A couple of weeks ago many a New Englander could be heard moaning about the incessant, unspringlike cold and rain. We got what we wished for, several straight days of 90F!
I’m making iced coffee. You start by brewing a pot of strong coffee and cooling it to room temp. Putting the hot coffee directly in the fridge seems like a bad idea. It would probably warm everything around it and drive up my electricity bill. How about…
Make sense? A saucepot’s job is to suck heat away from a source, it’s just that now we’ve turned things upside-down. I guess a water bath would be even better, but I don’t want to risk shattering the glass.
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Did it work? I did something similar, inspired by the same show..but I cooled down the pot with pan of cold water in the sink and running the water really slow..to get some movement going. Remember the show with the frozen blue ducks?
Seemed to work well.
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It worked better than leaving the the coffeepot sitting on the counter. But cooling still took several hours. Much too long.
I’ve since graduated to faster methods. The first was similar to the method you describe. I poured the coffee into a saucepan that was sitting in a sink full of ice water. This method cut the cool time to about 15 minutes, but is a little akward because with a big sink or a small saucepan you run the risk of the icewater finding its way into the coffee.
The second method, lifted from Alton Brown’s stock recipe in “I’m Just Here for the Food”, is to put a bunch of ice cubes in a heavy duty plastic bag and place it right into the saucepan with the coffee. When the ice melts, pour the water down the sink and replace with a fresh batch of cubes. In my hands, one change of ice was needed and the cool time was about 10 minutes.
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