ratio. I think in…
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How to make real Vietnamese coffee
To top off a refreshing plate of Vietnamese food on a hot day, we often go for a Vietnamese iced coffee. It’s the perfect sweet and cool complement for a bowl of pho, vermicelli, or a banh mi sandwich. With the temperatures hitting the 80s and 90s this week in New York City, I’ve been…
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Bread Illustrated, my pick for top breadmaking cookbook
This past month I was deep in the early learning phases of making yeasted bread and I came across this great book, Bread Illustrated by America’s Test Kitchen. After looking through dozens of cookbooks, it was exactly what I was looking for. I was struggling to understand the timing of everything: When making a bread,…
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A perfect cup of coffee requires a perfect grind
Whenever I find a particular beer that I love, I take note and try to replicate it myself. Lately I’ve been trying the same with coffee — I love Blue Bottle, and I’ve been trying to replicate the taste of their pour-over coffee for the last few months. It’s been quite the journey, which actually…
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DIY: Roast Your Own Coffee (RYOC): Technique
Perhaps you love coffee and would like to experiment, you may be looking to replicate the fresh coffee you tried in some cafe, or you may simply be starting to question why you spend so much to buy roasted coffee from someone else. Coffee is an industrial product like beer, and also like beer, you…
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DIY: Roast Your Own Coffee (RYOC): Equipment
Roasting your own coffee is a fairly simple process that requires a minimum of finesse. Even better, time investment is only slightly more than making a batch of popcorn. Whether you’re looking to roast for your own daily consumption or to add flavor to a home-brewed stout or porter, here’s a primer on how to…
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DIY: Hand-Pump Beer Line Cleaner
We’ve all been served from a dirty draft line at some point, leaving us with a flat, soapy flavored beer lacking any of the usual hops “bite” or maltiness that we remember. Since I pieced together my minimalist kegging setup, I have left StarSan no-rinse sanitizer in the lines to avoid this, hoping that the…
Hops Trains and Backpacks 