Cindyrella's Blog For Food and Drink

Bean to Cup Coffee Machines
If you are a coffee enthusiast and are always striving to find the best coffee possible, then this article is a good place to find the best coffee this globe has to offer for your bean to cup coffee machine. We run down the top 5 most expensive coffee in the world, where you can find them and how much they will cost you:
5. Fazenda Santa Ines, Minas Gerais, Brazil: $50 (£31) per pound – Brazil have a long and renowned history of producing first rate coffee, and the Fazenda Santa Ines is no exception, as this has to be the finest coffee to come out of Brazil. This high quality, hand picked coffee is very lively and bright and is famous for its citrusy aroma and subtle texture. This is a coffee with a chocolate tinge and is frequently served creamy. In 2006 this coffee was declared the highest rated in Cup of Excellence of Coffee award in 2006, which goes someway to justify its expensive price. This coffee is a great advert for the crops and the coffee of Brazil.
4. El Injerto – Huehuetenango, Guatemala: $50 (£31) per pound – Coffee has been grown in Guatemala since the beginning of the 18th century. One of the most popular harvesting areas is Coban, which is well known for its cloudy and rainy weather, which many believe is a vital contributing factor towards its incredible taste. The El Injerto coffee originates from the Huehuetenango region in Guatemala, and can boast accolades such as first prize in the 2006 cup of excellence, third place in 2002 and sixth place in 2007.
3. St. Helena Coffee From St. Helena Coffee Company, St. Helena: $79 (£49) per pound – St Helena is a small, mountainous, sub tropical island of 47 square miles, situated in the South Atlantic Ocean. It has been noted that coffee beans have been grown on the small tropical island since 1733, and over the last 10 years, St. Helena coffee has become known to coffee connoisseurs world-wide, who have been mesmerised by its unique quality. Only natural fertilizers are used in their crop, and livestock manure is not used as it may contain non-organic substances from concentrated animal feed or veterinary treatments. The coffee is also wet processed using pure spring water descending from the Island’s peaks, along the Central Ridge.
2. Hacienda La Esmeralda, Boquete, Panama: $104 (£65) per pound – Esmeralda pride their selves on supplying completely ripe, red fruits, that will only ever be hand picked from the crops. The coffee goes through a vigorous quality assurance procedure as each harvester’s production for the day is weighed and inspected for defects or green beans. This coffee has been known to be quite a light roast, medium brown with no oil on the beans, and has a spicy odour to it.
1. Kopi Luwak Coffee, Indonesia: $160 (£99) per pound – Kopi Luwak coffee is the rarest gourmet coffee which originates from Indonesian island of Sumatra. The coffee gets its name from little mammals called ‘Luwaks’ which live in trees and eat the red, ripe coffee cherry. They eat the cherrys with the bean intact and it undergoes chemical treatments and fermentations, before finishing its journey through the digestive system. The still-intact beans are collected from the forest floor, and are cleaned, then roasted and ground just like any other coffee. The coffee is second to none, with a rich heavy flavour that contains hints of chocolate and caramel. The price of this coffee is so expensive because of its rarity, but if you are a real coffee lover, who enjoys the finer things in life, then this may be worth a go.
Bean to Cup Coffee Machines

