Chelsea | YOUNG & FOODISH

The Insider’s Iced Coffee Even the Insiders Don’t Know About

dansyoung — Wed, 30 May 2012 11:52:59 +0000

Seconds after giving a long hello hug to my dear mother I raced to the Chelsea location of Blue Bottle Coffee, under the High Line at West 15th Street, to try my first zinger.

Such are my priorities when back home in New York: Family first, coffee close behind.

The story behind the zinger was the third big coffee exclusive entrusted to me by James Freeman, a coffee lunatic from Oakland, California who’s progressed from disaffected freelance musician to bi-coastal super-roaster of international renown. I don’t know what it is. I’ve never met Freeman face-to-face. I call him and he tells me things: The origin of the Gibraltar, San Francisco’s cult coffee. The inspiration behind the SG-120, a coffee in a glass of its own. The what, how and why of the zinger.

I raced up to the bar at Blue Bottle and asked the New York barista to make me a zinger. I don’t recall being smug about it.

– A zinger?

– Yes, a zinger. Ever made one?

– Never heard of it.

The zinger, I explained, was an insider’s iced coffee created by his Blue Bottle counterparts in San Francisco to achieve the effect of melted coffee ice cream in a small glass. They made their zingers by filling a Gibraltar glass halfway with cold-brewed, chicory-flavoured New Orleans ice coffee (see Blue Bottle’s recipe) and topping it with half and half (“half cream” in the UK) and a single ice cube. I boasted that I had learned of the zinger from none other Freeman, the boss of his boss.

– James Freeman?

The increasingly skeptical barista made eye contact with a colleague to check my story. The second barista made a face. It wasn’t a sympathetic face. He too knew nothing of the mysterious iced coffee.

At first they refused to make me a zinger for fear of the naughty things I might do with my photos and my suspect claims. But soon they relented if only to shut me up, half-filling a Gibraltar glass with New Orleans iced coffee and a single ice cube and leaving the rest to me. I slowly poured in the half-and-half but unfortunately there was no swirly effect, as there is when milk is added to Blue Bottle’s regular New Orleans ice coffee.

If somehow I hadn’t got the drink right I wasn’t going to let on. I took 73 photos of my zinger from several angles and then savoured the drink in a prolonged series of increasingly noisy sips. I needn’t have bothered. The baristas didn’t so much as look my way. By then they were 100 percent sure I hadn’t even met Freeman and, maddeningly, they were 100 percent right. If they had no quick response to my zinger I had none to theirs.

el doble my double burger benchmark

dansyoung — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 07:29:30 +0000

The El Doble at Txikito (pronounced “chic-kee-toe”) – a Basque restaurant in New York’s Chelsea. The chubby double burger is draped with smoked sheep’s milk cheese and peppery salsa especial.

The version seen above was requested to be on the rare side of medium rare.

What makes the banana blue gelato at Patisserie Valerie blue?

dansyoung — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:39:13 +0000

The Patisserie Valerie gelaterias at Spitalfields in East London and Duke of York Square in Chelsea feature a flavour called banana blue. You can’t miss it, but you might want to give it a pass. As someone familiar with blue corn, berries and potatoes but not yet bananas I wanted to know what made the gelato blue before deciding for myself. I asked someone at Valerie, who inspected the package and identified the bluing ingredient as E133 – Brilliant Blue FCF.

E133, a synthetic blue coal tar dye, is certified as a safe food additive by the EU and the US FDA. But ExploreENumbers still lists E133 as one of top 10 E numbers to avoid. It was concerns about allergic reactions and harmful effects linked with Brilliant Blue, especially when consumed in combination with other additives, that led Nestlé Rowntree to halt production of blue Smarties until a natural colour could be found. The reintroduced blue Smarties get their blue from Spirulina, a type of blue-green algae rich in protein, vitamins, minerals, and carotenoids.

So is the world ready for Spirulina gelato? Though it’s hard to say, you must admit it does sound Italian.