You bought good coffee beans but don’t have a machine to roast them? Don’t worry, this article will guide you through the simplest formula for roasting coffee at home that’s most delicious!
For a long time, coffee has become a familiar part of our daily lives. However, to have a properly made cup of coffee at home that maintains the natural aroma and rich flavor it originally has, coffee enthusiasts need to master the secret of roasting coffee the right way.
Why Do Many People Choose to Roast Coffee at Home?
Nowadays, the situation of coffee being mixed with additives, flavorings, or chemicals to reduce costs is causing many people to worry. Such types of coffee not only lose their original pure flavor, but also significantly affect the health of users.
This very issue has made the trend of roasting coffee at home increasingly popular. When you personally perform the steps from roasting, grinding to brewing, you will both feel at ease about the quality and enjoy the pleasure of savoring a cup of coffee that suits your “taste.”
Actually, manually roasting coffee at home is not too difficult. The main issue lies in how to roast with the right technique, following proper principles and timing. Because just a small deviation can compromise the flavor and quality. It can be said that roasting coffee is an art, requiring skillfulness, patience, and meticulousness in each step.
How to Roast Coffee Beans at Home Using a Pan
Roasting coffee at home is not complicated at all – you can make use of familiar utensils like pans, pots, or saucepans to do it. Ideally, you should prioritize cast iron pans or pots with thick bottoms and moderate slopes. This way, the coffee beans will be stirred evenly and cooked thoroughly from inside out, helping to preserve the full flavor.
Below is a guide to roasting coffee beans with a pan following proper technique, simple and easy to do that you can apply right at home:
Ingredients to prepare
Before starting to roast, you should prepare all ingredients as follows:
- Pure coffee beans: You can choose Arabica, Robusta, Culi, Cherry, Moka, or even Civet coffee. In Vietnam, Robusta is still the popular and favored type thanks to its strong flavor, less acidic, very suitable for Vietnamese taste.
- Additional ingredients (optional): Some people prefer to add a few types of additives such as: specialized butter (aromatic butter, phe butter, rite butter…), a little good fish sauce (above 35 degrees protein) or strong alcohol. These components help the coffee beans develop a richer, more aromatic and intense smell after roasting.
However, you can completely roast pure coffee beans without adding any additives. Using butter, fish sauce or alcohol is just a small tip, for those who want the coffee flavor to become more buttery-sweet and richer after grinding.
Necessary tools
To roast coffee beans at home, you should prepare some basic tools as follows:
- Pan, pot or saucepan: The size can be small, medium or large depending on the amount of coffee you want to roast. However, the advice is to choose a pot or pan with a wide surface area so the coffee beans can easily contact heat and cook more evenly.
- Heat source: You can use gas stove, electric stove or wood stove. According to the experience of long-time coffee roasters, wood stoves often bring distinctive flavor, maintaining the purity of coffee beans. But if you don’t have a wood stove, gas or electric stoves can still meet the requirements well.
- Coffee grinder or blender: After roasting, you need this tool to grind the beans into powder, serving the brewing process.
Read more: Light Roast vs Dark Roast Coffee: Which is Better for Health?
How to roast coffee at home with proper technique
After preparing all necessary ingredients and tools, you need to follow the proper coffee roasting process with correct technique and principles to ensure the coffee maintains its delicious aroma after roasting.
- Step 1: Process the coffee beans. After buying coffee beans, proceed to filter out any remaining chaff stuck in the coffee. Then sun-dry the coffee 1-2 times until completely dry, this helps reduce roasting time.
- Step 2: Add an appropriate amount of coffee beans to the pan that has reached proper heat, stir continuously and evenly so the coffee cooks uniformly. Wait for about 15 minutes, when you see the coffee beans slightly turning yellow, gradually changing to deep yellow. At the same time, when you hear the coffee beans making popping sounds, immediately turn down the heat, then continue stirring evenly.
- Step 3: When the coffee starts popping more frequently and regularly, turn up the heat higher, increasing the temperature to about 220-240°C to help the coffee cook and develop aroma. At this point there’s more smoke, and the aroma begins to rise.
- Step 4: After all coffee beans have turned dark brown, you can add butter, continue stirring evenly until the butter completely melts, then turn off the stove. Next, add fish sauce and strong alcohol to the pan, mix until completely dry then stop.
- Step 5: Take the coffee to an airy place, or you can use a fan to cool the coffee completely to ensure the aroma is preserved longer, avoiding the case where coffee is still hot and will continue cooking, leading to burning.
Read more:
- Popular Coffee Roasting Levels and Their Flavors
- Best coffee blend ratios & How to create the perfect cup?
Thus, the above article has shared in detail how to roast coffee beans at home with proper technique, from preparing ingredients and tools to each roasting step. Hopefully this information will help you feel more confident when personally creating delicious, properly flavored coffee batches right in your own kitchen. Wishing you success and rich, full-flavored cups of coffee to enjoy every day.