When I was 16 my first summer job was working for the local Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. It was hot and sometimes dangerous work. KFC uses big oil filled pressure cookers to cook its chicken and that super heated oil was always splashing around as we scooped out the chicken. To this day every KFC cook can point to the burns on their wrists as a mark of their trade.
Making the chicken is relatively easy. We first thawed out the frozen chicken in hot water then put it through a basic egg wash, skin attached. The pieces were tossed in the pre-mixed flour supposedly containing the ‘eleven secret herbs and spices’, then placed in a pressure cooker filled with hot oil to brown. Once browned the lid was clamped on tight. There was a special clock with a third hand attached to the minute hand that spanned the time needed to cook the chicken properly. We’d write down the number from the third hand on the lid in grease pencil then when the minute hand reached that number we’d pop the lid open and unload the chicken. Simple, but marvellously effective.
The flour itself came in plastic buckets telling us that the contents came directly from Shelbyville Kentucky, so we were not made privy to any of the ingredients they contained. The flour didn’t look like much, just white flour with lots of black specks in it. I was a little suspicious about what it contained but too busy to care enough to follow it up. Then strangely, I read a newspaper article sometime that summer pertaining to that flour.
It seems that a food research group had examined this mysterious substance and found only three ingredients in it: the flour itself, salt, and pepper. That was it. No long list of secret ingredients at all.
I was amazed then remembered seeing the flour with those uniform black specks and recalled my buried skepticism. Those black specks were too similar to each other in colour, size, and shape to be anything but a single substance (pepper) and nothing else was visible. The other nine ingredients, if they existed, would certainly show as a powder discolouring the flour, or be of many different shapes, sizes, and colours. It all made sense to me now. KFC was pulling a kind of scam.
What surprised me was how little attention was paid to this information. I felt sometimes like I was the only one to have read that article. When I’d tell people about this boondoggle KFC was pulling they were amazed of course, and still are to this day (even a professional chef when I told him). But, even though KFC is now just increasing our distrust of corporate propaganda, it wasn’t exactly Watergate either so I got over myself.
Over the years I didn’t think much about this fact regarding KFC’s big secret, but I’d try from time to time to duplicate the recipe but I never got the proportions quite right. Then one day for no particular reason I decided to get serious about this and, through trial and error, eventually came up with the proportions which, as far as I can tell, most closely match the KFC product. And for your information they are:
I cup of flour 1 1/2 tbsp salt 1 tbsp pepper
Now most people will not have the kind of heavy duty pressure cookers KFC uses so your cooking time will be longer and the chicken will turn out a bit drier as a consequence. But other than that, that seems to be all there is to it folks.
Bon apetite!
Barry Hames has been an addictions therapist and writer for over 25 years. He is also the author of A Skeptic’s Guide to Faith: The Sacred and Spiritual in Everyday Life (available through clublighthousepublishing.com) He lives and works in Vancouver, BC.

If you’re about to head off to buy ingredients for your family’s dinner you may wish to revel in the fact that it has just been announced that the British are now the gourmet champions of the world. At least as far as the amount of time we spend cooking is concerned. The French have long had a reputation for enjoying cooking and good food, referring to us rather derogatorily as ‘les rosbif’, but in fact we have come out ahead of the French in a new survey analysing the amount of time we send in the kitchen cooking meals for ourselves is concerned.
We also top the poll as far as how many of us bother to cook a proper meal for our family on a regular basis, showing that we are clearly moving forwards in terms of cooking and food. Of course, the French may well turn around and suggest that we are only spending longer in the kitchen than they are because we’re so bad at cooking we just take a lot longer to do things, however, that is likely to be as accurate as their assertion that all we eat are fish and chips, Yorkshire puddings and roast beef. Not that there’s much wrong with any of those as far as I’m concerned!
But when it comes to us heading out to buy ingredients for our food we don’t tend to look for gourmet ingredients as often as some other nations. In part this is because we simply don’t have as convenient access to such gourmet ingredients as our friends on the continent. Supermarkets have so dominated our shopping habits that we are very much limited by the range on offer there, and since supermarkets necessarily cater for the common denominator and the bottom line they aren’t likely to offer many specialist ingredients.
Many of the gourmet items we might otherwise choose to buy have short shelf lives or low profit margins, and so we don’t find them available as easily as we might on the continent. This is a shame, because whether it’s because of people like Delia Smith and Jamie Oliver, the wealth of cookery programs, books and household gadgets, we are all making a much more concerted effort to provide good home cooked food for ourselves and our families, and this is to be celebrated.
What better way of celebrating coming out ahead of the French for cooking than choosing to buy ingredients which take our traditional recipes to a new level? In fact it doesn’t have to take much effort to completely transform traditional meals into something which will certainly leave our continental rivals standing, a little like their petit escargots!
Although the range of ingredients on offer may be relatively limited at the supermarket, you may find that there are still one or two little specialist shops in your nearest town. It’s important to try to support such outlets as they provide an important service, and one which should be growing in importance. But if you don’t have convenient access to such an outlet then there’s a plethora of perfect pickings online!
If you want to buy ingredients such as goose fat, porcini mushrooms or fois gras and you can’t find it on your local shop then have a quick look online. The internet has brought us many advantages, and in line with our growing love of home cooking is a growing array of online retailers offering a wide range of affordable gourmet ingredients. You’ll be amazed how easy it is to transform something like a traditional risotto by replacing the cardboard mushrooms from the supermarket with dried porcini mushrooms, or your traditional fat with goose fat for your roast potatoes. Vive la cooking!
If you’re looking to buy ingredients online then visit The Good Food Network where you can find a wide range of affordable gourmet ingredients, as well as helpful advice and recipe ideas.