Sep 12 2008
chaffing
As much as I love my little Nesco counter top coffee roaster, I have to admit that using it as often as I do makes for one hell of a mess in my kitchen. Chaff from the the roasting process covers my kitchen like a layer of volcanic ash. While the chaff cup, prominently displayed in the picture above, does a pretty ok job of collecting some of the free floating particulates, it does not trap all of them. Also when I try to dump out the chaff cup , a lot of the wispy floaters tend to escape. It also does not help that my method for cleaning out the chaff deposits from the base of the machine is to blow them out onto the counter, leaving the mess for a later time. Perhaps, I should invest in a dust buster to help take care of this little problem. Or a shop vac.
Chaff, for those of you not in the know, is the outer parchment layer of the coffee bean, that tends to flake off during the roasting process. Some beans, when roaste,d release copious amounts of chaff, overfilling the chaff cup, while others release minimal amounts. I think the amount of chaff a particular bean has has something to do with the way it was processed and cleaned as well as particular genetics. While chaff is annoying to a everyday neat freak who like a spotless kitchen, it really does not effect the overall taste of the coffee. At least, I do not think it does. I have, on occasion, roasted coffee and got tons of chaff within the batch (usually because my screen was clogged), and I could really see no adverse effects of grinding the stuff up along with the beans. In fact, I think it might actually add a little bit of flavor to the pot.
Still, my kitchen is a mess and I know that I am probably breathing in a good amount of these little free floating suckers everytime I decide to do another roast.
